The Pattern: For years and years, reviewing the results of a survey within your organization has probably followed a predictable pattern.
1. Trying to understand high level, organizational trends that are occurring across your business
2. Isolating patterns of results that suggest certain sections of the business or groups of employees may need targeted help.
3. Using the collected responses and patterns to make business decisions.
This is a great approach, and a framework we have designed both our entire platform and survey systems around.
The Problem? You and your team simply lack the bandwidth to read through and try to make sense of a critical, actionable data-layer - open-ended feedback and free-format comments.
Unsurprisingly, employees care deeply about the quality of their experiences within the workplace and have spent some time thinking about how it could be better. When all of those issues and ideas are shared in the context of open-ended feedback within a large survey, it’s like being in the middle of a networking event and trying to attend to every conversation at once— impossible at worst, and extremely draining at best.
However, if you or your team has gone through the exercise of reviewing everything that employees have shared, you quickly realize how much you are leaving on the table if you make business decisions using only the results of structured, close-ended survey questions.
The Solution: AI Powered Thematic and Sentiment Analysis
Going forward you and your team never have to miss out on the important information communicated in open-ended feedback because you lack the bandwidth to read through every response, create categories and themes, and run statistical analysis in hopes of uncovering accurate insights. Using advanced text analysis algorithms, like those that Mindset offers on our Engage platform, you can quickly categorize comments based on topics or themes to understand how positively or negatively participants feel about those themes— at every level of your business.
As an example, in your responses you may uncover a theme around your current Benefits offerings. In addition to any typical survey questions, AI Powered Thematic and Sentiment Analysis can quickly tell you how your employees really feel about your benefits offerings, automatically. You don’t need to export data or read every single comment to try to make sense of hundreds or thousands of varied text responses.
Check out how we used this technology to understand the biggest challenges to work during Covid-19
This means that your team can quickly review the things that employees were focused on in their comments, and additionally, see what those themes look like for every single manager and/or business unit within your organization. By transforming open-ended feedback into a series of themes, you and your organizational managers and leaders can now understand what employees are saying collectively while responding to the specific needs raised in their carefully considered comments.
Bottom Line: Text analytics helps make the personal, practical, and the overwhelming, actionable.
While properly designed surveys are mission-critical to making data-driven business decisions, new data processing techniques and technologies let you quickly get at additional data-layers that have not been easy to utilize. We all sense the value of open-ended feedback. With hundreds or many thousands of responses, it’s simply overwhelming to figure out how to extract the data and analyze it. AI Powered Thematic and Sentiment Analysis makes it simple, immediate, and automatic. There is no excuse not to use it.