Name: Product Pulse Vol. 12: Internal Benchmarking, Heatmaps, and Company Comparisons
Uploaded: 2026-09-02T18:46:08.368Z
Duration: 25 min 56 s
Description: Product Pulse Vol. 12: Internal Benchmarking, Heatmaps, and Company Comparisons

Transcript for "Product Pulse Vol. 12: Internal Benchmarking, Heatmaps, and Company Comparisons": Hi, everyone. My name is Jill Onofredi, and thanks for joining us today for Product Pulse. I'm joined here by Sam Norton, who is one of our product managers on AwardCo Engage. Before we dive into that and I introduce Sam and let him talk about the product, I wanna remind you guys about AwardCoRecognize. It is our premier summit. We have it coming up in November. Registration is very limited, and it's filling up fast. And so I want you guys to get a chance to come. It is the most incredible event. It's at the montage. It is gorgeous. We have amazing speakers, amazing content, especially from our center of excellence and our COE members. So register. I'll have Bronson. Bronson, if you can drop a link so that they can go and get registered. I would love to see you guys there. I think we'll have some really great content, some really great surprises too. So make sure to register. Awesome. Sam, welcome to product pulls today. Thank you. Kaye, do you wanna tell us about yourself and then about AwardCo Engage and what we're covering today? Yeah. Happy to. Great to be with you guys. We're gonna have a fun time today. I am one of AwardCo's product managers specifically over our survey and analytics tool. So excited to be with you today and give you a sneak peek into AwardCo Engage, what we're doing with the tool this year, and what's coming in the future. We may have some sneak peeks into some additional stuff. So, just to give a brief intro to AwardCo Engage as well, this is probably, for many of you, your first window into AwardCo Engage. AwardCo Engage is our survey and analytics tool to help you pair recognition with measuring employee engagement. Employee engagement is obviously measured across a lot of different themes and topics. And for you to be able to measure those themes adequately, identify hot spots, and truly drive employee engagement, we present to you AwardCoEngage, a surveying tool to understand how your employees are feeling and drive that. So that's what we'll be talking about today. Amazing. And we're gonna take it even a level deeper today because the Work Co Engage covers a wide swath of things in terms of, like, what you can measure. Today, we're gonna talk about how to contextualize that, how to make sense of it, and really bring meaning to how am I doing against this team. So we're gonna talk about internal benchmarking. So what does this mean in the context of the rest of the company? We're also gonna talk about heat maps. And our UX designers crushed it with this one, honestly. And so we're gonna look at some of these new visualizations that really, like Sam said, help you pinpoint what to focus on and how to make meaning and then obviously take action on all of it as well. So internal benchmarks, heat maps, and then last but not least, we're gonna talk about some of the controls that help you to best analyze the results because this is sensitive data. So we're gonna talk about that. And then like Sam said, if we're quick, we can give you guys some sneak peeks as long as you don't tell the big bosses that that's what we're showing you today. So shall we dive in, talk through benchmarks? Let's do it. K. So tell us about internal benchmarks and what that means. I mean, I kinda set the stage in terms of, like, how is my team doing against the rest of the company? Bring that to life first. That's right. Yeah. On an engagement survey, you're gonna have a number of scores across themes, maybe an overall engagement score on that, on that particular theme to understand how your employees are doing. But most of those are just a number. Right? What does that number mean, and and what do we compare it against to make a meaningful to gain in meaningful insights? So the first thing we're gonna talk about today is as you land on a survey results page, you're given a quick overview of the themes, the number of questions you're asking, your response rate, etcetera. You're given your overall engagement score, and then we'll talk some, about some of these themes that we're seeing here. But, specifically, you see kind of a a spread, excuse me, of all of the themes that you measured. Now, again, these are just numbers. And as we filter down to specific subsets of employees, maybe you're and you wanna focus on a particular department or you have, you know, you have an idea that you wanna focus on a subset of your employees, maybe your full time employees or a specific group, we allow you to filter the page by those employees. So we're gonna jump in initially and maybe look at, a specific department. We have, you know, maybe an idea that our sales department might be struggling or have some questions. So we're gonna filter the page to that group. And we we see initially I'm gonna come down to these themes here. We see a company benchmark across each of our themes and the comparative number of what this employee group scored. So in vision and strategy, for example, they had a 25%. The company average, however, was 12 points above that of 38. So this contextualizes the number a little bit for you. And this theme, we're gonna kinda talk through this across all of our visuals on a survey, but we we've added this contextualized, company average to our our bar charts to help you understand what a number means, not just look at an individual number. Yeah. I love that because it really brings to light, like, is this good? I think that's one of our biggest questions that we have to answer as we're looking at this award. Co engage product is like, sure, that's great. But what does that mean for me? And so I love this because it really breaks it down and helps different leaders pinpoint what matters for their organization. Would you mind actually popping out the leader view as well? Yeah. One of my favorite things about AwardCo Engage is that it connects to your HRIS. And so that hierarchy mapping that is so complex with a lot of engagement tools actually takes place here. And so you