The ZebraZone Benchmark is an annual large-scale survey of satisfaction, commitment, stess and well-being at work based on a representative sample of the salaried and waged working population in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg.
The ZebraZone Benchmark sets out:
- to be an up-to-date gauge of satisfaction, commitment, stess and well-being in the workplace;
- to describe current trends and developments in the labour market; and
- to provide benchmark information to companies who wish to compare their own satisfaction, commitment, openness to change, stress level, mobbing, etc. with the benchmark results;
Every ZebraZone Benchmark eventually results in one or more research reports.
Procedure
Every year ZebraZone benchmarks a number of countries (until now Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg). In this way, the most recent, up-to-date data on employee perceptions of satisfaction, commitment, stress and well-being at work are constantly available. The procedure and methodology have been developed in cooperation with the academic world. This guarantees the validity and reliability of the data.
Data are gathered by street surveys (right across the country), telephone interviews and on-line surveys. Only the salaried and waged working population is included in these surveys. Care is also taken to ensure that our sample is a representative reflection of the overall salaried and waged working population. ZebraZone takes account, in sizing the sample, of the real-life distribution of active employees for a large number of socio-demographic factors, like age, gender, size of company, education and training, region, sector, etcetera.
An annual survey providing up-to-date data is necessary, as perceptions are not stable over time, contrary, for example, to personality measurements. Think back for a moment to the 9/11 effect, in which employee satisfaction soared (“we’re lucky to have a job”), but quickly fell owing to a lack of career possibilities.
ZebraZone has developed standard questionnaires for each (perception) model (for example satisfaction and stress). These are used both in the benchmark surveys and in the companies where we carry out a survey. In this way, each question is always benchmarked and we can make a perfect comparison with the situation on the labour market. A company can estimate better which scores can be ascribed to their specific policy, and which should be ascribed rather to labour market circumstances. Thus, one can avoid spending resources on elements on which the company has only minimum influence.
A major added value of ZebraZone is that company results are compared with representative benchmark data and NOT with existing customer data from our databases. Customer data are in most cases unrepresentative, given the danger of bias in the respondent population (e.g., if only “(dis)satisfied customers” ask to carry out a survey).