Key Driver Analysis

Key Driver Analysis is a powerful way to derive business value from your employee survey data. Essentially, Key Driver Analysis helps your organisation better target improvement efforts to get the most ‘bang for your buck’. It is the most popular ‘high-level’ analytical report amongst JRA’s clients.

What is it?

A Key Driver Analysis identifies the key leverage points for improving the engagement levels of your employees. Key Driver Analysis is grounded in a robust statistical technique, and basically identifies the questions within a survey that have the most significant impact on employee engagement (these are not necessarily the questions that simply scored the lowest in a survey). The results of a Key Driver Analysis are presented in an easy to understand Performance-Importance Matrix that clearly identifies the issues that are the most important in influencing the behaviour of your employees, and that are scoring poorly relative to industry norms. In effect, the results of a Key Driver Analysis allow managers to better focus their intervention efforts – where they actually make a difference and where the organisation isn’t doing so well at present.

How does it work?

Key Driver Analysis uses a statistical technique known as multiple regression to identify patterns in the responses of employees. We don't actually ask survey respondents what items in the survey are most important to them, as this most often results in a large number of items being selected, and frustration on the part of the respondent. By using multiple regression, it becomes possible to identify which questionnaire items have the strongest and most meaningful association with key outcome variables (such as employee engagement). Prioritising intervention efforts upon the results of statistical analysis is far superior to simply targeting intervention efforts towards the lowest scoring items in a survey. Typically the lowest scoring items have no connection with employee engagement (or other outcome variables) whatsoever.

What are the benefits of a JRA Key Driver Analysis?

• Better understand which aspects of your organisation are the most important to ‘get right’ with respect to employee engagement (or some other important outcome relevant to your organisation).
• Better appreciate how well your organisation is performing with regards to these ‘critical aspects’.
• Better prioritise your intervention efforts. Key Driver Analysis enables you to focus on the things that will make the biggest difference to your overall results. Ideally, what you want to end up with at the end of your survey is 2-3 things for your organisation to focus on over the next year - things that will make a real difference to your employees.
• Better utilise limited resources by focusing on improving the things that have the most impact on employee attitudes and behaviour. Too often we see organisations choosing to focus on the lowest scoring items in their survey. Frequently, however, the lowest scoring items in an employee survey do not have a significant impact on important outcomes like employee engagement or peoples’ willingness to stay with the organisation. A Key Driver Analysis allows you to avoid the potential for wasted time, money and other resources.
• Create a sense of objectivity around intervention efforts. How do you justify to your managers and to staff generally why some survey-related issues are being targeted but not others? By referring to the results of statistical analysis, you can inject a tremendous amount of objectivity into the employee survey and follow-up process. This helps create greater acceptability of the intervention efforts that arise from the survey process.
• Work with well-qualified and client-focused analysts. JRA has a team of well qualified analysts that are committed to helping organisations best utilise their survey data. We won’t simply deliver some hard-copy report to you, but will pay a visit or call to ensure that the key client contact has a good understanding of the Key Driver Report and its implications for improvement initiatives.