Turn Employee Surveys Into Strategic EX Insights

An employee insights survey can help you measure and improve employee engagement and sentiment across the employee lifecycle. Employee surveys can be a valuable tool in helping you focus your efforts in the right direction in order to boost employee morale and productivity.

Let’s look at why it is important for an organization to maintain sustained effort to understand employee experience and how you can extract important employee experience insights from survey data for strategic human resource development.

Why Is Employee Experience Important?

An employee insights survey helps you gauge your employee experience. When a company invests in ensuring a thriving employee experience at the workplace, it ensures that it is set for growth. Positive employee experience leads to better employee engagement, reduced attrition rates, reduced absenteeism, more efficiency, and a more profitable business. Let’s look at these reasons in detail.

1. Employee retention. Employees actively seek employers where they’ll be appreciated and those that deliver good employee experiences. Thus, an organization with these experiences will retain and attract the best talent.

2. More engagement. Employees who are more satisfied are more engaged, and in turn, tend to be more motivated. A sentiment analysis API can give you in-depth insights into employee engagement and their emotions towards their jobs.

3. Improved collaboration. When there is more employee engagement, teams work together better as a whole towards the common goals of the company. This means a business will be more efficient and sustainable.

4. More productivity. Employees who are engaged, supported, and feel that their contribution is appreciated will be more productive. This means they’ll get more done in less time.

5. Stronger relationships and trust. By offering a more humanized working environment, you show employees that you respect them. This helps the leadership team build stronger relationships with employees, which means more trust and loyalty.

6. Better creativity. Happy employees are more invested in their jobs and as a result, develop more innovative solutions to problems and challenges.

7. Professional growth. Good employees need to be nurtured, and so recognition and mentorship programs are a great way to do this. That’s why employee recognition experience is important and acts as a catalyst for professional growth.

8. More revenue. Ultimately, when your employees are more engaged and productive, they’ll deliver higher-quality work and your business will generate more revenue.

How To Derive Strategic EX Insights From Employee Surveys

You can improve employee experience in your organization if you extract the hidden gems in your employee experience feedback data. An employee insights survey provides a wealth of information that you can use to implement the necessary strategies and measures to ensure that you have an engaging employee program for a more successful business.

Here are some important ways in which you can derive these much-needed strategic EX insights from employee surveys.

1. Analyze all data types

An employee insights survey usually consists of text data that you’ll need to analyze. These responses sometimes also have emojis or gifs. Similarly, to get a more detailed view of your employees’ opinions and feedback, you might want to use other types of media. For example, you may want to record audio or video during employee exit interviews and make it a part of your employee experience surveys. Employee exit interviews are an underused resource and can be very valuable to a company.

With the right employee experience analytics platform, you can analyze all these different data types and extract insights from them. This gives you more accurate findings from your EX data and helps you get a holistic picture of how your employees feel about working for your business and what you can do to improve their experience.

2. Leverage open-ended questions

You can extract smart employee experience insights from surveys if you can leverage the goldmine of information that responses to open-ended surveys can hold. Doing this provides you with a broad overview of your employees’ opinions instead of using simple “yes” and “no” surveys. So when you use employee insights surveys that utilize open-ended questions you get more relevant insights that tell you how employees feel about working at your company.

Sentiment analysis applications analyze open-ended responses by using artificial intelligence-based tasks such as natural language processing (NLP) and semantic clustering to extract the sentiment from open-ended responses. In this manner, they give you fine-grained insights into the reasons and motivations behind employee behavior.

3. Identify semantic similarity

This brings us to the next point - identifying semantic similarities in survey responses. Apart from giving deeper insights into your employees’ opinions and feelings, you can derive improved employee insights from surveys by using a sentiment analysis API that employs semantic clustering. Semantic clustering allows the tool to extract the meaning behind seemingly similar survey responses so that you don’t get double positives or negatives, which can affect the accuracy of your insights.

Thus, through semantics and machine learning, you can differentiate between responses that sound the same but may not be. This is even more significant in multilingual data where a company needs to analyze employee surveys in different languages. Understand how multilingual semantic similarly works.

4. Understand non-contextual responses

It is very important to know the frame of context in which a survey response has been given. But as is the case with any machine learning EX insights tool for employee surveys, when you upload your response data, more often than not, there is no contextual reference. Therefore, the EX insights platform you use must have an intelligent and efficient way to understand non-contextual information. This is an often overlooked feature but an essential one because similar responses can have entirely different meanings which could impact the accuracy of the results you’ll get from the employee insights survey.

For example, if an employee gives an open-ended survey response like “more breaks during the day”, it could be challenging to interpret if the response is positive or negative if there is no context. It could be that the employee means that your business should offer more breaks during the working day. Alternatively, it could also mean that the employee chose your business when looking for a job because you offer more breaks.

5. Sentiment analysis

With simple surveys based on closed-ended questions and responses, you’ll have a limited set of aspects you can deal with that will show you if an employee likes or doesn’t like particular aspects of his job description or the company. Open-ended surveys give you more data you can analyze. When you process this employee feedback data through sentiment analysis, you can get a treasure trove of EX insights that can help you improve your employee experience.

A sentiment analysis API extracts all the aspects, topics, and themes in survey data and then analyzes them individually for sentiment. Thus, unlike close-ended surveys, you could learn why an employee feels a certain way, what you can do to create a more nurturing work environment, if there are training needs that are unfulfilled, and other important factors.

6. Monitor employee sentiment over time

Performing an employee insights survey using machine learning-based survey sentiment analysis has another significant benefit. It allows you to measure and track employee sentiment over time because it can compare historical and current data.

There are several benefits flowing from this. Firstly, when you measure and track employee sentiment over time, you can see how any strategies and measures you implement influence it. This helps you measure the effectiveness of your employee experience improvement strategies.

Secondly, it allows you to measure and track the complex interactions between the different aspects that make up your employee experience. For example, while the sentiment of one aspect could increase, it might mean that the sentiment of another decreases. These insights give you the capability to balance all these aspects to ensure the best employee experience possible.

7. Identify aspect co-occurrences

You can derive strategic EX insights from employee surveys by identifying recurring topics and aspects. These co-occurrences mean that two or more aspects appear together in survey results, which can tell you that those two aspects are somehow related. Thus you can identify every experience that matters to your employees.

These recurring topics and co-occurrences help to identify which topics and aspects occur more than others and whether they are positive or negative. You can share these insights with the right leadership teams so that they can take the appropriate action. Aspect co-occurrences thus show you what aspects are more important to your employees and what you should focus on while developing strategies to improve your employee experience.

Conclusion

If you want to deliver the best employee and brand experience, it’s crucial that your EX analytics tool has the most robust machine learning mechanism to understand an employee insights survey. Only then can you truly use those insights to develop efficient and productive employee experience strategies. Repustate helps you analyze employee feedback across all channels, so you can ensure excellent employee experiences.

This means you can extract valuable insights from all data types with the help of video content analysis, and can also extract these insights from surveys, posts, and comments on external employee feedback sites like Glassdoor or Linkedin. You can also use the EX analytics tool to build a better brand experience for your company as a whole so that your employer brand is top-notch and attracts the attention of the right candidates.