can see here, this is the list of executives. And Martha, who is the CEO here, is able to see her downline, and that same, like, visibility applies. So if you wouldn't mind just clicking into Let's go into Chris here. I'm gonna remove this filter as well. Yeah. Go ahead. Okay. So this is where we see Chris's downline, and those internal benchmarks also apply. And so Chris can see for his or her organization how that cascades. You can see here that Chris's department is doing a little bit better to the benchmark than the department we were filtering for previously. So that really helps just contextualize. Okay. Where do we need to focus? What do we need to do to actually make reasonable actions towards improving the tool? Spot on. Yeah. So let me dig one layer deeper here. There are kinda two work streams we're gonna talk about. One is you're aware of a group, maybe a department, or maybe it's a a specific theme or question that you wanna focus on. And you're saying, you know, I wanna go look at we're gonna look at support through transition, for example. So I'm gonna come up to our themes page and search for support through transition. This allows us to dig into one specific theme and look at we're looking still at Chris's results. Look at how Chris's subset of employees is performing on a specific theme. We can see that across our favorable group, our promoters, we're just below that company average. And then across our neutral, we're pretty spot on with the company average. By scale point itself, you can see that distribution as well. I guess, both on the the five scores and four scores here, he's just below the company average on both of those. This same concept applies across all of the themes and then questions inside of themes. So this question, for example, was asked and rolls up to this support through transition. I'm effectively supported through organizational changes. Inside of this question details page, we're gonna see the company average itself as well and then the favorability distribution for this specific question. So again, it allows you to dig in deep into specific questions and themes that you might be interested in. What I love about AwardCo Engage overall is that you can see the highest level of information, but you can also drill down into the specifics. Like, if understanding what's happening at the theme level is sufficient for what each individual manager needs to do, they can stop there, but they can also drill down into the details. But the individual employees are always protected by that confidentiality. So you saw there that the response comments were hit into low count. We also released in the last few weeks, the ability to configure confidentiality thresholds. So the standard is five. You can go all the way down to three and then go up from there too if you want a higher confidentiality threshold that protects the individual responses from being targeted or filtered down to, which is just another layer of employee protection. Yep. Exactly. So I'd like to take this now and switch context a little bit. This first work stream is maybe a specific thing you're interested in. Now we also recognize that sometimes we run an engagement survey, and, we want to find new insights. We wanna find hot spots or maybe bright spots, and we don't quite know where to start looking. So this next work stream is through what Jill mentioned is a heat map. And for those of you that are familiar with the heat map, it allows you to compare groups against one another across, in this scenario, all of the themes that you measured on your survey. So this table shows right now we're grouping by top level leaders at the company. All of these individuals that we're seeing as column headers report up to our CEO, and the data that we see in each of the columns and cells is that subset of employees and how they perform on each of the themes that we measured in our survey. Quickly, we can see at a glance because of our coloration and how we've kind of broken this down that Chris's group has a couple of areas that may need some attention. We've sorted this now low to high, so we're seeing the lowest performing themes here, or we can do the inverse and see where he's performing higher or other groups are performing high. This allows us to pinpoint and say, okay. At a glance, maybe I'm just out hunting, and I wanna find some hot spots. We can go to Chris and have an have a conversation. Say, hey. We've identified a couple of areas. How might we go to your group and say, maybe fulfilling work is, what we wanna focus on? How can we make your work more fulfilling? What is maybe stopping you from feeling fulfillment in your work, and how can we collaborate on that topic? I love that. It makes it so clear. Can we switch to, like, maybe the department breakout of these as well? Because this one I mean, most of them are killing it. They're crushing it. This makes it so easy when you're looking at a imagine, like, in all of your roles as, like, the head of people, CHRO, anyone who is reviewing an engagement survey has a wide, wide breadth of information that they have to understand. And so to be able to really distill that down into okay. If I look for the orange, that's going good or that's need some improvement. I look at the blue, those are areas that I just need to reinforce and recognize what's happening well there. And so I love this. Another shout out to our UX designers is that it was very intentionally blue orange as opposed to the very traditional red green to support anyone who faces bright green color blindness. So there's another accessibility layer in there. But overall, the objective is the same. How do we really clearly make it known that, like, for the for example, this is kind of interesting on this data that the executive team is unengaged. How do we really solve for that here and support those groups as needed? The sales department here is another area that you can see needs additional support. And our action planning tools that are in development currently will be another way that you can take additional action and improve overall engagement across your company. Yep. Yeah. I'd like to kinda switch gears as well to looking at the questions in this view and then taking one step into an individual