According to Gartner, the companies might spend up to $100 billion per year by 2025 on paid market research. They already invest around $40 billion on market research and in addition to that, they also spend on online survey administration.  

Based on the data from Harvard Business Review in 2018, the companies spend over $720 million on employee engagement which is predicted to rise over $1.2 billion. Even after spending nearly a billion on employee engagement, a study reveals that around 85% of employees are still disengaged.  

Organizations do not focus much on internal issues like employee satisfaction as much as they do on customer happiness and customer retention rate. According to Gallup, employee disengagement costs around $350 billion to the US economy. In that, the company bears $2,246 per disengaged employee. That’s quite a hefty price, and increased employee turnover can further add on to the expenses through the termination and hiring costs. Therefore, it is high time for companies to rethink their employee engagement strategies. Refrain from treating employee engagement plans as luxury as it has become a necessity and think of it as a part of business strategy.

How do we engage the Employees and increase the employee retention rate? 

Employees who feel that their voices are heard by the management would feel 4.6 times more empowered and perform well. 90% of employees say that they stay longer at a company where the top management takes action on their feedback. Even IBM researchers reveal that follow-up with meaningful actions has a great positive impact on the employees. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to take appropriate actions to know the concerns of employees. Employees in your organization might feel that there are no growth opportunities and development. How can you learn about it without them telling you directly? That is where employee surveys come to your rescue. If you do a proper follow-up and address the concerns bothering the employees, the engagement rate would skyrocket. 

How Does the Data from Employee surveys help you? 

The data from employee surveys give you the results that would help you to identify the areas for improvement. But that doesn’t give you the accurate data as many a times employees are not honest in delivering feedback and they would fill in the form as it is mandatory. As a result, the data is misleading. HR cannot plan strategies based on the reports, and even if they do, there would be no greater impact. But still, employee surveys are one of the most efficient tools to learn the thoughts of the employees and to gain insights on how the organization operates and the employee sentiments on the company. 

How to improve employee surveys? 

Employee surveys can be very helpful when the sentiment analysis technology powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is added to it to gain qualitative insights. Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyses the language in the answers to the open-ended questions and give actionable insights on the survey by an employee that can be later on aligned with the business outcomes and objective by making an impactful move on it. Organizational-level sentiment analysis report can help HR identify the domains that are disengaged and come up with plans for them. Also, the analytics help HR identify various other problems in the organization. The surveys will not be meaningless anymore. The neutral survey responses by employees can be eliminated for better analysis and data-driven strategic decisions.  

When the sentiment analysis technology powered surveys are conducted, the following steps should be followed to get useful results. 

1. Employees are dissatisfied with management that steal their precious work hours by asking them to fill a survey form that would take around half an hour. Therefore, it is always better to have quick short surveys to extract authentic answers from the employees. 

2. Do not conduct surveys on regular topics. Conduct a survey when you are planning to bring in a new policy, event, or some major organizational change. Surveys would help to learn the thoughts of employees on that particular event. 

3. As was mentioned earlier, taking action on the surveys is what builds real trust and loyalty between employers and employees. After taking the measures, make sure to let your employees know what the management has done on the survey results. 

4. Surveys should be anonymous and confidential. There is no compromise on that. If the managers learn the owners of the answers and hold it against them, then the survey process would become an utter failure. 

How does Sentiment Analysis technology help with Continuous Feedback? 

NLP analyses the language in the feedback and reports the sentiment of the language. It encourages managers to use a more positive language to convey their comments on the work of an employee. The technology prompts the manager to rectify the language if it is in a direct hit negative language. In 360 degree feedback, the technology helps more in identifying future leaders and nurturing them. The employees will be satisfied as there would not be too many disruptions in the workflow. HR can use the feedback data to provide training plans and help employees and managers improve on their strengths and work on their weaknesses.  

Once, the technology is implemented in your survey and feedback processes, your company would attract more high performers and become a smarter workplace for a smarter workforce.  

Stay safe and keep your employees engaged.