Employee Engagement Survey – Software Solutions

On October 8, 2018, LinkedIn acquired Glint and entered the segment of “Employee Engagement”.  According to Josh Bersin, “Glint, is a comprehensive employee experience platform that stores data from onboarding, new-hire experience, ongoing pulse surveys, and open interviews.” It is important to note that Microsoft – LinkedIn approached this market segment through the acquisition route. On November 11, 2018, SuccessFactors announced an acquisition of Qualtrics. No wonder that ‘Employee Engagement’ is gaining leadership attention and becoming the organizational priority.  Even Jack Welch thinks that ‘Employee Engagement’ is number one indicator of organizational health.

Gallup carried out research in 155 countries and found 15% engaged employees, 65% not engaged employees and 18% actively disengaged employees. The report further states that engaged employees increased productivity (17%), sales (20%), and profitability (25%). And reduced absenteeism (41%), turnover (59%), quality issues (40%), and safety incidents (70%).

If you ask 10 HR Professionals they will tell you 15 definitions of Employee Engagement. Every HR consultancy has their own Engagement Framework, with more or less similar engagement drivers. According to the SHRM report, a number of definitions exist; however, they all share these common elements:

“Engaged employees will:

• Feel satisfaction with their work. 
• Take pride in their organization.
• Enjoy and believe in their work. 
• Understand the link between their job and the organization’s mission.
• Feel valued by their employer.
• Fully commit to their employer and their role.
• Exert extra effort to contribute to business success.”

The engaged employees are proud of their company and job. Company invest in developing their employees and offer opportunities for growth. Employees enjoy their work and are willing to recommend it to their friends and contacts. Engaged employees are intrinsically motivated, and hence they are less likely to leave.

“Engagement – The extent to which people are not only satisfied or committed to the organization but also advocates for the organization.”- William A. Schiemann

I have already covered the recent trend in measuring employee engagement in my earlier article: Employee Surveys - from once a year to a continuous process.

Considering the latest developments, the term ‘Employee Experience’ is gaining traction according to few consultancies. In short employee experience is creating the ‘moments that matter’. However, given the buzz around this term and it's scope it would need a separate article to cover the topic.

Although it’s interesting to note that according to Dave Ulrich, “But great HR people have done empirical work for decades, however now it's all about the ‘employee experience' but when I think about it, it's actually work that was done 30 years ago.”

Meanwhile, Laszlo Bock has started his own company that uses nudge engine. As per his book Work Rules, this concept is largely based on the research by Richard H. Thaler and Daniel Kahneman in the field of Behavioral Economics. It will make life easier for OD Professionals. Josh Bersin calls it ‘Employee Engagement 3.0’ and says, “this approach has tremendous potential.”  You can read his article to gain further insights ( Employee Engagement 3.0 )

‘Marketing’ function has influenced the trends in measuring employee engagement. For example : Pulse surveys, Continuous Listening, Voice of Employees, using AI, NLP, Social Network Analysis, Sentiment analysis; and linking all the data to financial results.

Josh Bersin has published a comprehensive report on trends in HR Technology. ( Talent Trends – HR Technology Report 2018 ) There is a section on developments in Feedback, Pulse Survey, and Analytics Tools. Josh suggests that: “Well-run companies now understand that in a sense, employees are more important than customers— because when employees are managed effectively, customers tend to be happier.”

How does it work :

According to the report, we have an influx of high-tech tools to track employee engagement. These tools help managers and employees collect feedback data using pulse surveys. Unlike Annual Surveys, these tools quickly analyze feedback data as well as open-ended comments using NLP and immediately produce results on the dashboard.

Josh says that “Most of these offerings include text analytics and let you send out a quick pulse question at any time. Some companies now pulse all their employees every week or two, and the data goes directly to managers to give them visibility into which teams are not effectively listening to their employees.”

These software providers bring together the best thinking in Organizational Development, AI, machine learning, and real-time technology. Instead of the Analysts and consultants, anyone can use those tools.

