Key Drivers

Key Drivers, what is and what does it tell me?

Think of it as having a skilled detective by your side, uncovering the most significant factors influencing employee engagement.

By using advanced statistics, this tool reveals relationships, predicts outcomes, and highlights the key factors that drive your engagement. With these insights, you'll have a clear roadmap to guide your decisions and tailor your strategies to different groups within your organisation. 

It helps us understand:

• Relationships: It shows us how two things are connected, like survey questions and engagement scores.
• Prediction: It predicts outcomes based on certain variables, helping us foresee how changes might affect engagement.
• Importance: It highlights which factors have the strongest influence on engagement, guiding our actions.

By comparing the relative importance of factors like management support, work-life balance, or career development opportunities, you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• Should we focus on improving management training or increasing work-life balance initiatives?
• What can I do to boost employee retention?
• To enhance engagement, should we concentrate on career development or better benefits?

Alongside your Key Drivers, we provide you with our Action Grid. The Action Grid helps you figure out which areas to focus on first. It highlights the most important factors and guides you on what to do next, ensuring you stay focused on the right priorities. This way, you can make smart decisions and see real improvements within your team.

How can I use the Key Drivers table and Grid to take action?

What are they showing?

The table and grid both display the same information about your key drivers. The grid is designed to make it easier to understand what you need to prioritise. While the table lists the drivers, their scores, and the strength of the relationship, the grid visually shows the relationship between driver scores and their strength. This helps you see what to focus on first.

How to use them?

Review the Action Grid first. It helps you quickly identify which drivers need your attention. Focus on the drivers in these quartiles from first to last: 

• Prioritise:  Drivers with low scores and high strength are crucial areas to focus on first. They have a big impact but aren't performing well.
• Celebrate: Next drivers with high scores and high strength are your strengths. Make sure to continue doing well in these areas and protect them.
• Review: Drivers with low scores and low strength need a review. Make small improvements if possible.
• Maintain: Drivers with high scores and low strength should be sustained and maintained, but they are not the top priority for you right now. 

Next, use the table for details. Look at the specific scores and details about each driver. Use this information to plan your actions based on what you saw in the matrix.

By using both the table and Action Grid, you get a clear picture of what to prioritise and what actions to take to improve employee engagement.

How should I take action against each Key Driver? 

In priority order…

Prioritise

• What it means: These are crucial areas where performance is lacking and they have a significant impact on engagement.
• How to take action:
  • Focus on improving these areas first, as they will have the biggest positive effect on overall engagement.
  • Develop specific action plans to address issues in these areas.
  • Allocate sufficient resources and support to drive improvements.

Celebrate

• What it means: These are areas where your team is performing well and still has a high influence on engagement.
• How to take action:
  • Acknowledge and recognise the team’s success in these areas.
  • Continue to support and invest in these strengths to maintain high performance and grow your metric score.
  • Share best practices from these areas with other teams to replicate success.

Review

• What it means: These are areas with low performance, but they have a lower amount of influence on overall engagement, compared to other drivers.
• How to take action:
  • Look into making small, incremental improvements in these areas.
  • Do not divert too many resources from more impactful areas.
  • Seek easy and quick wins that can improve these areas without significant investment.

Maintain

• What it means: These are essential areas where you are doing well, but they are not the most influential drivers compared to other drivers.
• How to take action:
  • Maintain current efforts to ensure these areas remain strong.
  • Regularly check in to make sure performance does not decline.
  • Protect these areas from becoming future weaknesses by providing consistent support and resources.

By understanding and acting on each of these points, you can effectively improve your key drivers of employee engagement, ensuring that resources are allocated where they will make the most difference.

Remember, all key drivers have some level of influence on your metric score—that’s why they are called key drivers. Make sure to consider each driver when creating actions.

What is the difference between organisation view and ‘my view’? 

In the reporting dashboard, you can see two different views in the Key Drivers tab*.

1. Organisation view: This shows the key drivers for the entire organisation (or the total number of responses). It helps you understand what factors are influencing employee engagement across the whole survey.
2. My view: This shows the key drivers specifically for your team. It helps you understand what factors are most important for your team's engagement.

Using both views:

• Use both views to start conversations with your team.
• Ask your team if they agree with the identified drivers and discuss how these factors affect them.
• Remember, these views are the beginning of a discussion, not the end. Engage with your team to get their insights before making any changes.

*Your ability to see each view in the dashboard will depend on your platform access. 

Which type of survey should I enable Key Drivers for?

Key Drivers is designed to help you identify the key factors that drive engagement within your organisation. It requires the use of our Engagement Index or eNPS metric along with a variety of questions that cover different aspects of engagement.

We recommend enabling Key Drivers for comprehensive engagement surveys rather than smaller pulse surveys. For the best results, start with our Question Bank, which offers a range of pre-built questions and survey examples that have been thoroughly tested by Hive People Science.

How do I set up Key Drivers? 

To set up Key Drivers for your employee engagement survey, start by ensuring you include our engagement index or eNPS metric in your survey questions. Utilising our recommended engagement survey template, created by Hive People Science, also provides a good starting point. When designing your survey, focus on including actionable questions that align with your survey objectives. 

Once your survey is designed and ready, navigate to the analysis tab in the survey builder. Here, you can enable Key Drivers for your survey to ensure it's set up to capture and analyse the factors influencing employee engagement effectively. 

