How can employee sentiment analysis improve your business?

Is employee sentiment important in the workplace? The short answer is yes, very much. First, however, let’s research why organizations, people analytics, and workforce planning managers should pay attention to it

The most significant factor influencing employee attrition is the feeling that employees don’t have enough professional growth and promotion opportunities or lack sufficient recognition. As a manager, how can you lower the turnover rate?

If you really want to crack that code, take steps to understand your employees’ sentiments, i.e., what your employees think, say, and feel. This process requires data analytics. To gather and understand this data, many leading HR teams turn to employee sentiment analysis using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze the true meaning of employees’ words.

In short, sentiment analysis is an approach that involves collecting people’s opinions and feedback to capture, quantify, and measure brand perception. Employee sentiment refers to how business leaders run the organization and the attitude of employees towards it.

Employee sentiment analysis can also use natural language processing (NLP) and other AI techniques to automatically analyze employee feedback and other unstructured data to quantify and describe employees’ attitudes toward their organization.

Employee sentiment is the general mood your employee experience in the organization, based on internal and external factors measured by mood analysis.

Previously, HR managers relied on quantitative data placed in spreadsheets from payroll systems to manage the workforce. However, according to people analytics managers, this information turned out to be insufficient.

That’s where employee sentiment analysis comes into play. It allows you to analyze and interpret high-quality HR data from surveys, textual feedback, video talks (video interviews), and other content your workforce shares.

Employee sentiment analysis is part of an overall larger employee voice strategy. It can be a key indicator of opportunities for improvement and growth at the management level and across the organization.

An employee voice strategy gives all employees the opportunity to express their views. It involves preventive measures taken by the organization to gather employees’ sentiments on many topics.

By identifying moods and visualizing them in real time with analytics that can be easily filtered, HR managers can gain vital information about employees and their managers, including their current perspectives.

You’ve decided to start collecting data. However, it’s still unstructured information. This data comprises text, images, audio, and video. Comments or open-ended responses in a survey are also a form of unstructured text data. Organizations must transform this unstructured quantitative data into structured and qualitative data to analyze it to get information from surveys.

Try to apply algorithms for textual processing information. Once you achieve text analytics, all statistical or machine learning analyzes can extract meaningful information from employee sentiment data.

As the turnover rate increases, annual performance reviews and surveys don’t provide the company with enough information to understand how employees treat the organization they work in.

According to Andrew Marritt, CEO of OrganizationView, employee sentiment analysis isn’t enough to determine who is unhappy in your organization. Still, it’s good to look at general trends across a large organization. Such analysis will show what people usually talk about in your company.

Feedback from employees gives you data you need to solve problems you may not even be aware of while maintaining a healthy and happy work environment. In addition, getting results from all your employees means you can identify issues specific to certain roles, teams, or management groups that are endemic to your organization.

MyHRfuture shared the example of Robobank. During the COVID-19 lockdown, the company used text analytics and employee listening to gather feedback on how employees rated the organization’s response to the crisis and understand how the organization could better support employees. Within 24 hours, feedback turned into ideas and advice for crisis teams to develop new interventions.

Another example is from the British company Nottingham Health Trust. The company found it difficult to achieve high employee engagement rates during surveys. Their challenges included high workforce turnover and low employee satisfaction. Mandatory surveys provided insights but also led to survey fatigue. This feeling worsened when staff saw no action had been taken on previous surveys.

To improve this experience, Nottingham Health Trust is exploring sentiment analysis this year to understand workers’ most significant pain points better so the right actions can be taken.

Google recently used HR analytics to determine whether the tech giant really needed managers and, if so, what personality traits made them the most successful. In a multi-year research initiative called Project Oxygen, Google determined managers are vital to a team. After examining metrics related to productivity, retention, job satisfaction, and quality of management, Google found that eight specific qualities increase a manager’s chances of success. As a result, Project Oxygen changed how Google hires and empowers managers.

Employee sentiment and its analysis are of great importance for the development of your business.