It’s a simple fact that employees do their best work when they’re satisfied with their jobs. For some, it’s doing work they enjoy. For others, it’s about feeling like a valuable and appreciated member of the team.
Of course, to provide employee satisfaction, you need to understand your people. What they want out of their work, as well as the kinds of stressors and obstacles they’re dealing with. That’s where employee sentiment analysis comes in.
As the name suggests, “employee sentiment” is a catch-all term for what your employees think. Their opinions and feelings on a wide range of issues. Understanding these things helps business leaders and managers engage more actively with the needs of their staff.
The most immediate sentiment concerns are those relating to the employee experience. For example, knowing your customer support staff need better call centre phone systems to do their jobs.
Sentiment covers everything, from commutes and work culture to advancement opportunities and the annual Christmas party. It also includes external issues which can still reflect on you as an employer. For instance, some employees might want the company to reduce its carbon footprint.
Sentiment vs engagement
Employee sentiment and engagement are often confused with one another. This is because they’re strongly connected as concepts, but with key distinctions.
Employee engagement is a person’s level of attachment and commitment to their role, their employer and their colleagues. As such, it directly influences their levels of focus and sense of personal stake in the success of the business.
In other words, if engagement is a measure of overall enthusiasm, then sentiment is more about their underlying feelings. The reasons why someone may or may not feel engaged at work. Maybe they hate their co-workers, or perhaps they’re just overburdened by excessive workloads.
The benefits of leveraging sentiment data
With all this talk of employee sentiment analysis, you probably want to know what you stand to gain. The return on investment, to put it bluntly.
For one thing, increased employee engagement. By understanding how you think and feel, you address actual issues and concerns, rather than making broad, clumsy attempts to boost morale. Goodbye pizza parties, hello hybrid work setups and manageable goal-setting.
A key benefit of sentiment analysis is how it combines quantitative data with qualitative insights. This is really helpful when you’re dealing with high volumes of new hires. Creating sentiment metrics allows you to track the strength and prevalence of employee opinions and demands.
Taking advantage of this data benefits your business in the following ways:
Boosting discretionary effort due to increased engagement.
Giving employees a voice.
Lowering rates of staff attrition.
The tools and techniques of employee sentiment analysis
It’s one thing to outline why you should engage with employee sentiment analysis, but another entirely to help you get started. Fortunately, it’s less complicated than it sounds, especially in this day and age.
Employee sentiment analysis algorithms
Lately, we’re seeing AI take on all sorts of roles, from auto transcription software to complex IoT personal assistants. One of its most enduring applications, however, is in sifting through masses of data for actionable insights.
There are a few different algorithms on the market for studying employee sentiment. Typically, these applications compile your sentiment data into bespoke reports highlighting key trends that human eyes can easily miss. With rich enough data, they can even predict when your people are at risk of quitting.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) can evaluate tone and infer meaning from written employee responses to provide more analytical nuance.
Sentiment scoring assigns a value to text indicating positivity, neutrality or negativity, as well as overall intensity.
Aggregate data accumulates the overall impressions of all your data sources, with the ability to break results down by specific topics or data cross-sections.
Of course, even having the best AI in the world won’t mean much if you don’t have data to feed it. So, let’s look at some options for sentiment data collection.
Polls and surveys
Even if you’ve never used an AI-driven sentiment analysis tool before, you’ve probably surveyed your people in one form or another.
Traditional employee surveys typically use a large number of questions to explore engagement-related issues. On the plus side, these questions provide a large amount of data to feed into your HR software or sentiment analysis tool of choice. The downside is that these surveys are unwieldy and only offer a snapshot of engagement and sentiment.
There are also countless other options for surveying your people. Quick polls and pulse surveys to gather employee insights on key issues. What people think of a potential office redesign, for example, or how many people are interested in working from home.
A benefit most poll and survey tools share is that they tend to be conducted anonymously. In theory, this means employees can feel free to be honest without fear of reprisal.
Employee/manager check-ins
Of course, most polls and surveys aren’t intended to be a regular thing. On top of that, they mainly serve to aggregate sentiment into an overall impression. But what about regular feedback and individual concerns?
These things are why a regular employee/manager check-in can be useful for understanding employee sentiment during performance management. These check-ins use small, focused question sets customized on an individual level.
An employee submits the check-in, and their manager reviews it. This means that, unlike surveys and polls, a check-in can’t be conducted anonymously.
Whether it’s weekly, monthly, or anything in between, checking in bridges the gap between major performance reviews. As such, this offers a real-time stream of data which is incredibly valuable for sentiment analysis.
Exit interviews
When someone leaves your organization, it’s often worth trying to secure an exit interview. For one thing, it’s a final opportunity to benefit your brand by parting on amicable terms. More importantly, though, it’s a chance to learn what went wrong.
People leave roles for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes, it’s their choice, while for others, not so much. But there are always underlying reasons. Did they find a better position somewhere else, or was it because of your management style or the corporate culture?
With current employees, there’s often the pressure to put on a smile. This may lead to an overly optimistic spin on their feedback. In theory, exit interviewees don’t have this issue because you’re not their boss anymore.
Just make sure to guarantee their reference ahead of the interview, so they don’t feel like you’re holding it hostage.
Key survey topics
Regardless of which data collection methods you use, you’ll need to consider your areas of focus. Due to the nature of employee sentiment analysis, there are practically countless topics you might cover. That’s why we’ve done our best to round them up into a few general categories.
Engagement and wellbeing
We’ve talked a little about the relationship between engagement and sentiment. Knowing the levels of enthusiasm and commitment in your organization is an essential first step in getting to grips with what your people think and feel. If half your staff struggle with boredom at work, it’s a clear sign something has to change.
Then there’s wellbeing, which is just as vital. This means asking questions about the rates of stress and burnout in your organization, as well as mental health.
Training and support quality
How much training and support a person receives can significantly affect their perceptions of their employer, as well as their confidence in their own abilities. Yet, even in the same industry, standards for these things can vary wildly.
Asking employees about these things directly is often the best way of identifying skills gaps and general support needs in your organization.
Attitudes towards workplace policy
It’s important to find out what your people think about the various rules and regulations of working life. How do they feel about the policy for booking vacation time, or the system for filing project reports?
Beyond evaluating existing policies, these questions can test the waters for new policies. For example, you might gauge interest in remote work before implementing the option.
Opinions of workplace culture
The Great Resignation a few years ago highlighted the deep dissatisfaction shared by many employees. It’s important to know how employees feel about your company culture. Are they thriving, or is it toxic?
It’s here you’ll dive into key issues like absenteeism and transparency, as well as wellbeing concerns like burnout. Do people feel like they can take time off, or is overtime running rampant?
Employer perceptions and social issues
With the digital revolution, people have never been more tuned into what’s going on. It’s also never been easier to share what you think of your employer.
What your employees think of the business can influence perceptions of your brand. If they think you’re a toxic employer, it’ll start to affect what the public thinks, too.
On top of that, most people want to feel like they work for “the good guy.” That’s why it’s important to be aware of the social issues that matter to your employees. If you have a lot of environmentally conscientious staff, rolling out greener policies is a win/win.
Employee sentiment analysis is a path to richer insights
We can spend all day listing the RoIs of sentiment analysis, but what it really comes down to is giving employees a voice.
Employee sentiment analysis tools help to turn masses of information from different sources into a detailed tapestry. Just make sure you put the work in collecting rich, meaningful data.
As long as you use those insights to create a supportive and more engaging workplace for everybody, your employees should be more than happy to add their voices to the mix.
