One way to understand the proficiency and competitiveness of your CW program is to simply benchmark it to others or industry indices. But how do you know what is a good benchmark to compare against?

First, there are a number of established benchmarking methodologies and best practices to leverage in the marketplace. These best practices range from creating comparable benchmarks to leading market processes/organizations within and outside of one’s industry to networking and visiting leading industry organizations or even renowned CW program operations. There are also a number of books written on benchmarking methodologies, such as by Robert Camp, who specifically outlines a 12-step approach to benchmarking.

But before you dive in, there are two main forms of benchmarks you should become familiar with: external industry benchmarks and internal organizational benchmarks.

• External industry benchmarks are useful when understanding what program models, strategies and tactics to employ. However, when trying to compare CW program management performance metrics representing your program, industry averages often yield little meaning for comparison. This is due to the almost infinite variations in organization structures and policy dependencies across companies. AS a result, such comparisons can provide very little value and, at times, be misleading. Be very cautious in your use of these. Additionally, some external industry indices can be limited in availability because of the aforementioned limitations.
• Internal organizational benchmarks can help you set goals based on designed CW program values, or compare different segments in your CW program (e.g. geographic region, skill set or supply chain partners, etc.). As the saying goes, “know thyself.” Choosing the appropriate benchmarks will help you identify performance, service gaps and opportunities for improvement in your program.

Benchmarking is important because it can give you directional visibility in the setting of performance and operational expectations for your program. More important, it can also give you insights on how to do things better/differently than the current program policies and operations inherited by your own organization’s structural and cultural requirements.

The danger with benchmarking, though, is not recognizing the “degrees of comparison” in the data/perspective/respondents’ organizational own dependencies. What that means is a favorable performance in one organization may not be replicated at another because different company structure, policies and culture will not support that performance. But when benchmarking performances are compared, sometimes that visibility drives organizational changes to replicate and exceed the benchmarked performance. In other words, you might exceed the industry benchmark, but in your own way, instead of replicating the exact methods used by the benchmarked organization(s). Change sometimes happens in the light of benchmark comparisons even though degrees of differences need to be carefully taken into account when improving your CW program. There are indeed “degrees in comparison” when it comes to comparing apples to apples!

Two final thoughts. First, creating performance benchmarks within your staffing partner supply chain is a critical internal benchmark strategy. It’s an internal and controllable benchmark analysis because staffing partners are performing within your company’s organizational structure and program framework, policies and processes. This will require that you use the same criteria to measure all your staffing providers. Ultimately, this enables you to rank your providers against each other for performance benchmark comparisons.

You can use this information to coach underperforming providers and potentially justifying incentive rewards for leading performers. Ranking them will enable you to determine the appropriate performance plan levels to utilize with your lowest-performing providers. Note: Depending on your corporate culture and program rules, you may or may not want to share the names of other staffing providers when you deliver rankings to an individual provider.