Episode 18: How to Use Employee Surveys to Create Strategic Value (Interview with Sarah Johnson, VP at Perceptyx)
We increasingly expect a similar experience at work as that we enjoy as consumers. This coupled with advances in technology and the growth of people analytics has seen a surge of growth and innovation in the field of employee experience and surveys. With growth comes noise.
How often should I survey my workforce? Is it time to ditch the annual survey? What about survey fatigue? How do I combine surveys with other data and analytics? These are just some of the areas I cover with today's guest on the podcast, Sarah Johnson, Vice President of Enterprise Surveys and Workforce Analytics at Perceptyx.
Sarah is an IO psychologist who has been in the survey research space for 35 years and combines her wealth of experience with an exciting vision for the future.
You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation, Sarah and I discuss:
Why survey research is the most strategic thing HR can do
We talk about the huge shift in how companies are approaching surveys, incorporating analytics and identifying actions to drive the employee experience
We look at the link between employee experience, customer experience and business outcomes
Sarah provides examples of the work Perceptyx has delivered to its client base which includes the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook
We explore why text is the final frontier for surveys
We look into the crystal ball like we do with all our guests and ponder what the role of HR will be in 2025
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in employee experience the role of people analytics and the insights and outcomes that can be generated through the intelligent use of surveys.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Perceptyx to learn more, visit perceptyx.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome Sarah Johnson who is the Vice President of Enterprise Surveys and Analytics at Perceptyx to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Thank you for being on the show Sarah.
Sarah Johnson: Thank you for having me David happy to be here.
David Green: Great to have you here, you've come all the from the US especially to be on the show... Not quite but anyway... Sarah, can you please provide listeners with a quick introduction to you and your background and also your vision when it comes to Employee Surveys and Workforce Analytics?
Sarah Johnson: So I started my experience in the survey world back, gosh, almost 35 years ago. I worked at IBM and I was part of a group that was called Strategic Personnel Studies which dates me a little bit but the Strategic part is important because in that early role with IBM, I learned the value of surveys as a tool for human resources to be truly strategic partners to the business.
So I was at IBM for about 10 years leading their Global survey practice went over to Eastman Kodak where I did the same and for about the last 15 years I've been an external consultant initially with CEB the Corporate Executive Board and about five years with Perceptyx and at different points in my career I've had the opportunity to maybe segway into leadership development or succession planning or compensation. But at every one of those decision points, I chose to stay in survey research because I truly feel it is the most strategic thing that a human resources professional can do.
So I've always found value in the work. It's a wonderful opportunity to talk with senior leaders. My background is in industrial organisational psychology.
David Green: Why do you believe it's the most strategic thing in HR?
Sarah Johnson: Because when you think about it, there are a lot of programs human resources organisation's run. Yeah, but very few of those programs cover every single employee in the organisation, every single business unit, every single region of the world if it's a global company. It is the opportunity for an HR professional to be in front of every single leader within the organisation. Sharing a message about people. And I can't think of any other program or policy in human resources that gets that access to senior leaders. And if you think about the content of the survey strategically, it's a wonderful opportunity to influence senior leaders and influence the direction of the company. And so to me that's what I've always strived to do in my career is to really be the influencer to shift the thinking of senior leaders to help them see something that they hadn't noticed before, give them an appreciation about people that they may not have had before.
David Green: That's great and during those 35 years. You must have seen a lot of change in how surveys are designed, delivered and hopefully actioned upon. It would be great to hear some of those highlights along that journey.
Sarah Johnson: Well I grew up in the world of paper surveys. I mean, we would publish a very lengthy booklet that had all of the bubbles that you would fill in, we had to build an organisation hierarchy that an individual had to code themselves into, it would be sent out, it would come back, it would be scanned which we thought was tremendously exciting to visual to optically scan things and then it would take time to work with the data. The introduction of Technology into the process has been a game changer for many organisations, but I think it provides us an even better opportunity to not just do the process more rapidly but it gives us so much more flexibility in how we use the data and how we link in other data sets. But beyond the technology changes, there has been an enormous change in how we think about the role of employees. I mean when I started my career it was all about job satisfaction... Are you happy here? Is the company meeting your needs? And it has evolved now to engagement. It has evolved to employer of choice. It's evolved to really looking at the entire employee experience which I think provides us with a greater opportunity to do more strategic work for organisations.
