Benchmarking Data Through Insight

Benchmarking is a common practice and sensible exercise to establish baselines, define best practices, identify improvement opportunities and create a competitive environment within your business/organization. Integrating benchmarking into your organization will result in valuable data that encourages discussion and sparks new ideas and practices. When properly done, benchmarking can be utilized as a valuable tool to help companies evaluate and prioritize improvement opportunities. In this installment of CenterStage, Doug Johnson – the CEO of JA Benefits – has provided his perspective on JA Benefits’ Insight tool, and why using Insight to receive customized results is great for employers seeking detailed and specific benchmarking data related to their business. The tool, itself, can be used for cities, towns, counties, schools, non for profits, and manufacturers.

 

Partner, CEO

Gaining Customized Results Through Insight

Benchmarking. It sounds difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to a valuable survey tool known as Insight, employers can receive the most accurate and qualitative assessment of their organization to ensure productivity and longevity. According to Doug, “In today’s competitive employee market, employers need to know where their strengths lie.” By performing a benchmark assessment, employers essentially ‘pull back the curtain’ on their organization to draw attention to their needs and where they can better their benefit spending. From benchmarking, you can gain valuable Insight into your organization, such as –

  1. Understanding your performance relative to close competitors – Doug believes “anytime you want to analyze where you are in terms of benefits, you need to know where you stand in comparison to employers in your particular market or industry”. Having a thorough understanding of your own performance can only go so far. For example, if you’re working to improve year-to-year employee benefits costs, it’s beneficial to understand the current industry trends, as well as which of the benefits you offer are actually being utilized. Furthermore, standing out among your competitors allows you to attract and maintain top talent among employees.
  2. Comparing performance between product line and/or business units in your own organization – Benchmarking doesn’t necessarily have to be an exercise that requires competitive intelligence. Many companies – particularly large and distributed ones – benchmark performance of facilities and products having similar processes. This analysis can lead to deeper investigations as to why a facility or product is under-performing.
  3. Holding more people responsible for their performance – Without internal or external benchmarking, it can be a challenge to set precedents each year. Benchmarking projects and reports gives perspective on what’s considered ‘good-performance’ and can be an instrumental tool for measuring the effectiveness of facilities, units within your organization or even particular personnel.
  4.  Drilling down into performance gaps to identify areas for improvement – Many companies carry out such benchmarking projects, then drill down into the variables to identify who are the culprits of under-performance.
  5. Enabling a mindset and culture of continuous improvement – Providing metrics performance visibility from new hires to top management allows personnel to understand how their actions impact certain areas of the business. Adding an additional layer to those key performance indicators and showing them how their current performance compares to industry or internal targets, can be incentive to drive productivity and innovation needed to exceed those averages.

Better Understanding What Makes A Company Successful

Market leaders are those who exceed industry benchmarks. The challenge, however, is those companies are no doubt working to expand the gap. These organizations are receiving benchmarking data on geographical reaches, industry performance, benefits offered, group size, race and gender of not only themselves but industry competitors, too. Through data analysis from the Insight survey, these analytics can be included in your organization’s benchmark assessment.
The Insight survey dives deep, offering a comprehensive overview and analysis of your company to help develop a strategy, manage costs and showcase value. Insight allows employers to discover their competitive advantage; to find advantages in their strengths. Maybe it’s how other employers are offering benefits to their employees such as paid time off, sick leave or disability care. Maybe it’s what competitors are providing as alternative options for doctors and pharmacists. Utilizing this information, employers can understand how to maintain and improve moving forward to attract new employees, maintain talent, and eliminate excess spending.

The JA Focus

Think of us as your organization’s ‘quarterback’. We’ve been offering the Insight survey for nearly sixteen years, passing along the necessary information to employers downfield to ensure a game winning result for their organization. When you are ready to return to previous information from past surveys, that information is readily available thanks to our database. From here, employers can calculate and compare improvements from years past.
Assisting employers in interpreting and reviewing their results, JA doesn’t stop helping when the stadium is empty. Knowing employers and their organizations are met with the highest-quality Insight into the behind-the-scenes production is our only goal. To begin taking the steps toward assessing your business, visit this link today. You can also contact Doug Johnson at 812.329.6005 or doug.johnson@jabenefits.com.

 

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