Key Driver Analysis explains overarching employee outcomes like engagement, satisfaction, or intent to leave. Here we apply multivariate regression to identify the largest contributors to overall employee satisfaction for the 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. To help select the questions with the largest effects on overall satisfaction and to help reduce potential issues of multicollinearity, we employ LASSO regression.
The key point of this analysis is that the items with the lowest relative responses aren’t necessary the ones that management should focus on to improve overall satisfaction. If lower scoring items aren't associated with higher satisfaction, choosing to focus on them may yield little to no gains.
The results of the Key Driver Analysis are illustrated in the plot below, which is divided into four quadrants based on the average question score and average importance:
Successes in the upper right quadrant (High Score, High Importance) are items where the organization scored relatively high that are also strongly associated with overall satisfaction.
Critical Improvements in the upper left quadrant (Low Score, High Importance) represent items where the organization scored relatively low, but are strongly associated with overall satisfaction. These are areas that offer the greatest potential for the organization to improve overall satisfaction.
Basics in the lower right quadrant (High Score, Low Importance) are areas where the organization scored high but have relatively lower correlations to overall satisfaction levels.
Low Yields in the lower left quadrant (Low Score, Low Importance) are the organization's lowest scoring items with the lowest importance.