David Green: Building on some of that and probably relating to your point about it being the most strategic thing that HR could do. Why do you believe survey research and the whole topic of employee experience is increasing in importance?
Sarah Johnson: It's something that we've always talked about as human resources professionals, but I don't know that we've always fully taken advantage of the opportunity. To understand everything there is and how it relates to the success of the business. And so now with analytics we have a better opportunity to tie all of those elements together, not only the employee experience but how it relates to attrition, how it relates to business process effectiveness, how it relates to customer satisfaction.
So I think if we are thoughtful about the elements of that work experience, we measure not just engagement, but we understand what it's like to be an employee in this company. What are the barriers to success that employees experience? And what can we as a leadership team or a business do to break down those barriers? To not only help employees better engage with the company, but maybe even more importantly help the organisation be successful.
I get frustrated with organisations who are just so laser focused on engagement. But they can't see the trees in the rest of the forest. You really have to look at the big picture. And I think that's what we are trying, we are doing more and more of these days is to look at the big picture not just the employee... The employee sense of engagement with the organisation.
David Green: As you said that whole experience across the whole journey really.
Sarah Johnson: Right.
David Green: And I guess it's something that employees are demanding or not just employees, but the workforce is demanding more as well.
Sarah Johnson: Well, how do you mean?
David Green: Well with the...You want similar experience at work as you get as a consumer and in order to be able to deliver that you need to understand the employee much better than maybe we have in the past.
Sarah Johnson: Well, you know as humans, I mean we want to feel as though the things that we do have meaning. We don't just want to come in knock off eight hours and then go home and do something else. We want that time to feel as though we've accomplished something to help us feel as though we've grown somehow to affiliate with other people.
I mean, we as humans we are social animals. We want to know that what we do has meaning we want to be able to do it with smart people. We want to be trusted. We want to be sought after for our advice. So I think employees have always wanted that, they may be a little bit more vocal about it. But I think organisations are now more than ever paying attention to the human element, as you think about organisation productivity and success.
David Green: And much of that responsibility is falling on HR and I agree. The opportunity here is enormous and there are companies that are really harnessing the technology and the mindset to actually really drive a better employee experience and reaping the benefits from a business perspective. But I think you probably agree with me, progress has been quite slow.
Maybe not, and I think HR functions do seem and we experience in our work here. We've seen that HR functions seemed overwhelmed by data and analytics. How can HR use surveys to make some inroads and improve their confidence with data?
Sarah Johnson: Well, you know to your point about organisations and trying to do different things to engage employees.
I think if you are working without data you are operating as an HR organisation on hunches, on what we think, what we see other companies doing, therefore it must work in our environment. And so I see a lot of organisations implementing programs or policies or practices that really don't do anything. They seem to treat the symptoms, but they don't treat the underlying cause of what are some of the challenges with employees.
And so if we are armed with facts and data, then we are not making policy decisions, we are not implementing programs based on hunches or what we think is going to happen. We're basing it on on data what we know will work with our organisation, which means that we can be more confident that what we implement will make a difference within the organisation.
We can go to leadership with a strong business case that talks about why this needs to be implemented with some projections of how it's going to play out in the organisation. Too many companies are focused on... Right before organisation surveys, there's still a lot of donuts and pizza that gets shared within office environments. That's not what engages people. It's much bigger and much deeper than that and with analytics we can get to what those underlying causes are
David Green: And of course with survey data one of the challenges or barriers to organisations really embracing analytics in HR is they say the quality of their data, whereas the survey data is essentially a good place to start.
Sarah Johnson: It is. It's a great place to start if you think strategically about what it is we need to understand about the organisation. I mean if we're just asking a handful of questions that don't really reflect what's important in the organisation. The data aren't going to help us much. But if you think clearly about what is the strategy of the organisation? What are we trying to accomplish? What are the challenges that stand in our way of being a successful business? And what are the people elements of that? Then I think we can design survey content that collects a lot of the data that will then fuel the analytics and then when we combine that with HRIS information as well as business performance metrics, you put together a very very powerful database that can be the engine of HR analytics. And so, you know, a lot of organisations come to us really interested in doing HR analytics. I think that's probably the number one objective of most HR organisations is to do analytics, but they're unclear how to start and our message at Perceptyx is always you already have a start and maybe you don't see it. But your survey data can go a long way to help you do analytics and it's kind of an easy jumping off point for a lot of organisations to start to use their survey data much more analytically to tell a story about people within the organisation.