leader who might look at this page as well. So we've now switched the view. Our our rows on this table are the questions we asked in the survey, and we can perform the same analysis on each of the questions, in our survey. To step out one layer, on our previous example, we went into our leader panel and and selected a leader. Any leader that comes into the platform will have that that you grant that permission to will have access to results for their downlines. Right now, we're looking at this data for all participants. This is generally gonna be the survey creator, your HR team that's that's reviewing the results as a whole. But if we were to look back at this leader panel here and select, we'll select Chris again and then enter the heat map. We now see the heat map for Chris and those that report to Chris. This allows Chris to have those crucial conversations with his team. This first column we're seeing is the company benchmark on our questions, how Chris's team, scored as a whole, and then a breakdown of each of the individual supervisors under Chris. This really, you know, as we're saying, allows Chris to easily come in here, find an insight quickly, and have a crucial conversation, and really empower his team to go make the right decisions. Yeah. I love that. I think a big theme that we're seeing across the industry is manager enablement. How do you as HR leaders empower the teams across the business to empower managers to have those conversations and, like, effectuate change in their organization. And so being able to see this, being able to drill down into the themes and understand what actually makes a difference, I think this is a great use case for a pulse survey as well. How do you check in on that on whether it's a quarterly, a monthly cadence to see how those actions are actually impacting the organization is a great way to use this tool. Yeah. You make a great point. The survey run becomes a huge responsibility on your shoulders to disseminate these results. What we've done with the WordCon Gage is distill down for each individual supervisor exactly what they need, no more than what they need, but exactly what they need to say, I've understood my results, and now I can take take this and go have those those crucial conversations. We want to support you with the knowledge that you want, but we want to enable the managers to act and, and and drive engagement on their individual teams. No. I think that's a great call out. And, actually, this is a great segue. I have a question here from Christy, and Christy's asking, what about in cases where there are some sensitive data points? I think, like, we know that different categories of metadata, like gender or race or anything of that nature can be sensitive. Do we have any protections in place so that we can filter that out? Yeah. Great question. Yeah. A couple of things I'll call out on your user data itself. You're able to upload as much custom metadata as you like. These are things like state that someone might be living in city, department, business unit, cost center. Those are less sensitive metadata values, and those show up throughout reporting for managers and whatnot. We recently, enabled you to upload a new type of sensitive metadata or, excuse me, a new type of metadata that is this sensitive metadata. You're seeing here three options, age, ethnicity, and gender. These are examples of metadata you might want visible in your engage reporting tool and in the heat map, but you would not want in reports that managers can pull, for example. So in your roles and permissions, you can grant to individuals this visibility into these metadata values. And for those individuals, it will appear in your heat map. So for example, we might filter or group this page now by ethnicity and see if there are underserved or under, undersupported groups in the organization. Now, a quick call out to confidentiality. Maybe I I filter too much and I say, you know what? Let's look at New York specifically, and we immediately see, oh, we've just filtered down so far that we have filtered below our confidentiality threshold. This protects the anonymity of those responding that you know are in New York that may be of this particular ethnicity. We block that out and we say, hey, you filtered a little bit too far to protect them. We're gonna block this for you. I love that. I think it's giving the managers exactly what they need to know and not too much, I think. And then as HR admins, you have the ability to understand, like, okay, what do gender differentials look like at your organization or anything to that effect. And so it just protects everyone involved. I love that. I think it's wonderful. Okay. I think we're at the point where we can switch into some surprises and sneak peeks. However, before we move on, I wanna make sure that you guys have a chance to have all your questions answered. If you do have any questions, drop those into the chat or the q and a while I have Sam queue up some of the exciting themes, topic analysis, AI features that we're gonna talk about. Yep. Wonderful. Drop those comments in. We'll take a look at those and get those answered. While those are coming in, speaking of comments, I'm gonna direct you to these tabs here along what we might wanna look at in a survey. We hear from almost every single one of you that we talk to. I read every comment in my surveys, and it takes me hours and days. But I do it because I wanna understand how people are actually feeling. Right? We are working on and soon releasing a full comments breakdown page that gives you comments, the ability to filter and organize those comments, the sentiment that we and our, our proprietary model that is understanding, interpreting, and organizing these comments has assigned. So you'll see that sentiment, topics that those comments roll up to, potential ideas that may come from comments, and then the question itself and the score that was given. This allows you to organize and say, you know what? Let's batch this and say, I wanna talk I wanna look through all the comments that maybe are positive. Let's go find some wins and really identify what we're doing well. And then in a different session, let's look at all of the comments that maybe are neutral or maybe