Voice of the Employee Is a Critical Way for a Company to Gauge Staff Morale
Traditionally, organizations have used large-scale, usually annual employee surveys to gauge the morale of their staffs and to understand their concerns about specific issues such as:
- Sentiment: positive
- Sentiment predicate: good
- Entity: promotion opportunities
- Sentiment: negative
- Sentiment predicate: not competitive
- Entity: compensation
The two sentiments expressed by the employee have been identified, normalized, and transformed into structured data, which can then be quantified and aggregated over a very large set of such comments.
Companies can not only track sentiment about standard HR topics such as compensation and growth opportunities, but also detect new issues (e.g., complaints about some new hazardous work conditions) and address them before they become a bigger problem. Companies can also gauge and track reactions to corporate policies and possibly adjust those policies or inform future ones.
One popular way of displaying sentiment data is via a dashboard which allows tracking of sentiments and emerging themes over time. This gives a good view of the different aspects of Voice of the Employee.
Summary
Sentiment Analysis is an important technology for improving a company’s understanding of its work force and what the concerns, worries, satisfactions, and dissatisfactions it has. It can also measure the attitude toward specific policies and detect emerging issues. Moreover, it can give insight into deeper issues such as the level of employee engagement in their jobs, which is critical to employee retention and ultimately company’s success.