David Green: So if you were giving advice to company that really wanted to do this.
Where could they start with this? And I think you've hinted at it in terms of understanding the business challenges that they could potentially...
Sarah Johnson: I think the best place to start is to figure out what problem can you solve for the senior leaders?
So one thing that we always encourage our clients to do before they Implement a survey is to do a series of interviews with their senior leadership team. What are the issues that are keeping them up at night? What are the challenges that they're facing? What do they wish they knew about people that would enable them to make good data-based decisions about those people?
And so once you've had those conversations you do a couple of things. One, we get information that enables us to design the survey content strategically, but it also serves I think an important teaching opportunity for senior leaders like, did you know that I could predict attrition of key talent through the employee survey data? And a lot of leaders will... what, I didn't know I thought the survey was just about reporting engagement. Are you saying that we can do more than that?
So it's a great opportunity to understand what it is you want to know but also to open up the minds and then once you've decided what that content would be you develop those questions. There's really no end to the analytics that you can do. So it's an easy way for organisations to get started.
You don't need a data scientist. You don't need a statistician. You just need a well-designed survey and some good analytics tools on the back end to help you out.
David Green: And I really like the point you made about a good way to sort of nudge and educate senior leaders as well about the potential power of what it can help predict and help you solve as well.
Sarah Johnson: Exactly. And as HR professionals ever since I started my career, we've always said we want to be a strategic partner to the business. And this is how you do it, you come to the table with facts and data and you educate them about what it is that that the facts and data about people can do to drive the success of the organisation.
We've got to show leaders what it is that we can do as a function.
David Green: So certainly, there's a lot of change going on in the engagement and the wider employee experience space and a number of articles written shall we say around how it's throwing away traditional methods.
I hear lots of things about ditch the annual survey and you need to survey employees every day. I'd love to hear your thoughts about some of those, miss-hypes, misnomers, whatever you want to call them.
Just get your opinion on the really.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. Technology has been a wonderful thing. Technology has transformed the way we collect information on a lot of things and so just because we can do something, I would say technically, doesn't mean we should do something. So one of the myths as you put it, a lot of the noise in the survey space is around this notion of the annual survey is dead. It is a dinosaur. It's too slow. It's too cumbersome. It's too difficult. By the time organisation's get the data the world has changed and it's completely irrelevant.
And I would say we don't find that to be the case at all. The vast majority of our clients, 80 plus percentage, still do an annual census survey and these are companies like Google and then Microsoft and Apple and Citi and American Express.
These are leading organisations with leading HR thinkers. Why do they do a census survey? Well, if you get back to what we're talking about with analytics. There's really nothing like an annual survey to give you a database that is wide and deep. It covers every employee in the company, every business unit, every country.
And so if you plan that data, if you plan that service strategically you can come back to that database and query it time after time after time to do different surveys or different analyses, but the other thing is there's no reason today with the technology that we have for that survey to be slow.
We can turn around survey reports in 48 hours. There's no reason why it should take six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks. It's all a matter of how you use it in the organisation. Now, is a census survey right for every company? Well no, our belief is that there is no one-size-fits-all in the survey space. While a census survey may work for some organisations, other organisations may choose to survey a twice a year if that works for them, it's fine.
We have a client that surveys in addition to their census survey. They do a sample survey every day of the week, five days a week 1,500 employees are randomly sampled with a small set of strategically focused questions. It works for them. That flow of data, the constant drip of data would bring other organisations to their knees. So there is no one recipe that works for every organisation.
The organisation has to think about what are our data needs? What is the ability of our users to consume that data? And what are we going to do with it? A lot of companies talk about well, we don't want to survey too frequently because we're worried about survey fatigue. Honestly, I don't think there is such a thing as survey fatigue.
