How To Get The Best Out Of An Employee Experience Platform
Discover how an employee experience (EX) platform helps businesses understand, improve and enhance employee satisfaction through data analysis. In this article, we break down the different ways in which you can use an employee experience platform, why it is so important, and how to choose the right platform for your company. You will also find great tips on how to build your own employee experience strategy.
What Is An Employee Experience (EX) Platform?
An employee experience platform is a software solution based on machine learning algorithms that help an organization extract useful information from its voice of employee data. The platform can analyze sentiment from thousands of data points within the employee experience data gathered from employee surveys, interviews, chats, emails, and even external reviews sites like Glassdoor & Indeed. In doing so, it provides HR teams with actionable insights into employee aspirations, pain points, expectations, motivations, and so on.
Why Is An EX Analysis Platform Important?
An EX analysis platform is critical to the success of an organization in several ways. It helps companies:
1. Measure and enhance employee satisfaction
An EX analysis platform helps the human resources department to measure and track how happy or dissatisfied employees are at work and what are the root causes of their sentiments. Additionally, since the insights are extracted from an objective tool that is run on highly intelligent algorithms, companies are assured of unbiased insights that they can use to better the overall work environment in order to increase employee satisfaction.
2. Develop relevant training programs
An employee experience platform can be very beneficial in finding out what kind of training and development programs are most needed and which are obsolete. This may also extend to other areas of work, which employees feel are detrimental to productivity. By having these insights at hand you can develop better skill-building, mentorship, leadership, and other programs that can help increase employee productivity and decrease frustrations at work.
3. Inspire better leaders
An EX analysis platform is not only important for employees but also for the executive staff and senior management. A view into what employees think of their management styles, and how they perceive them, can give leadership teams the opportunity to alter management styles in order to help boost productivity and morale amongst employees. It also helps managers become more self-aware and acknowledge the importance of humanizing the workplace so that employees feel more secure and happy at work.
4. Increase employee morale & reduce attrition
When you continually collect opinions from employees about their work teams, managers, compensations, and other work-related aspects, you start getting a picture of what factors can act as motivators and detractors. This insight can help you build better employee strategies to increase morale and ensure that your employees don’t leave you for greener pastures.
5. Boost your brand perception
An EX analysis platform is instrumental in developing your brand experience. It can help you boost your employer brand by enabling you to address negative areas mentioned by employees, ex-employees, as well as candidates who have appeared for interviews. Glassdoor sentiment analysis can be very helpful in this matter as well because you can also analyze external data to see what employees, both past and present, really think about you. Criticisms can be very important data that is given free of charge, which if you work at, can help you improve your brand for significant growth.
6. Build relevant employee recognition programs
Employee recognition is a very important part of human resources enrichment. A good employee recognition program takes into account what employees are good at, what their aspirations are, as well as their personalities. That’s why recognition programs can range from corporate-sponsored advanced skills training, post-graduate programs, gifts, monetary rewards, social media acknowledgments, and so on.
7. Identify areas of concern
An office environment, whether in-person or virtual, needs to be a safe place for employees to be in. That’s why it’s important to ensure that all employees feel comfortable in the situations they are in and know that they can safely speak out and take their grievances to the management. Diversity and inclusion policies must ensure that all employees feel heard. An employee experience platform is a very important tool in this aspect and gives HR teams a very clear indication of any issues that can be seen emerging so that can be addressed before they snowball into something bigger.
8. Increase employee engagement and community building
Employee loneliness and burnout are serious issues that organizations are taking very seriously. This is especially true as we emerge from the covid19 pandemic that saw most organizations turn into virtual workplaces and employees taking on more responsibilities due to staff shortages. An employee experience platform helps you to manage employee engagement and find the best ways in which to build work communities that can provide support to employees from peers and managers.
9. Overhaul the recruitment process
An EX tool can give you actionable insights into ensuring that the person doing the job is the right one for it. Whether it’s a candidate you are interviewing or an existing employee who doesn’t seem to be at optimal productivity, an EX tool can show you what kind of aspects need to be taken into consideration while choosing staff for that particular job.
10. Improve existing human resource policies
It is important to keep yourself updated with what’s current in the market. This includes getting rid of archaic employee policies and becoming less rigid and autocratic. Employees like to be trusted because it builds in them a sense of belonging at a company and actually increases productivity. An EX platform can help you measure the pulse of the workforce so you know what they think of you and how you can move towards a more modern, humanized work culture.
