The complete Guide to Voice of Employee (VoE)

If the 20th century was the era of the customer, the 21st century can be seen as the ascendancy of the employee. This does not mean that customers are no longer important to your business, rather it recognizes the essential connection between your employee happiness, business growth, and overall brand trust. Your employees are vital stakeholders in your business success. Understanding staff feedback toward your brand, company, and culture are essential insights to improving overall business results and your competitive positioning.

What is the Voice of Employee?

Good business is driven by happy employees, regardless as to their position or duties in the organization. Corporate culture encompasses the beliefs and behaviors that influence a company’s dynamic between management and employees. This dynamic ultimately affects the manner in which your company interacts and handles outside business. Holiday policies, remote working, business hours, office layout, health benefits, productivity tracking, employee turnover, hiring decisions, treatment of clients, client satisfaction, and every other aspect of people operations are reflections of company culture. The manner in which employees perceive, experience and judge all these aspects holistically, can be referred to as your voice of employee.

Voice of employee, or VoE for short, is the practice of analyzing employee feedback to improve your employee experience. Voice of employee is typically gauged by utilizing employee satisfaction survey tools and feedback systems. Most companies understand the importance of employee feedback analysis and how it can supercharge your employee experience efforts, but a lot of organizations are relying on archaic methods to extract the data they need to better understand what their employees are trying to say.

Using employee feedback and voice of employee methods, your company can gain valuable insights into where they are excelling and where they might need some work. Measuring employee satisfaction doesn’t have to be over-complicated; with a Text Analytics API, you can measure your employee satisfaction and improve retention rates like never before. Get to the root of what your employees really want and read between the survey lines.

Why is Voice of Employee important?

With employee churn rates skyrocketing in the 21st century, and most employees jumping from job to job throughout their lives, retaining valuable talent has become difficult and competitive. VoE is the most valuable tool in your company’s arsenal. With a good voice of employee solution, you can:

• Improve the employee experience

• Attract and retain the best in the space

• Get into the minds of your workers

• Know where you need to improve

• Understand the next “big trend”

With a good VoE solution, companies can take the guesswork out of employee satisfaction efforts and get to the root of what will actually work versus what might work. Answers as simple as “more training”, “better benefits”, “more one-on-ones with management” will be right at your fingertips. There is no better way to know what your employees are thinking than to apply methods that don’t just collect the feedback but will be instrumental in examining it for employee sentiment analysis.

What are the common aspects of VoE?

One of the greatest challenges faced by companies and human resource professionals is getting a clear gauge on how employees feel about some of the following things:

• Management and leadership

• Benefits and pay

• Career opportunities

• Teamwork & collaboration

• Training courses

• Work/life balance

• Stress and personal health

• Up-skilling

The sources of data that your HR department can pull insights from include such things as quarterly reviews, employee survey responses, Glassdoor reviews and social media comments. Yet, getting the feedback is not the only challenging task. Extracting vital insights from the feedback is the most important part of the process, but also the most challenging. One of the ways to automate this process is by using a Text Analytics API to discover sentiment in your employee feedback text data.

How can Sentiment Analysis help VoE?

The power of a great employee feedback solution is well known in many industries. Combine the benefits of a voice of employee tool with sentiment analysis and you’ve got a new superpower on your hands. Sentiment Analytics is the practice of using NLP or Natural Language Processing to identify employee sentiments. By combining AI and text analytics, companies can read between the lines of what their employees are trying to say about their experience working with a brand and garner the sentiment behind it. When you combine text analytics and VoE, you’re gathering the emotional feedback of your employees.

How to use Sentiment Analysis API to discover VoE?

One of the biggest indicators of how a company treats its employees is via employee churn rates. If you have a high turn-over rate, it’s time to focus inward and analyze where you are going wrong. Using a Voice of Employee solution that goes beyond simple survey tools, you’ll have access to unprecedented insights into what your employees are really thinking and what it’s going to take to keep them happy.

A Text Analytics API carries you beyond simple survey answers. Whether it was their treatment from upper management, meetings, training tools, or flexibility you’ll know exactly what part of your business is having the biggest impact on your employee satisfaction.