I think the fatigue comes in when as an organisation we're constantly asking for your opinion and you never see anything come of it. If I feel as though as an employee, you're going to take action with my input. I'll answer questions all day long. But if I answer your questions and they never come back to me with here's what we heard or here's what we've done.
Why should I keep asking your questions? The fatigue sets in when we ask for input and we don't act on it.
David Green: Inaction rather than frequency
Sarah Johnson: Right. It becomes a one-way conversation. I'm telling you what I think and you just kind of nod your head and nothing ever happens as a result of that. That's what employees are tired of.
David Green: And I guess when it comes to the frequency again, it's also around timing.
So if there's a major initiative going on in an organisation such as a transformation or a new CEO or a re-org or something like that then again, that's a great point to bring the surveys in to find out what's happening.
Sarah Johnson: It is a great point and I'm glad you said that. A lot of organisations will come to us and say well, we just restructured, we've had a downsizing we've had to change our marketplace, we've been acquired. This is probably not a good time to do a survey because the results we get won't reflect what's the usual around here? And what I always say is no, what you're experiencing today is now your usual.
This is a great opportunity to collect that information to help employees understand or to help you understand what employees need now. What do they need to hear from you? What are they experiencing that is creating that uncertainty so that you know how to help the organisation through this difficult time to ultimately succeed?
The best time to do a survey is whenever there is meaningful change within the organisation.
David Green: Yeah, and then you can compare that to when things are business as usual if there is such a thing and then I guess what that can do is a) you can actually solve the problems there and then and b) you learn from that the next time you maybe put a major re-org in place.
I think you're exactly right. It gives us a benchmark to say when these changes happen, this was the impact on the organisation. And what a lot of organisations realise is even when they go through a very difficult time, not everything in the survey shifts downward necessarily. The issues may be very specific to an employee base, we want to understand the future better, we feel great about the work that we do, we love the people that we work with. My day-to-day is fine. It's helped me understand the direction in which we're headed and give me confidence that you all in senior leadership know what you're doing and you're going to get us there.
I guess one more point around the frequency side of things particularly if you're regularly asking people who are dealing with customers questions on a regular basis. You can use some of that information to actually improve the customer experience and business metrics.
Sarah Johnson: Exactly and I don't want to give the impression that the only way you should survey is to do an annual census survey.
It's not.
David Green: Yeah, that came across very well.
Sarah Johnson: Good. Because what we find is a lot of organisations that we work with do a census survey and then they supplement that with onboarding surveys which run continuously or exit surveys which run continuously or as you just said, a pulse survey that is very specific to a topic or very specific to a location. And you brought up a great point, which is the ability to compare the customer experience to the customer facing employee experience and we did that with a client a few years ago. They operate a number of call centres and they collect vast amounts of customer call centre data and after a customer has called in they were then given a survey to explain why did you call in? How long did you wait? All of that kind of information. We collected companion data on the employee side and we were able to tie almost to the transaction, those pieces together to get a sense of what were the barriers on the employee side to solving the customer's problems. And what that identified in this particular company is the ability of that individual to make an in the moment decision that I need to offer a concession. I need to offer a one month... A credit, a $50, or I need to offer one month of free service for something that the company offers but but to give them those decision rights really made all the difference for that particular organisation.
David Green: That's great. So moving on to the work you're doing with Perceptyx, you've given a snapshot of it there and I know Perceptyx has been around since 2003.
It's been in this space for a while
Sarah Johnson: We're 16 now, we're old enough to drive in the States. We're excited about that.
David Green: So fully armed with your license. What is Perceptyx's approach to employee surveys and Workforce analytics? And how do you help customers capitalise on some of the opportunities that we have spoken about?
Sarah Johnson: So our view is that organisations need engaged employees to be successful. But in order for an employee to engage, they need to see themselves as successful within that company. So it's not enough for the company to be successful and we've seen lots of examples of successful companies that have very disengaged employees.
Well, what's the problem? Well the employee can't see themselves as successful in the company. So what does that mean? Well, that could mean that I want to work with smart people. I want to be involved in decisions. I want to earn a living wage. I want to feel as though the company is investing in my growth and development.