How Do You Develop An Employee Experience Strategy?
To build an effective employee experience strategy that can improve employee engagement and boost employee experience, you should follow an objective, methodical approach. This can be broken down into the following five steps.
1. Gather the voice of the employee data
You must first collect data that is relevant to your strategy, which means you need to decide whether you only want internal data, or whether you would also like to have external data from outside sources such as review platforms and social media.
2. Map employee sentiment along the employee journey
Once you have gathered the employee feedback data you need to ensure that it is mapped along the employee journey, namely, recruitment, onboarding, employee development, talent retention, and offboarding. Mapping sentiments based on the employee journey will help you determine what aspects affect employees the most during which stage of the employee lifecycle.
3. Identify important EX aspects
Once you are able to categorize sentiments based on the various employee stages, you will be able to see patterns emerging that can affect employee sentiment. These could be related to factors such as compensation, work culture, team spirit, inclusion and diversity, and such. A machine learning-based employee experience platform can identify and extract these insights seamlessly at scale and with precision.
4. Compare with the existing employee management strategy
Once you have received the insights, you should compare the results based on time periods. This will give you an indication of whether employee sentiment has increased or decreased around the aspects identified, and if so, it will give you the opportunity to dig further to find out why.
5. Build a more relevant and effective EX strategy
By comparing results from historic and current data, you can see what aspects of the organization need immediate attention and which are useful and need to flourish. An EX analysis platform gives you this critical information in the form of charts, graphs, and word clouds. It also helps you filter results based on keywords, and other criteria you set.
Thus, in these broad 5 ways, you can build a successful employee engagement strategy that can go a long way in developing a more nurturing work environment.
How Does The Employee Experience Platform Work?
The employee experience platform is trained on datasets meant for the industry you are in. Once optimal results are obtained, it can be used to analyze employee experience data to extract actionable insights. There are 4 basic stages in which machine learning algorithms work under the hood to achieve the desired results. These are as follow.
Step 1. Gathering the voice of the employee data
Data can be gathered from any source, internal or external. These could be internal employee surveys, emails, chats, interviews, other feedback channels, and even external review platforms like Glassdoor or Linkedin.
Step 2. Data Processing
Machine learning algorithms process the data that is ingested in the text pipeline and run tasks like natural language processing, named entity recognition, semantic clustering, and such to segregate and categorize aspects, themes, and entities from the data. Thus you can get aspects such as salary, team, manager, vacation, etc. against which sentiment scores can be set.
Step 3. Sentiment analysis
The sentiment analysis process assigns sentiment scores to the different aspects that have been identified and categorized. Thus the employee experience platform allows you to have a holistic view of employee sentiment as well as aspect-based insights.
Step 4. Insights visualization
The EX analysis platform transforms all the insights it gathers into charts, graphs, and various data points so you can make sense of the quantitative and qualitative data. You can set alerts through the dashboard for any relevant keywords you are interested in as well.
What Are The Top Employee Experience Platforms?
There are several employee experience platforms in the market. Here are some that are at the top of their game in their respective areas.
1. Repustate IQ
AI-powered, Repustate IQ is a formidable employee experience platform that can give extremely detailed sentiment analysis from all data formats - text, video, and audio. It can seamlessly integrate with tools like Power BI, Tableau, Survey Monkey, and such, and process 23 languages natively, without translations. You get insights for recruitment, training, onboarding, compensation, and any other workplace element you need.
2. Glint
Glint is an EX tool that runs via Linkedin. It gives you access to employee feedback and provides you with action-based insights. It can support multiple languages as Repustate IQ does, and can integrate with some HRIS tools.
3. Kazoo
Kazoo is another great EX analysis platform that can give employee insights regarding various employee-related aspects. It allows HR teams to integrate with popular human resource management systems and collaborate with tools like Teams and Slack.
4. Qualtrics
Apt for large enterprises, Qualtrics allows HR teams to extract information from employee surveys and feedback. Like Repustate IQ, Qualtrics too has a comprehensive dashboard where you can gain insights based on your parameters.
5. Lattice
Lattice too is aimed at big organizations. It allows you to send out employee surveys, integrates insights, and helps you develop goal-oriented plans based on them.
6. Achievers
An employee experience tool that can be customized, Achievers is apt for analyzing the voice of the employee data for awards and recognition, and training and development needs for overall improvement and growth.
