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What if 28 percent of your staff plans to quit within the next year, as Qualtrics found in a recent survey?
That kind of turnover can be typical in fast food joints, where working conditions are staff come and go as fast as orders, but if you need employees to have several years of experience Before they can make a major contribution to the business, it has to do with it.
Such a shift is not an inevitable one, however: There are things managers can do – and times they should do them – to improve communication, which becomes an employee who is thinking of leaving. an enthusiastic stay.
That, at least, is the theory at Qualtrics, which takes numbers from its employee engagement surveys and combines them with data from HR systems, collaboration tools, and other resources to build a more detailed profile of an employee’s thoughts called it. Employee Experience ID. And it will use those profiles in a new tool it launched today: Employee Journey Analytics.
It aims to identify key moments when employers can make a change in employee attitudes – on hiring or onboarding, for example, or when they return from parental leave or take a new PC to work – by looking at the combined -combined Employee Experience ID data across the enterprise.
That may seem like something the chief HR officer has to deal with, but because so much work is done in and through today’s IT systems, CIOs have an important role to play at two levels: in integrating the systems. of management experience, whether from Qualtrics or otherwise. , and in ensuring that workers have a positive experience with enterprise IT systems. Surveys won’t fix problems for CIOs, but they can help identify them.
“CHRO and a CIO have grown to become two C-suite persons who, first of all, engage with each employee and, second, have the greatest impact on employee engagement and retention,” said Brad Anderson, president of Qualtrics products and services.
As an illustration of the potential influence of CIOs on retention, Anderson said Qualtrics research found that employees who said their technology enables them to work were 158 percent more engaged and 61% more high goal to stay in a company for more than three years.
Privacy concerns
Forrester’s chief analyst for employee experience, David Brodeur-Johnson, expressed concern about the privacy implications of being able to drill down into an employee’s survey responses and their relevance to area events. of work.
Historically, the Qualtrics platform has enforced privacy limits by not allowing managers to divide data into groups smaller than six or eight people, maintaining the anonymity of individual responses, it said. Brodeur-Johnson.
“On the whole, this kind of thing is really powerful, but if it gives managers the power to establish an individual’s response to each of these things, and it can be used in a punitive way, that we think is dangerous, “he said. .
CIOs have an oversight role here, he said: “CIOs… have the opportunity to establish certain expectations on how that information will be used. Does it follow their data management policies, their cybersecurity policies? Do they expose the organization to any risks that others may not see, in HR or elsewhere? ”
It must be balanced with the opportunity to play an enabling role, he said: CIOs who support the interaction of this type of data can “be seen as more of a strategic partner in these types of initiatives to gain more insight. in the employee experience. “
Competitive field
Qualtrics, mostly owned by SAP, isn’t the only vendor trying to offer a clearer picture of what makes employees feel what they’re doing, and help employers act on it.
Earlier in the month, Oracle announced an addition to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management suite called Oracle ME. It includes a feature, Oracle Touchpoints, that captures and tracks employee emotion, and recommends next actions to managers based on the feedback gathered.
Workday, is also making similar features in its SaaS offering. It acquired Peakon, a compiler of real-time employee sentiment data, in January 2021 and uses that data to deliver recommendations to managers, either as a standalone tool or integrated into its broader platform. HCM.
Meanwhile, Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) has added APIs to its core survey platform to exchange data with Salesforce, Teams, and other enterprise applications, allowing it to deliver a broader picture of engagement. employee contact for evaluation with tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI.
The problem now, Anderson says, is, “Organizations have a lot of different ways they listen, but they’re all fragmented.”
To address that problem, Qualtrics collects and aggregates more than just employee survey data in its quest to find out what causes workers.
To generate its Employee Experience IDs, it also connects to HR systems to see an employee’s position in the hierarchy, recent performance reviews, and important life events such as return from parental leave; cost management systems to identify frequent travelers; Microsoft Viva to understand the working patterns of teams; and IT service management tools to see how many support tickets an employee files and how quickly or efficiently they are resolved. Qualtrics does just that through an integration with ServiceNow, for example.
Thanks to its acquisition in October 2021 in Clarabridge, Qualtrics can also check the sentiment of employee comments, not only on surveys or support tickets but also on the public channels of chat platforms such as Teams or Slack, said Anderson.
For now, Workday can only conduct such an emotional analysis with feedback explicitly provided in the free text fields of Peakon surveys.
Managers can click on an employee profile to see the ups and downs of their enterprise interaction, and click on individual data points to see interaction details.
Employee Journey Analytics, meanwhile, offers an emotional overview, for the entire company or group of employees, in various interactions-onboarding, IT support, return from care. Dashboards show the strength and direction (positive or negative) of sentiment in graphical form for all employees or subsets of them to help HR departments formulate action plans in the areas that matter most. in employee interaction.
Early feedback
Anderson said a multinational retailer testing the new features found that when managers sent new hires a text message or email before their first day of work, staff were more satisfied and not less stressed in their new jobs than new hires who did not receive such a message before starting. .
Of course, ticking the box is no substitute for empathy: Employees need to feel that those messages are true, not automatic, and managers need to follow up if new hires have questions or concerns.
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