And so what we do is we help employees... we help organisations understand not only engagement but what are the barriers to engagement and consequently the barriers to organisation success. It's not just about engagement. There's a broader picture. So what we bring to the companies that we work with is the thought leadership that goes into thinking more broadly about the survey to thinking strategically and then providing the technology and the analytics tools that enable organisations to not only create that organisation effectiveness process of managers sitting down with their teams to talk about the results and do action planning but also analytically to understand what is the connection between survey data and HRIS data and business performance metrics, but also to tie together data from the entire employee lifecycle.
So for example, if we're looking at census survey data, and we find that a very high percentage of our high-performing employees and key skills may not stay with the company for the next year. Well, let's go back to their onboarding experience and did they experience something then that maybe has poisoned that relationship a little bit or made them less willing to stay with the organisation or maybe we want to see if any of those employees have since left the company and have taken the exit survey.
Why did they leave? So the ability to stitch together these databases I think is what makes us unique in the marketplace. It's easy to collect data. A lot of companies will collect lots of data, create lots of databases. The challenge is tying all of those things together to tell that story analytically and that's the power of analytics for an HR organisation is to go in front of leadership and tell that story based on facts and data.
David Green: So I mean effectively what an organisation's able to do and we hear a lot about mapping out the employee journey at the moment, maybe understanding the moments that matter they can plug Perceptyx in to help at those moments that matter which are different for different families of jobs and different for different locations, but you can be using it to understand all along that, along that journey and tweaking where necessary.
Sarah Johnson: Exactly and the way our tools work is that they don't have to wait for us to do that analysis for them that can be put into the hands of their survey administration team or their analytics team. They can using our tools easily move between all of those different data sets and all of those different surveys to understand it. I mean because it's a real-time system, you can query it in, almost an infinite number of ways to answer all kinds of questions that come from leaders.
David Green: So it sounds like there's a flexibility there if you're working with one of your clients, that's got an advanced people analytics team. You can give them the data and they can play with it and bring it in with other data sources however they like or if you're working with an organisation that's maybe less experienced in people analytics and needs support with the analysis then you can do that as well.
Sarah Johnson: It is as complex or as simple as the client needs it to be. There's some organisations that we work with have very large analytics teams. They of course, you can imagine they send us hundreds of data fields that we integrate together. They do all kinds of very slick analyses, but for some of our other clients, we keep it super simple. We don't want to overwhelm anyone. We want to meet our clients where they are so that they will feel comfortable using the data getting insights and hopefully over time progress their level of sophistication of using data, so they'll eventually use it more and more. But if I think if you freak people out at the beginning, if you overwhelm them, it's too much too soon.
David Green: Yeah, I think you're perfectly right. Our listeners love to hear real life examples. So it would be great to hear a couple of examples of clients that you've worked with at Perceptyx and thinking about some of the challenges that working with you guys has helped resolve.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, so one client we worked with was a very fast moving, fast growing technology organisation and they were very troubled by a very high turnover rate in very high potential young people and they would bring these folks in they would stay for a couple of years and they were leaving in droves. So we did an analysis of attrition for them and they sent us all of the employees who had left the organisation both voluntarily and those employees who had left the organisation as not regretted attrition.
So they weren't terminated. These are employees who left but the company wasn't sobbing that these individuals had left. We mapped it to their survey data and we found a very interesting pattern. There's a belief I think in much of the HR world that that people join organisations and leave managers.
And in this case, we found that to not at all be the truth. When we looked at the regretted attrition the questions in the survey that were most predictive of actual attrition focused on this notion that it is just too hard to get stuff done around here. There are too many decision-makers involved.
We are too slow, our IT systems don't talk to each other. This is a great company to work for, I'm going to stay long enough to be able to put it on my resume, but I'm tired of coming in and banging my head against a brick wall. So we knew, that company knew, that in order to keep those high potential folks they needed to tighten up how they worked. But the non regretted attrition, for them, it was a lot of whining about my manager. My managers always on my case. My managers always checking up on my performance, my manager my manager my manager. Which made sense because the manager was trying to get the most out of these people and was trying to improve their performance.
So it's very very enlightening to us to understand that. A couple of our clients have done deep-dive surveys on diversity and inclusion, which we find to be a very popular topic with just about every organisation we work with and so in this particular company the CEO was the chairman of a National Commission on inclusion and diversity in the workplace.
