How the national benchmark strengthens strategic HRM policies

Your time is limited and you can only invest your money once. As an HR professional in education, you want to make an impact, but where do you start? Good news: you don't have to gamble. DUO-Onderwijs's new national employee benchmark shows exactly where investment pays off most. 

During the HRM & Education Congress 2025, Roeland Stehmann, senior consultant at DUO-Onderwijs, presented the latest insights from the annual benchmark survey. With data from over 35,000 employees from 850 schools from the past 2 school years, the benchmark provides a rich basis for building strategic HR choices. Or, as Roeland puts it: “A benchmark reveals which actions you achieve the most impact with.” 

The data show how employees rate their work and teaching quality. In the PO overall opinion remains stable around 8.0; in the VO around 7.3. Both sectors show a slight decrease. What is striking: employees are often more outspokenly positive or critical than parents and pupils. That makes their perspective particularly valuable for steering. It is therefore clear, according to Roeland: “The cliché that the butcher judges his own meat really doesn't apply here. Employee survey instead offers an honest and sharp picture of what is really going on.” 

The benchmark clearly shows where strengths lie: employees assess in both PO and VO the content of their work, the collegial atmosphere and the autonomy they experience as positive. But there are also structural bottlenecks. Communication scores lower especially in VO, and workload is a persistent problem. More importantly, workload turns out to be a strong predictor of overall satisfaction. That makes it a direct lever for strategic HRM. Those investing in workload reduction and the processes better organised, will immediately effect see.

What factors are important if you want to create a productive environment for good teaching? In PO, they are: effective collaboration and communication, good atmosphere, staff who are in their strengths, good methods and learning tools, and a shared vision between staff and management.  

In VO, the emphases are different: sound decision-making (consulting experts, taking time for considerations), shared vision, an open and learning culture, a solution-oriented mindset, and good methods and learning tools. 

The benchmark not only looks at how employees rate the school and education, but also at loyalty through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). That insight is strategically relevant because it shows how attractive a school is as a workplace and predicts how employees promote the organisation to the outside world. Not for nothing does Roeland call the NPS “the oil light on your dashboard”.  

Interestingly, the predictors of satisfaction are not always the same as those of loyalty. “For instance, job content makes employees happier, but determines their loyalty to a much lesser extent. Leadership, atmosphere and working conditions, on the other hand, turn out to be crucial,” Roeland explains. For HRM, this means steering on two tracks: in addition to strengthening job satisfaction, investing in professional leadership, team culture and predictable, safe working conditions. 

The benchmark also shows that school characteristics play a role. Non-urban schools, for example, score higher on average than urban ones. In VO, school size and years of service appear to weigh in, with smaller schools and younger staff often being more positive. This underlined The importance of careful comparison: as school do your there well to mirror the results against an appropriate reference group. Strategic HRM policy thus requires customisation. 

For schools, the benchmark is of great value. Those who commission a survey from DUO-Onderwijs not only see their own results, but can also compare them with similar schools. This makes it immediately clear what is going well, where there is room for improvement and what actions het most effective. The benchmark thus helps schools to substantiate choices, set priorities and focus on a healthy work culture and better education. In this way, research does not become a stand-alone project, but a practical tool for strategic HRM policy.