Abovementioned tools provide Pulses and surveys which employees can quickly complete using any device of their choice. They give us timely vital feedback from the people. Looking at the trends, soon employees may be able to answer surveys while conversing with Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, Cortana via mobile app or Smart Speakers. In India, there is interesting AI Chatbot ( Video ) used for employee surveys with an option to submit ‘anonymous feedback’.

While employees are taking these surveys, we get real-time dashboards with analysis. Our Senior Leaders, Line Managers, and HR Professionals get accurate insights about the current state of employee engagement for all the employee segments. The dashboards include trends, benchmark comparisons, and details for each engagement driver and team. We can also use ‘heat maps’ to identify strengths and areas of improvements for each engagement driver.

These tools help us to create real-time configurable reports to compare results according to employee attributes. For further analysis, we can use ‘Driver Impact Report’ reflecting engagement profile for each employee segment. It clearly shows the engagement scores for each team with respective engagement driver. So that, we can focus on the areas important to our team.

Due to advancements in the technology, predictive capabilities are becoming part of the Software tools, providing valuable insights. That helps us to proactively focus on issues requiring immediate attention as well as other opportunities and areas for improvements.

Using predictive capabilities we can get notifications for segments/population who are planning to leave or whose performance is not up to the mark. We get an opportunity to quickly address these issues on priority while helping us to prevent attrition and unnecessary hassles.

For easily comprehending responses to open-ended questions the narrative intelligence (Natural Language Processing) uses all the comments and extracts the main theme and sentiment in the visual map or word cloud.

The actual work starts on completion of the survey process. The most impressive part of these tools is the option to take action on the insights gained through the survey analysis. Once employees have raised their concern (answering surveys). They expect us to take immediate actions to resolve those issues. The ‘Action Planning’ (recommendations) section of these tools takes care of this problem. It helps Leaders and Line Managers to take effective steps on team feedback. This integrated action planning delineates Line Managers and Leaders :

• Why engagement issues matter.
• Where to focus. &
• How to improve.

In the process, it clearly depicts the impact of their actions over time.

With help of aforementioned tools, organizations can increase employee engagement, develop their people and achieve their strategic objectives. These software tools give us:

• Real-time visibility into the state of the employee engagement.
• Proactive insights to uncover issues and opportunities.
• Recommendations – Action Plans to effectively act on the insights gained through the survey analysis.

Engagement Software Solutions Providers:

There are following main software solutions providers according to the report.

CEB - CultureIQ, Culture Amp, eePulse, Glint, Hyphen, IBM Kenexa Employee Voice, OrgVitality, Perceptyx,  Qualtrics – (SuccessFactors), Questback, Spring International, Thymometrics, TINYpulse, Ultimate Software’s Kanjoya, & Waggl.

There are new embedded tools from ADP, CornerstoneOnDemand, Saba, and Workday. The ERP vendors are also moving in this direction according to the report, for example, Qualtrics acquisition by SuccessFactors.

Suggestions from-Tom Haak:

Celpax, CircleLytics, Effectory, Peakon, VibeCatch, Willis Towers Watson.

For continuous Listening  Keencorp, StatusToday.

If you are using Slack, following simple plugins are available to quickly create Surveys : HappsterFeedback, Polly, and SimplePoll.  

Josh suggests that “When companies start implementing continuous performance management, they often realize that feedback and engagement survey systems should be connected to the process… I believe we are going to see integration between this area and performance management in the years ahead.”

Logically that may sound correct. I have recently covered this topic in my earlier article on “What is OKR & CFR and How it works”. Once we complete the survey process, we get an action plan to improve employee engagement. Now that action plan may become Objective or Key Results for our Leaders, Line Managers or the HR Professionals. However, in practice survey and appraisals are two distinct processes. Hence we may have to wait and watch how this unfolds.

"Our employee engagement scores and our company performance over time determine whether we are succeeding."

- Garry Ridge and Stan Sewitch