Hi @timmy.cheung - no, we can’t remove the normalised or average score.  Favourability is important for understanding the spread and variability of responses, but the average is most meaningful metric to track over time.  This article shares much more about the science behind this stance.

And to your point about explaining to people less comfortable with statistics, this short overview might help, but let us know if we can wordsmith further to make it simpler to understand!

Hi @bcolver thanks for this!  So how would I explain this to a CEO, if lets say I have a score of 66: do I say its 66%?  Or 66 points?  Or just 66?

While I understand the rationale behind normalising the score, I’m surprised that Glint has opted for this approach as I haven’t seen any other consultancy take this radical stance.

Hi Timmy-

I happened to click on this thread and noticed you never really got a reply to your second question. I’d be happy to share my own experience discussing the scores with our internal leadership because I think it was well-understood. 

I simply described the normalized scores as (in your example) “66 out of 100”, and explained that these scores were just the 5-point answer scare, scaled up to 100, where 1=0, 2=25, 3=50, 4=75, 5=100. This approach to explaining the scores seemed to clear it up for everyone, and where I was initially a skeptic like you, I did find as bcolver suggests that having a single number to track over time and compare across areas is really helpful….with the distribution of scores being helpful when diving into specific areas. Hope this helps you and others viewing this thread. 

Hi @timmy.cheung,

When we switched over to Glint a few years ago, we had a bit of a learning curve with the new metric. So I know where you’re coming from! Here’s my experience, in case it’s helpful:

When it came to talking about overall engagement, we were used to talking percentages (% engaged, % content, % ambivalent, % disengaged), and our primary metric was an average on a 6.00-pt scale. Now, after a few surveys with Glint, our leaders have really embraced the change. We now talk naturally and accurately about “scores”--though, initially I had to really emphasize that the score is not a percentage. The benefits of this approach make it an easy habit to break.

Having the max score be 100 is so much easier for us than the way it was before, when the overall metric was still an average score, but out of 6. That made it exceedingly difficult for people to really understand their scores comparatively and/or over time (e.g., is it meaningful to go from 5.28 to 5.59?). The score out of 100 is extremely intuitive, once you can get people to avoid thinking about percentages. (There’s a lot of research supporting the benefits of this approach, too.) And favorability percentages are a great supplement to what you can learn from a score--especially on those bigger teams.

I probably did demos with 20 companies before we picked Glint, and I can say confidently that a lot of those places are moving away from thinking about “percent engaged,” and the 100-pt scale is increasingly common. I’ve seen first hand the value of this approach. It used to be really easy for leaders to dismiss the people on their team that were rather artificially categorized as “disengaged” (or whatever term a particular vendor might use). It was easy to have a defeatist, nihilistic attitude about staff--and to stop thinking that they could become more engaged. (In the worst cases, this turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the leader stops trying and the staff do, too!) Now, with the way we think and talk about “scores” that view has almost entirely disappeared in my conversations with leaders.

Keep hammering home the score as the primary metric, and explain how and why it’s not a percentage, and if you’re leaders are anything like mine, they’ll get it. It just might take a survey or two.

Hope this helps!