As command-and-control organisational structures fade away, an open conversation between the workforce and leadership is crucial - and valuable. 

For decades already, employee surveys have enabled this conversation. But getting to the nitty-gritty of what employees are trying to communicate isn’t always straight-forward. Sarah Johnson, Vice President at Perceptyx - an employee survey and people analytics company, explains:

“You can’t read comments like a novel and come away with any understanding. […] The challenge is you are faced with literally millions of words in multiple different languages. And how do you make sense out of it? To just read the comments is not going to give you a tenth of the insight you could pull out of it.”

How can organisations derive more meaningful insight from survey responses, without sifting through tens of thousands of comments?

In the last few years, the explosion of data is mostly unstructured data: text, images, audio, video. Comments, or open responses in a survey, are also a form of unstructured text data.  For organisations to unlock insight from surveys they have to convert unstructured, qualitative data into quantitative structured data. This is known as text analytics.

In other words (the words of Andrew Marritt, in fact), text analytics is the application of algorithms to process text information. Once this is achieved, all sorts of statistical or machine learning analysis can be applied to derive meaningful insights from text data.

Text analytics gives organisations the opportunity to tap into a wealth of rich data and turn around insights quickly.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, Robobank used text analytics and employee listening to gather feedback on how employees valued the response of the organisation to the crisis and understand how the organisation could support employees even better. Within 24 hours, feedback was converted into insights and advice for crisis teams to design new interventions. Three months into lockdown, Robobank are using open text analysis to understand what aspects of the current working situation employees appreciate, in order to ascertain what changes should be kept in the future. (Read more about Robobank’s use of continuous listening here.)

We spoke to Andrew Marritt , CEO of OrganizationView, about how text analytics can be used to not only understand employee sentiment, but also drive real business impact. He explained to us what happens “when a business turns to 30,000 people in their stores and asks: “What can we do to improve customer experience in the stores?”” With text analytics, the answer is - “turn those answers around in ten days from the original question. That’s using HR and employee data to make real business impact. That might have taken a management consultancy three months to do.”

Check out the video of his interview below as well as the transcript from our discussion. For more videos on the future of HR, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

For more information on text analytics, how to use text analytics on your HR data and the key concepts and techniques to use in people analytics projects,  take a look at our online People Analytics certifications.

myHRfuture: What are some of the developments happening in the Employee Voice space?

Andrew Marritt: We were able to ask "can we solve this very particular problem?" which is can we understand what people are saying to the answer to a particular question? and we've got to a level now that not only can we outperform a human market researcher in that area but because we're so good, we're able to say to clients that you don't need to ask 60 survey questions, you can ask one or two open questions and learn from that.

Interested in learning more about People Analytics? Take a look at our online People Analytics certifications on myHRfuture

myHRfuture: What are your thoughts on sentiment analysis, and does it really work?

Andrew Marritt: Sentiment analysis is not good enough to identify who in your organisation is unhappy, however, it is good enough to look at overall trends in a large organisation, but I still feel in most employee surveys you can ask a better question by using a closed question. What is important though is to look at the question and determine what are people talking about? If I think about a Chief Executive looking at every single comment, our goal is really be able to say here's one side, let's summarise that. Not just to say they're talking about leadership or management but what are they saying about leadership and management? And which of the 20 statements do you really have to read because they're complete outliers and we think they help provide the most value.

myHRfuture: What excites you most about People Analytics at the moment?

Andrew Marritt: I think it's vital for HR, that they get involved in people analytics. I think it's very important that those conversations go to the business that they partner very well with the business and it always excites me to solve business problems. Even when we're doing Employee Voice it's not so much about engagement type questions but when a business turns around and says to 30,000 people in the stores: "What can we do to improve customer experience in the stores?" and we’re able to summarise that information and turn those answers around in ten days from the original question. That's using HR and the employee data to make real business impact, and that might have taken a management consultancy three months to do.

myHRfuture: What is your biggest worry about the future of People Analytics?

Andrew Marritt: My biggest worry is the ability to get business interpreters in HR who have a good enough understanding of the business and can then look at the workforce implications of that. Within HR we've struggled for 10, 15, 20 years to bring in people who really understand the business and can ‘talk business’ rather than just HR, and this applies to analytics just as much as it applies to being a generalist.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Bailie is the Managing Director of myHRfuture.com and an advisor and consultant for start-ups focused on HR technology and People Analytics, including Adepto, Worklytics and CognitionX. In his previous role as the Senior Director of People Planning, Analytics and Tools at Cisco Systems, he was responsible for delivering the tools and insights to enable and transform the planning, attraction and management of talent across the organisation globally. Ian is passionate about HR technology and analytics and how to use both to transform the employee experience and prepare companies for the Future of Work.