7. Kudos
Kudos is an EX analysis platform that can help you gauge employee engagement, satisfaction, and other parameters easily. It comes with a visualization dashboard and integrates with Teams, Slack, and other tools.
8. Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva is an EX platform that helps employees discover and share helpful resources, track progress, communicate with peers, share ideas, and such. In addition, it helps HR teams find actionable insights on ways to improve productivity and work culture.
9. Culture Amp
More of a peer-to-peer feedback analysis tool, Culture Amp has more than 30 survey templates that you can use for different surveys to find out useful information about employees’ morale, performance, and engagement.
10. Survey Sparrow
SurveySparrow is another great EX analysis platform for large enterprises. It allows you to send out employee surveys that can be mobile-based and sound like easy chats. You can share the surveys on various platforms and check out the results on custom dashboards.
How To Select The Best Employee Experience Platform?
There are certain key features that an EX analysis platform must have to be able to serve you best. These are:
1. Track & measure sentiment
An EX platform should allow you to track and measure employee sentiment across a wide range of time periods and aspects. Having an overall view of your employer brand, employee engagement levels, or the employee happiness quotient is great. Still, real actionable insights can only be gained if those insights are granular so you know exactly what areas need improvement more than others.
2. Ability to process all data types
Your EX tool should be able to process employee feedback from any data-type, whether it’s text, audio, or video. This is tremendously useful because you can not only process text data such as emails and surveys but also video interviews and such data.
3. Understands semantic analysis
The best EX model for you must have the ability to process semantic classification so that you don’t get redundant data. Semantic classification ensures that all aspects and emotions are measured accurately and you don’t get double negatives or positives.
4. Conducts sentiment mining
Your EX platform should have robust sentiment analysis algorithms in place so that they can accurately measure and provide you with the sentiment scores for each aspect identified in the data you process. Accurate sentiment analysis means that the model should be able to analyze not only text data but also emoticons. This is the same principle as in customer experience analysis.
5. Multilingual
The platform should be able to analyze data natively in whichever language it is processing. This means that it should have part-of-speech taggers for each language separately and should not depend on translations. Thus, you can make sure that all your employees are happy and don’t feel neglected.
6. Customizable
Your employee experience platform should be customizable so that you can use it for years to come, even as you scale or change or expand into other industries. And more importantly, it should allow you to make these changes independently without needing to code.
7. Understands reviews and social media listening
Not all EX platforms can analyze social media listening data. That’s because social media content can contain text elements such as code switches, colloquialisms, emojis, social media short forms, etc. that many ML models don’t have the ability to read and understand.
8. Ability to analyze all data sources
Your EX model should have the ability to give you real-time insights from Twitter feeds as easily as it should give you insights from surveys or chatbot histories. It is very important that your EX model is multifunctional in analyzing data from any data source. This gives you the flexibility to choose different modes of collecting employee feedback and get more returns from your investment.
9. Understand open-ended responses
Employee surveys are one of the most commonly used feedback collection methods. However, a survey is only as good as its questionnaire. The more open-ended queries you put forward, the more chances you have of discovering things about your employees’ experience at the workplace. A great EX analysis platform should therefore have the ability to extract insights even from surveys that don’t have fixed answers.
10. Intelligent insights visualization
All the great insights that your employee experience platform provides are of no real use if you don’t truly understand the insights that you get, or you don’t know what to do with the inputs. Therefore, your model should have a visualization dashboard that gives you insights in a user-friendly manner so that you can actually use the insights to develop your employee experience strategy.
Conclusion
Repustate’s employee experience platform, Repustate IQ, has helped numerous organizations gain invaluable insights into employee engagement, behavior, satisfaction, and motivation. Available in 23 languages, the platform gives you the opportunity to understand and nurture your employees, wherever they may be located.
Your human resources team can use the insights to help develop stronger employee engagement campaigns, and use strategies throughout the employee journey - all through easy-to-use insights from Repustate IQ’s intelligent dashboard. Already have a visualization dashboard? No problem, as Repustate IQ seamlessly integrates with external dashboards such as PowerBI and Tableau.
Employee data can be sensitive. And so, you can be assured of vital data security with Repustate IQ. You can install it behind your firewall as an on-prem installation. Or if you prefer a insights virtualization solution, you can opt for the Cloud version.