Write a response to Derek post:

Benchmarking is a great tool to facilitate strategic decision-making. By benchmarking, an organization can find out information about the company from its employees that would normally not be talked about. As long as the benchmarking is anonymous, then the answers will be valid. With the answers to the benchmarking questions, an organization an find out what they are doing good, or not so good, and see where they need to make changes. Decisions on these changes will be able to be made strategically, since they have valid, trustworthy evidence from multiple sources on what needs to be changed. With this info, they are able to make strategic decisions on how to affect change.

            It is often much easier to know WHAT needs changing then knowing HOW to change it. This is why it is important for leaders to understand how to improve their organizations effectiveness. Not only should they use research from their own company, they should use benchmarking from other companies who have made their research public. Before it is decided to actually effect change due to another company, many things need to be evaluated such as: where and how the info was gained, is there other better info available, is there enough evidence that the change worked, and could the other companies’ evidence be biased (Barends & Rousseau)? If all of these things are not taken into consideration, then the change utilized by others might now work for your team.

            To me this sounds like something that is done in the Navy called DEOCS (Defense Organization Climate Survey). This is where a Navy command asks all of its personnel to anonymously answer command chosen questions about the command to they can find out what the average Sailor thinks about the command. After these surveys, they also conduct interviews to see why questions were answered a certain way, and to facilitate change in the future.

Barends, E., Rousseau, D. M. (2018). Evidence-based management: How to use evidence to make better organizational decisions. London: Kogan Page.