Patent ID: 7593861

Claim:
A method of providing employee assessment services, comprising: negotiating with an employer to administer surveys to its employees; obtaining performance metrics relating to performance of a business of the employer; designing a survey to obtain feature metrics relating to features of business culture relating to the business of the employer, wherein the survey is in a machine readable form; electronically administering the survey to the employees on a computer, thereby obtaining survey data including the feature metrics, wherein administering said survey includes communicating survey questions to respondents and obtaining responses to the questions from the respondents, the questions having response choices corresponding to numeric values; performing assessment of behaviors of the respondents during survey administration by executing machine readable instructions corresponding to the following steps: dividing responses to survey questions from a particular respondent on a particular survey into blocks, wherein the blocks have substantially equal numbers of responses and substantially reflect a sequence in which survey questions are communicated to the particular respondent; computing standard deviations of the numeric values corresponding to the responses in each block; and comparing the standard deviations of the numeric values corresponding to the responses in each block with a predetermined threshold and indicating that at least a portion of the survey data is likely invalid when the standard deviation of the numeric values corresponding to the responses in each block is equal to or less than the predetermined threshold; prompting the respondent on the display of a computer to affirm the validity of said responses and readministering the portion of the survey that is likely invalid when the validity is not affirmed by the respondent; and compiling the survey data on a computer to identify statistically significant, noteworthy, consistent, and non-contradictory linkages between the feature metrics and the performance metrics, where noteworthiness is assessed based on an effect size calculation; and communicating the linkages between the feature metrics and the performance metrics to the employer.