He was deeply interested in it. So we did a special deep dive survey based on a random sample of five of their largest regions of the world and we designed a 25 question survey that included a diversity and inclusion index. But our focus in this particular survey was to understand what are the elements of an inclusive work environment?
What are the pieces of that work experience that enable someone to feel I can be perfectly myself here. That I don't have to, you know act in a certain way. So we looked at things like psychological safety. We looked at how teams work together. We looked at group dynamics and produced I think a very insightful picture for this organisation to help them understand.
What are the changes that we need to make to truly be a more inclusive organisation? What elements of our culture are standing in the way of this objective that we have?
David Green: That's great. Thanks, Sarah. I mean those are two really good examples of how survey data can provide some amazing insights. So we've already talked about how Perceptyx was formed in 2003 and obviously you've had significant growth throughout that time but only recently taken on your first investment from TCV.
So it would be really helpful to understand, what's next? How's that investment going to support your continued growth and moving forward?
Sarah Johnson: Well you're right when you say that we've had tremendous growth in the last couple of years. We have more than doubled the size of our business which is incredibly exciting and to this point we've been entirely self-funded and we've done well in growing the organisation, but we have such ambitious ideas for where we want to go next. We see so much potential for technology in the HR space even beyond organisation surveys and HR analytics.
But in order to do that, we knew we needed to get additional funding. So we met with a lot of different firms and we chose to work with TCV TC V if you're not familiar with them is a venture capital organisation that has invested in companies that you may have heard of such as Facebook and Airbnb and Spotify and Netflix.
David Green: I think I've heard of them.
Sarah Johnson: Yeah, what we liked about them is they invest for the long-term. They find companies that they think have tremendous growth potential, they invest and they stay with those organisations as not only a financial partner but as a strategic advisor to that business. TCV has become very interested in the Human Capital Management space.
They see a great opportunity for technology in that space. So we're thrilled to work with them and to have their support. We are going to use this technology to accelerate the already strong growth of the organisation by making heavy investments in technology, investments in development as well as expanding our business globally.
We think there's a tremendous opportunity within Europe and we are excited to have their partnership to help us grow our business outside of the United States in the European area.
David Green: Yeah and obviously being European myself. I know there is a huge opportunity here, I don't think we're that far behind the US when it when it comes to workforce analytics to be honest with you.
I think the number of companies here who are advanced is probably smaller than the number of companies in the US but I think similarly ambitious and successful. I think it's a good move.
Sarah Johnson: We're excited about it. And we're seeing our business based in Europe grow very very rapidly.
So they've been a tremendous partner to work with we're excited to be part of their network of companies and already they have provided tremendous guidance to help us network with other organisations to help grow our business and and drive the analytics piece of our business as well.
David Green: Well, I look forward to seeing the continued growth that that supports. When we spoke last week, you came up with a great line. So I'm gonna try and make sure I repeat it. You described text as the final frontier for survey research. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that both from what Perceptyx is already providing in this space. But also where you see the whole topic of text going?
Sarah Johnson: Surveys have included comments for as long as I can remember and back in the day those would all be transcribed and typed and we would hand code them into topics. Now technology enables that to happen more quickly, but here's the thing.
Whenever I meet with a leadership team, they're very interested in the survey data, the results, the analysis. But there are so many CEOs who will say to me, Sarah, I read every single comment. I sat down with a book of 10,000, 20,000 however many comments there were and I read every single one of them. And I think to myself, okay, that's nice. It shows you're interested. But I don't know what you took away from that. You can't read comments like a novel and come away with any sort of understanding because there's no organising framework for that information. Comments really are the final frontier because we have the ability to pull tremendous insights out of them.
But the challenge is you are faced with literally millions of words in multiple different languages. And how do you make sense out of it? And to just read the comments is not going to give you a tenth of the insight you could pull out of it. So as we think of comments going forward we are looking for not just sentiment analysis because it's kind of interesting that a comment is positive or negative.
But it's really more interesting what is in the comment? What is the employee identifying as the way forward? So we are starting to look at programming around unstructured comment analysis using NLP to search all of these patterns within the text data and start to form the themes organically from the comments that people read.
