A segment is a part of a greater whole that has been divided into pieces. In the context of the IT Happiness survey, this greater whole is all of your employees together, and segmentation is the various ways you can divide them into smaller groups called segments. Without an appropriate amount of segmentation, your survey results will never be able to tell you the full story.
Why use segmentation?
Let’s start with a small example. Company ACME has just finished a survey amongst their 100 employees using three topics, and scored as follows:
| Topic | Score |
| Your laptop | 8.2 |
| The Servicedesk | 7.6 |
| Meeting room technology | 6.3 |
Based on these results, the ACME IT-Director might decide that improving all the meeting rooms is the top priority. ACME has two locations however, with about 60 employees based in France and 40 employees based in Germany. If we split up the results in these two segments, the scores become as follows:
| Topic | Score (France) | Score (Germany) |
| Your laptop | 7.8 | 8.8 |
| The Servicedesk | 9.1 | 5.3 |
| Meeting room technology | 4.8 | 8.6 |
While investing into improving the meeting rooms in France turns out to have been even more necessary than our IT-Director may have previously thought, we can also see that doing so in Germany would have been a waste of resources. Instead it turns out that what employees in Germany most need improved is their Servicedesk, something our IT-Director never would have guessed based on the high average score for the company overall.
Even now, several unanswered questions remain: The laptop scores are high on average, but are they as consistently high across models? Germany dislikes the servicedesk on average, but is there a difference in how the IT-department experiences the servicedesk compared to how the legal department experiences it? The more segmentation is added, the more we can pinpoint where actions are required.
How much segmentation to use?
This answer is simple: as much as you can. We can’t predict in advance whether a segmentation will be interesting or not, only after segmentation has been added can we analyse the results to see if there’s any interesting differences between individual segments.
We advise against using personal information as segments, such as gender, age or educational degree. Segments strictly relating to the organisation like employment duration, department or country of employment are fine to use.
Examples of segments to use
Various topic results can be enhanced by different kinds of segmentation. Some examples per topic are as follows.
Desktop/Laptop
What device type an employee has, how old their device is and what role they have all can influence the satisfaction with the given device. Maybe a certain model scores a lot higher and can be considered next time replacements are due? Perhaps satisfaction sees a huge drop-off once laptops reach a certain age which could be used to decide what the best moment is to replace them. Finally someone who uses processor-heavy modelling software all day will need more processing power than someone who just uses Excel, laptops aren’t one size fits all.
IT communication and training
To know how satisfied an employee is with the communication from IT, it’s good to know if they get any communication at all. Are they subscribed to the newsletters? How often do they check the intranet? What is their native language, perhaps communication in a certain language is received better or worse than in English. For training it’s useful to know what trainings an employee has actually done, if any, and knowing how they would rate their own skills can also be a good added dimension to see who these trainings are helping most.
Meeting Room Technology
Once again knowing laptop type is useful here, as some laptops might work better with connecting to the meeting room hardware than others. Which location someone works at most is also useful information to know which meeting rooms they are actually rating, as well as how often someone uses these meeting rooms. Someone who spends more time working from home than in the office might also have a different opinion on the meeting rooms than someone who only ever has meetings in the office.
In the preparation phase of the IT Happiness survey we will provide an example segmentation file to use as inspiration for further possible segments.