One of the easiest ways to conduct voice of employee for your own company is to use a Text Analytics API. An API allows one piece of software to talk to another. With an API information to be requested and exchanged between databases and devices. In this case your computer will be asking the API to make sense of the text you send it, and the API will return the correct answers back to you. Repustate offers an API, but there are others on the market you might want to explore as well. Regardless of which sentiment analysis API you choose, conducting sentiment analysis this way is an easy 3 step process:

Step 1: Data Gathering:

Gather and prepare your data that you want to analyze whether it’s internal (survey answers) or external data (social posts). To prepare the data for text analysis, all you need to do is put it into a CSV or XLS document format.

Step 2: Text Analytics:

Run your input data through your text analytics API. It will quickly return sentiment scores for each relevant VoE topic, aspect, or entity ranging from -1 for negative emotions, 0 for neutral feelings, and 1 for positive sentiment.

Step 3: Insights Visualization:

Once you receive the sentiment scoring you can use various different data visualization tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Repustate’s Sentiment analysis dashboard to quickly turn your data into visual reports made up of charts, graphs and tables to discover trends, patterns, and actionable insights in your data.

learn more about Employee experience dashboard.

What are the benefits of Voice of Employee?

Unlike previous generations where individuals stayed with their companies for their entire careers, people are “job hopping” more than ever before. Top talent continually bounces from company to company whether it’s because of monetary gain, better perks and incentives, or diversity in the workforce. Your employee needs are as unique and complex, and in the digital age, it’s become much easier to jump ship if something isn’t up to standard. By utilizing a VoE solution, you can get to the root of what will help your employees stay with your company long-term and give them the experience that they deserve. Employees tell companies what they want, whether it’s through reviews, surveys, or social media platforms, the sentiment is out there and it’s up to you to gather it and analyze it.

Your competitors are likely using employee experience tools to help them stay ahead of you, but none of these is more valuable than an employee feedback solution that not only gathers your employee insights but also takes that feedback and analyzes it by using sentiment analysis. With this, you can gather what your employees want to see from you and retain top talent.

Corporate culture contributes to the way consumers or clients perceive a company’s brand as an employer and desirable workplace. In recruitment, a positive corporate culture can have a significant impact on the calibre and quality of new talent the company is able to recruit. It’s a simple formula: a great organizational culture attracts great applicants. Not only does VoE contribute to new employee acquisition, it assists in a company’s ability to retain skilled, talented people. This is seen as a major advantage, and differentiator, over competitors who might be vying for the same talent pool. But the benefits of a voice of employee strategy goes far beyond this to include:

1. Higher Productivity:

Happy employees produce more due to their commitment to your company and their overall job satisfaction. Listening to your employees ensures that they feel empowered.

2. Better Leadership:

One of the most difficult things as a leader is to listen to feedback and criticism, but they are the true fuel for change. Leaders and managers gain vital insights from VoE.

3. Employee Retention:

One of the biggest disruptions to workflow and productivity occurs when an employee quits. VoE helps you improve those areas of your culture that might be causing high churn rate.

4. Higher Engagement:

VoE helps create an environment where employees feel more engaged with culture and staff. They feel more committed and therefore participate more and contribute to success. The intelligence you gather needs to inform your VoE strategy, which should ultimately have as its aim the improvement or corporate culture and brand perception. This process should be collaborative, and pull input from all various departments and levels within your company. It is imperative that employees participate in and feel ownership in the strategy and their feedback is applied, tracked and promoted internally by management and leadership.

5. Attract the Best:

As your employee satisfaction rates improve, so too will the rate at which you attract top talent to your organization. With the advent of social media, and more specifically platforms where employees can voice their opinions about what it was like to work for this company, organizations have to be more vigilant about what is said on those platforms. One bad review can be the reason why a job seeker chooses your competitor over you.

Voice of employee surveys are great at scratching the surface of what employees want to see from you, but they are only that: surface level and archaic. What companies need is a solution that digs deep into the employee satisfaction index and utilizes employee sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analytics meets Voice of Employee

Repustate takes text analytics and voice of employee to the next level. Our approach to text analytics is comprehensive and flexible enough to meet your needs in a variety of industries for a diversity of use cases. Because employees use so many different channels to communicate their brand sentiments, Repustate makes it possible to analyze the different means of communication. Whether it’s slang, hashtags, or industry-speak, Repustate allows you to create your own sentiment rules that are specific to your industry and use case. Multilingual sentiment analysis is hard but Repustate has developed multiple techniques that, when used together, deliver a fast and accurate analytics engine.

Learn more about Importance of Voice of Employee.

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