As the third quarter moves along and the end of 2012 doesn’t seem too far off, many HR departments are planning budgets, preparing for performance reviews and, of course, gearing up to administer the all-important employee engagement survey.While many organizations have firm engagement measurement practices in place, some could use a refresh on the design and nature of the engagement survey, according to Joan Dasher, employee engagement practice vice president at BlessingWhite Inc., an employee engagement consultancy.

Here [is the first of] four ways to thin out and refocus engagement surveys to produce more actionable results.Put less focus on external benchmarks. While many engagement firms specialize in offering industry-wide external benchmarks, Dasher said these often draw the focus away from a firm’s own engagement practices. “[They] get stuck looking at analysis and paralysis [of industry-wide data], and they’ve lost focus on their data and what they’re doing to drive their scores up,” she said.

Still, Kevin Kruse, author of We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement, said while firms shouldn’t spend too much time comparing against external benchmarks, there is value in it. “I think clearly one of the benefits of choosing one of the large survey companies out there is you are now entering into their vast research pools so you can get comparable [survey scores] to your industry,” Kruse said.