trending toward more negative. Now this topic section is really where the magic comes in, and our model is interpreting, understanding, and grouping these comments into topics and assigning them sentiments. So as we get into the AI topics tab, you start to see topics come out like career discussion, company culture, customer outcomes, intent to stay as we move down into maybe more neutral or negative, maybe even mixed, access to information. Some people are liking that they have access to this, that, or the other. Some are saying that they don't. Are there underserved groups? And so on into more negative and very negative, comments. Each of those allows you to drop down the the topic itself, look at the individual comments, even reassign a sentiment if that sentiment might not be exactly right and you wanna make some adjustments. And then last but not least, you can bookmark these and refer back to them later or have a conversation with a coworker and say, hey. I've I've bookmarked five comments I really wanna talk to you about. Let's go through these together and make some plans. Yeah. No. I think that's a great overview, and I think this is another great way that AwardCo as a tool is looking to streamline things that are taking up your time and taking time away from, like, spending time with people. That is why HR admins and why you guys get into the jobs that you're in is so that you can help people and work with them. And so being able to take away some of that manual analysis that happens with every engagement survey run is a big part of what we're looking to achieve with this tool. I particularly love actually, if you wouldn't mind going back to that last screen you were on, you will also notice here that over here on the right, there is a little blank spot where there are gonna be ideas. That is also a sneak peek into what our action planning tool will be is that we'll be able to generate recommendations in terms of actions you can take, whether that's running an additional recognition program, setting up nominations for an award program, or even just like frequency of manager one on ones, things that you can do either in or outside of the platform to help improve the overall employee experience. Yep. I really love these sessions. I love coming on. I've been on a time or two in these product pulses, and I love to talk with you because we're on your team. We want to help you do your best work and really empower and and help engage your employees. Happy employees perform better, and understanding how they're truly feeling both in the scores that they give on their surveys as well as the comments that they're leaving helps you understand. And to Jill's point, we wanna streamline that for you, make it simple and quick so that you're quick to find those insights and take actions. No. No. I think that's a great summary. And before we, like, start to wrap up, I wanna make sure we answer a few of the questions. One question that we got from James, I've heard this ties into our workers' recognition tools as well. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. So a lot of what we're exploring and what is upcoming with some of this action planning that Jill has alluded to is the idea that inside of inside of AwardCo, inside of our existing rewards and recognition tool are a number of actions that you can surface up and maybe prioritize more to truly drive maybe the feeling of appreciation or maybe a more connectedness. So our existing tool in a lot of ways will start to present itself in action planning to say, hey. We've identified a trend here. Maybe employees are feeling underappreciated or or maybe not seen so much. Consider creating a recognition program. Another thing that we're starting to explore and and really digging into is how this data, this this years and years of recognition data that we sit on compare with your, your engagement data and your surveys to highlight trends that are not only surfacing one place or the other, but together, and how that, just becomes even more powerful of, of a conversation for you. Yeah. No. I think that's a great call out. And then, I mean, one of the reasons people come talk to us at AwardCo is because in their engagement survey, they heard recognition is something that they're lacking, or they're seeing that recognition might be a way to solve for some of the things that are surfaced in their engagement survey. So by bringing those all into one under the same umbrella is a great way to be able to measure the impact of recognition and engagement together. So that's what we're looking to do. And like Sam said, bring all the data together to really show you how that all comes together. K. I think we've covered the bulk of the questions that have been asked. If you have additional questions, feel free to reach out to us or your account representative, whether that's on CS or sales. We are always happy. This is what our favorite our favorite things to talk about. I love Awario Engage. I think the team has done such a great job of bringing the tool to life of innovating on something that has been around for quite a few years, but looking at it in a different way so that it best meets your needs. We've seen a few customers see, what is it called? Response rate Mhmm. Response rate improve over two x, and they've also seen that, like, intent to stay increase significantly and then, like, regrettable attrition also decrease. And so it's having a real impact on our customers and how they're interacting Before we close, any final words, Sam? Nope. Great to work with you guys. We really wanna hear from you. So send us your thoughts. Send us your questions. We are not done here. There is so much more to come. We have teams working on this and building, and there's a bright future here, and we want you to come along with it. Amazing. Kaye, and one final plug. I mean, if you do wanna come to Sam talk to Sam and his team, great way to do that is attending the Recognize Summit. So November ninth through eleventh up in Park City, Utah, we will be hosting an incredible event. It's great for, like, professional development, networking. It's also a really fun time. So register at rcgnz.com, and then thank you for joining Product Pulse today. We'll see you guys next time.