NIST Are We Making Progress? (40 Statements)
Compare workforce or leader responses across seven Baldrige categories using transparent 1–5 means for the Revised 2011 NIST questionnaire.{{ summaryTitle }}
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Organizational improvement depends partly on what people experience in everyday work. Leaders may believe that strategy, communication, customer focus, and work systems are clear while workforce members experience gaps that do not appear in operating reports. A structured perception survey makes those differences discussable.
NIST's Baldrige Are We Making Progress? questionnaires ask workforce members and senior leaders to respond to parallel statements about the organization. The Revised 2011 forms contain 40 statements grouped into seven Baldrige categories: Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer Focus, Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management, Workforce Focus, Operations Focus, and Results.
| Form | Point of view | Useful comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce | What I know and experience as a workforce member | Patterns across functions, levels, or groups |
| Leader | What our workforce knows and experiences from a senior leader's perspective | Leader perceptions beside workforce perceptions |
Each response uses the same five agreement anchors, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Category patterns can point toward subjects for discussion or improvement, but one person's answers are not an organizational performance audit. Group conclusions require a confidential collection process, enough respondents to protect identity, and a documented aggregation method.
Edition matters. NIST now publishes a revised 2022 questionnaire with 41 statements; the assessment described here preserves the Revised 2011 paired 40-statement workforce and leader forms. Results should therefore be compared only with administrations using the same edition and form.
How to Use This Tool:
Choose the form that matches the respondent before answering. The form changes all statement wording but not the 1 to 5 response scale or category membership.
- Select Workforce form for a workforce member or Leader form for a senior leader, then start the assessment.
- Answer all 40 statements from the selected point of view using Strongly disagree, Disagree, Undecided, Agree, or Strongly agree.
- Review the overall mean and the seven category means. Open the answer review when a high or low category needs statement-level context.
- For organizational use, collect responses through a separately governed confidential process and compare aggregated workforce and leader patterns rather than acting on an identifiable individual response.
Interpreting Results:
Means closer to 5 show stronger agreement with the statements in that response set; means closer to 1 show stronger disagreement. The lowest category can suggest where to read individual statements and begin a conversation, while the highest category may indicate a perceived strength worth examining.
NIST does not provide a universal pass/fail cutoff for these questionnaires. A category difference is not proof of performance, and the browser result is not a Baldrige award score, certification, formal NIST evaluation, or employee rating.
Technical Details:
The five response anchors are coded directly from 1 for Strongly disagree through 5 for Strongly agree. There are no reverse-scored items and no weights. Every reported value is an arithmetic mean.
Formula Core
The overall mean divides the sum of all 40 response codes by 40.
A category mean uses the same rule over only the statements assigned to that category.
Here, xi is one 1 to 5 response, c is a Baldrige category, and nc is its statement count. Results are displayed to at most two decimal places.
| Category | Statements | Item range |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | 6 | 1A to 1F |
| Strategic Planning | 5 | 2A to 2E |
| Customer Focus | 5 | 3A to 3E |
| Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management | 5 | 4A to 4E |
| Workforce Focus | 6 | 5A to 5F |
| Operations Focus | 4 | 6A to 6D |
| Results | 9 | 7A to 7I |
If the six Leadership responses are 4, 4, 3, 5, 4, and 4, their sum is 24 and the category mean is 4.00. That number describes one response pattern; it acquires organizational meaning only when the collection and comparison design support it.
Accuracy and Privacy Notes:
The wording and category map follow the Revised 2011 40-statement forms, while the displayed means are a transparent derivation rather than an official NIST scoring standard. Responses stay in browser memory and sharing is disabled. Do not use an identifiable response for personnel decisions.
References:
- Are We Making Progress?, NIST Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, Revised 2011.
- Are We Making Progress as Leaders?, NIST Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, Revised 2011.
- Are We Making Progress? improvement tool, National Institute of Standards and Technology, updated May 13, 2026.