I think when you do that, beyond just theming based on keywords or keyword dictionaries you start to pull themes out of the data that you otherwise wouldn't have found. Now one of the things that I think our tools are exceptionally good at is not just finding the themes in the comment but linking the comments to how employees responded to survey questions. So for example back to our example of high-potential younger employees who are leaving the organisation very quickly. Well if I know that let's say 10% of them may leave the company in the next year. I can use the Perceptyx tools to filter to just that group of employees, that 10% and now I can go back and read just their comments and I can do keyword searches and theming around what did they say that will help me understand why they want to leave the organisation. So it's the ability to drill into the comments through multiple different ways. How they respond to questions the demographics, all of that, that's going to provide us additional insights, but there's so much more work that needs to be done to help us pull all of that context and all of that insight out of those comments.
David Green:I guess you can get really specific with the use of text as well. You can start looking at certain locations or certain business-critical workers. For example, or ones that interface directly with customers. You can get that additional insight that you maybe wouldn't get just from the survey itself but with the text it's...
Sarah Johnson: Exactly so when you can combine the demographic filters with how they responded to specific survey questions, and then what they said, I think it really starts to tell a much richer picture.
A richer story about their experience within the organisation and then leads a management team or leadership team more closely to what do I need to do about it? What are the specific issues they're experiencing?
David Green: So text or unstructured data if we want to call it is clearly one of the things that excites you most about the survey research space.
What else we if we look forward?
Sarah Johnson: Gosh, you know I think there is such a huge opportunity for analytics in the HR space and I think the more HR organisations can understand how to use their survey strategically. I think the closer we get to that it is so... And so as we talk to companies about what is going on within your organisation? What are the strategic objectives of the business? What are the leadership issues that they're trying to solve? What do we need to know about executives in our company? If we can get as specific as we can about those questions and about those issues, then I think we can do richer and richer work that really guides senior leaders and guides decision making within organisations and kind of change the path of organisations.
David Green: Great that probably leads on to our final question, which we ask everyone on the show and it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this coming from your background as well. What do you believe the future role of HR will be in 2025?
Sarah Johnson: Well, that's really up to us in HR, isn't it?
David Green: Good answer.
Sarah Johnson: We really have to decide do we truly want to be strategic partners to the business? As I said, we've been saying this for 30 plus years. So what are we going to do to actually be that? So I think HR executives and HR professionals are going to have to become much more numerically and analytically focused.
I'd love to see HR programs really emphasise analytics and it doesn't have to be calculus and heavy statistics, but numbers-based decision making. How do you interpret numbers? How do you feel comfortable with numbers? How do you figure out how do I solve this particular problem or how do I get answers about this?
So if we really want to become those strategic business partners, it has to be based on facts and data. Leadership live in the world of numbers and data and analysis. And if we want to play in that space we have to be the same and that's what really gives power to the work that human resources does. It's not someone's opinion. It's not someone's whim. It's not the latest trend. But it's what the numbers are telling us which puts us on par with research and development functions, with accounting functions, with marketing functions. We have to have the facts and data. We can choose to go in that direction or we can choose to stay in the space of what's new, what's different, what's trendy? But I hope we make the choice as an HR function to really focus on analytics and the use of data and helping us make decisions.
David Green: And that's coupled with the business acumen that you mentioned right at the outset of our discussion really, you really emphasised the importance of understanding the business.
If we've got the data and analytics as well. I guess that gives us the happy marriage there.
Sarah Johnson: It does. We have to be able to talk the language of the business, to see the world the way senior leaders do, and supplement that, influence them with what we know about people within the organisation. It's all about influencing their thinking, influencing their direction and helping them lead the organisation successfully.
David Green: Sarah thank you very much for being on the show. Last thing. How can people stay in touch with you and also find out more about Perceptyx?
Sarah Johnson: So we love to have people learn about Perceptyx. You can certainly visit our website which is perceptyx.com. You can follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter or handle is at perceptyx.
David Green: Nice and easy.
Sarah Johnson: Yes. We are a frequent visitor to lots of conferences. So PAFOW, UNLEASH, other conferences. So please come and see us and reach out.
David Green: Sarah. Thank you very much for being on the show.
Sarah Johnson: My pleasure. Thank you, David. Thank you for having me.