Normative Data and Benchmarking

Before you begin an employee or customer survey, you will want to consider the following:

Survey Best Practices

We know from Best in Class Companies that one of their Best Practices is to continually measure and manipulate financial, customer, and employee metrics. It is a Best Practice to gather employee and customer information annually. In order to know if scores are high or low, researchers compare their scores with other top performers, commonly known as "Benchmarking."

NBRI Norms©

"Norms" or "normative data" represent the normal or average scores for any given survey question across various levels of performance.

There are approximately 12,000 public and 8,500 private, "ultimate parent" companies in the United States with holdings worldwide. Of these, NBRI has data from approximately one-fourth. The number of survey questions from each company ranges from 10 to over 200. The number of respondents from each company ranges from a minimum of 100 to well over 100,000. The number of individual scores in the NBRI Normative Database is in the billions.

Normative scores are updated continuously and data more than three years old is differentially weighted so that the database continues to reflect the most recent findings in survey research. Due to the size of the database, we can utilize an outstanding .99 confidence interval, resulting in a margin of error of + .01 (1%), rather than the .03 (3%), .05 (5%), or .07 (7%) of most researchers. This means you can have a higher level of confidence in the data you receive from NBRI than from any other source in the world.

All data is meticulously scrutinized, statistically analyzed, and thoroughly tested before inclusion in NBRI Norms©. The highest standards have always been maintained, as each body of data is accepted only after it has passed a series of qualifying statistical tests designed to satisfy strict criteria set forth by NBRI alone.

NBRI Norms© exist for each of the hundreds of NBRItems© which have become the Official Universal Survey Questions of the Survey Research Industry, setting a new standard for excellence in benchmarking, and winning the Best Practice Award in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 from the International Research Foundation.

NBRI Norms© are a single mean score for each percentile, 1 to 100, for each survey question. Clients are able to compare their own mean scores with top performance (such as the 90th, 95th, or 99th percentiles), stretch performance (such as the 75th, 80th, or 85th percentiles), or average performance (50th percentile). We generally recommend that three percentiles be selected, providing Clients with a minimum to maximum range of performance for comparison.

Historically, Clients regularly requested that we create norms from specific SIC codes, as they wished to benchmark against the competition. Today, however, we have seen a shift from benchmarking within one's own industry toward benchmarking against best in class in the world. This is particularly true with regard to benchmarking variables as universal in nature to all companies as those in an NBRI Organizational Assessment©, such as climate, culture, and management style.

Other consulting firms charge as much as $650 per question for a single normative score! For a 100-question survey, that's $65,000! NBRI recommends three norms per question, such as the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles, so there is a range against which you may compare your scores, and our fees are very reasonable. With benchmarking made so easy and affordable, everyone can benchmark with the Best in Class! Combining NBRI Interviews, NBRItems, NBRI Norms, and NBRI Continuous Improvement Workbooks results in the fastest, most powerful and effective benchmarking and organizational development in the world!

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