Employee ratings of an organization's strengths and weaknesses can identify areas upon which to focus in order to increase employee satisfaction. Indeed, if you had no other data, you would still be in a position to make decisions about what to do in response to employee survey results.

You will be able to make much smarter decisions, however, with additional normative data.

For example, it's not uncommon to discover half a dozen attributes which receive relatively poor ratings in comparison to others in the survey. What's to be done?

One option, of course, is to attempt to address all of the low scores at the same time. In some cases, limited resources may preclude an across the board response. Even if such a full court press is possible, it is often an inefficient use of organizational resources.

Alternatively, you might make a judgment call, focusing on those attributes which you think matter most to employees. An you may be right.

Normative data, however, increase your odds, for they show where you stand in comparison with many other organizations on the same attributes.

A case in point -- employee ratings of salaries and wages are substantially lower than their ratings of, say, corporate communications or quality of supervision. Looks like a money problem, but is it?

It may be that, compared to other organizations, your wage and salary ratings are on the upper end of the scale. And your apparently satisfactory communications ratings are actually lower than those of other organizations.

That kind of information is precisely what norms are designed to provide.

Without that information, you can't really tell where you stand, and you may waste resources fixing "problems" that simply reflect prevailing views of employees in general, and missing an opportunity to address the real areas in which your organization lags behind others.