Before sending your survey, double-check that Key Drivers is enabled and configured correctly to gather valuable insights. Once your survey is sent these settings can not be altered. 

What are good questions to include in Key Drivers? 

When selecting questions to include in the analysis, focus on including actionable questions that align with your survey objectives. Also, avoid questions that are essentially facets of engagement themselves, such as “I see myself happily working for this organisation in a year’s time” or “More often than not, I have a good day at work here.”

Remember, our Hive Question Bank is a great starting point in designing your survey. These questions have been tried and tested by Hive People Science

Is there a minimum amount of questions I need to include in my survey? 

Yes, you need to include at least 10 questions in your survey. This is because having a sufficient number of questions helps you get a clearer and more accurate understanding of what factors are driving employee engagement. With too few questions, it’s harder to pinpoint what really matters to your employees.

Why do my survey questions need to be required rather than optional? 

You need to make sure every employee answers all the questions in the survey. If some questions are optional and employees skip them, you won’t have complete data for everyone. This means you can’t include their responses in your analysis, which can make your results less accurate. By requiring all questions, you ensure a full set of responses, leading to better and more reliable insights

In simple terms (no maths) how are the Key Drivers identified and calculated? 

Key Drivers empowers you to understand and improve employee engagement by uncovering what truly matters. By leveraging a combination of regression analysis and correlation, you can effectively identify key drivers across different scales of data. 

Utilising regression analysis for large datasets, such as the entire organisation's responses, allows you to pinpoint significant drivers with confidence. On the other hand, employing correlation for smaller sample sizes, like teams or departments, complements your analysis by providing insights where regression may require more data to yield meaningful results. 

This approach equips you with the tools to make informed decisions that drive positive outcomes.

In-depth knowledge seekers

Curious to learn more? This section is packed with detailed information and tips to help you get the most out of Key Drivers

Understanding Key Drivers

At Hive, we utilise Key Drivers to examine both organisational and team-level data. Depending on the size of the respondent group, we employ either stepwise regression analysis or correlation analysis to ensure robust results across different sample sizes.

When do we use Regression Analysis?

We conduct regression analysis when the number of responses is at least 10 times the number of survey questions. For example, if your survey includes 25 scale questions, we require a minimum of 250 responses to proceed with regression analysis. When this criterion isn't met, we opt for correlation analysis instead.

When do we use Correlation Analysis?

Correlation analysis is employed when there aren't enough responses to meet the regression analysis requirement outlined above. Additionally, we avoid correlation analysis if responses fall below an organisation's confidentiality threshold.

We identify key drivers across varying data scales by combining regression and correlation analyses. Regression analysis is instrumental for large datasets such as entire organizational responses, enabling us to pinpoint significant drivers confidently. Conversely, correlation analysis is valuable for smaller sample sizes like teams or departments, providing insights where regression may require more data for meaningful results.

Understanding the Action Grid 

Strength of driver

In the Hive platform, the strength levels on the metric are categorised into low, moderately low, moderately high, and high. These distinctions are important in interpreting the level of influence your drivers have on your metric score.

What do these strength levels signify? Metrics in statistics can vary and are somewhat subjective. When evaluating the strength of each driver on the metric score:

• Low strength: These drivers have minimal impact on the metric score, but still have some degree of influence compared to other questions in your survey.
• Moderately low strength: These drivers have a slightly stronger impact than low strength drivers but are still minor.
• Moderately high strength: These drivers significantly impact the metric score but may be influenced by other factors as well.
• High strength: These drivers have a substantial and direct impact on the metric score, but be sure to consider external factors that may have or will affect these drivers. 

How are these levels determined? 

• Initially, beta coefficients (which measure the strength and direction of relationships between drivers and the metric) may appear high when considered individually. However, as more drivers are added via stepwise regression, beta coefficients tend to decrease. In practical terms, beta coefficients typically range from 0 to about 0.3 for low to high strength, while correlations (which measure the strength of the relationship between variables) range from around 0.5 to 0.8.
  
  
• Consider the organisational context: 
  Remember, these drivers are derived solely from survey responses to gauge their strength. Key drivers serve as a starting point for discussion rather than a definitive conclusion. Therefore, it's essential to also consider other organisational contexts and external factors that may affect these drivers when developing actionable strategies.

Average Score

When it comes to survey reporting within the Hive platform, average scores play a pivotal role in providing a concise overview of the team’s overall sentiment. These scores are calculated by averaging responses to scaled questions, offering a numerical representation of collective opinions.

Managers should leverage average scores as they serve as a quick reference point to gauge the general mood and satisfaction level within the team. The simplicity of this metric allows for easy comparison across different survey periods, meaning managers can track sentiment over time.

We consider any score of 7.0 and above as positive, indicating that employees at your organisation are having a favourable work experience. This benchmark helps in recognising and reinforcing positive aspects of the work environment.

Who can view Key Drivers?

Viewing Key Drivers depends on your role and permissions. We have two permissions you can give to users. Here's a quick breakdown:

• View Key Drivers - Organisation View:

This means you can view overall organisation (all responses) insights in the Key Drivers reporting dashboard. Most users will receive this permission automatically if they have the ‘View Survey Results’ permission. 

• View Key Drivers - My View:

This means you'll be able to see Key Drivers for the segments or attributes you have permission to access. This keeps the data relevant to your role and responsibilities. Again, if you have the role "View survey results," this role will be applied to your access automatically.