Are your employees engaged?

The HR tech space is innovating a plethora of ways to keep the workforce engaged, which might cost a few billion if not done the right way. But if the bull’s eye is hit, then the productivity and performance of the employees would go through the roof. This is not an exaggeration but a fact. According to a report by Gallup, employee disengagement costs around $350 billion every year to the US economy.

And, that costs nearly $2,246 per disengaged employee to a US employer.

According to FastTrack 360, 71% of executives say that employee engagement is the most significant factor that contributes to the success of their company.

Coming back to the question, how HR tech space has been innovating the employee engagement field?

Continuous check-ins, 360 degree feedback, rewards and recognition, and goal-setting, which are conducted digitally to streamline the performance management system, also engage the modern workforce, who are tech-savvy and give more importance to the culture.

But later on, companies realized that they will have to go one step ahead by valuing the voice of the workforce even when they do not say it in 360 degree feedback.

This is where Sentiment Analysis comes into the picture to increase engagement and create a happy workplace by resolving concerns, if there were any, in an amicable way.

Table of Contents 

• What is Sentiment Analysis?
• Key Benefits of the Sentiment Analysis Technology
  • 1. Enhanced Employee Experience 
    2. Strong Leadership 
    3. Increased Productivity 
    4. Lowered Employee Turnover Rate
• Conclusion
  

What is Sentiment Analysis? 

The companies use the Artificial-Intelligence powered sentiment analysis technology to analyze the sentiments of the social media users through their comments on a particular brand. So, that helps in understanding how the customers, prospects, and other consumers perceive a brand.

Similarly, employees are the pillars of a brand, who also increase the brand’s visibility in the talent market through word of mouth and referrals. Then, to create a happy workplace, the management has to identify the concerns of the employee by analyzing the information across various communication channels such as email, continuous feedback, 360 degree feedback, surveys, etc.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) identifies the sentiments in the scattered information across various channels as positive, neutral, and negative, and the AI and ML structure the raw data into actionable insights. The management, from the structured data, can easily spot where things are great and which departments are going through a rough patch.

 
Armen Berjikly, senior director of growth strategy at Weston, Fla.-based Ultimate Software, says, “There’s far more going on behind what can be learned from traditional quantitative metrics, and it’s usually going on in the realm of ‘what are people feeling?’ and ‘why are they feeling that way?’ The goal of sentiment analysis technology is to have a machine try to understand what someone feels and why they feel that way.”

Synergita has collected the data of the percentage of users in each department, age group, and tenure, who reflect positive, neutral, negative sentiments in their messages.

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Positive does not mean ‘only positive things to tell about’ but ‘constructive feedback.’ Negative is complete criticism from which the employees can learn nothing and just feel discouraged. Neutral is the absence of sentiment.

Key Benefits of the Sentiment Analysis Technology

Enhanced Employee Experience

When the data from sentiment analysis is presented before the HR department, if the personnel see too many negative sentiments from one department or business unit, they know that the employees are bothered with something in particular. In those cases, an employee engagement survey would help to find out the cause. The employees would feel engaged and stay loyal to the company as they know that the company cherishes them.

Strong Leadership 

And, sentiment analysis helps a company in strengthening the leadership skills of its employees. Providing constructive feedback is an indicator of strong leadership. When the technology displays the data as ‘negative sentiment in too many comments of a particular employee.’ HR can approach the person and identify the reason. Besides, they can also recommend training programs based on the structured data.

Higher Productivity 

Once the obstacles in the way of the employees have been removed, the workforce can focus more on their priority tasks and increase the overall productivity of the organization. Continuous check-ins, peer-to-peer feedback, recognition programs, training plans, and sentiment analysis should work hand in hand to create an engaged workplace for the employees. To be effective, the comrades should stay together.

Lower Employee Turnover Rate 

The millennial workforce cares more about the relationships they build with the leaders of the company. If their voices are heard and acted upon, is there even a reason for them to leave other than the compensation part? But employees most of the time stay for people, culture, and employee-centric management and try to grow along with the company. The employee engagement platform with sentiment analysis technology will create such a greater workforce and reduce the employee turnover rate.

Conclusion 

Sentiment analysis technology has been around for a while but it was mainly leveraged to enhance the customer experience. The idea of combining the sentiment analysis technology with the employee engagement platform was born later when the HR tech companies want to help organizations in finding the concerns of employees that they could not identify during feedback sessions.

Having sentiment analysis solutions for your employee engagement platform can increase the performance of the employees and build an open and robust culture.