How to measure employee sentiment and why you should do it

Many employees are dissatisfied with work. You might be experiencing talent shortages, a steady flow of ‘quiet quitting’, or even frustrations coming from greater demands for sustainability, flexibility, or home working. Whatever your organization’s specific challenge, it’s important to connect with and understand your employees, so you can be proactive in addressing their concerns. And that’s where employee sentiment analysis comes in.

Measuring employee sentiment allows you to get to the heart of the issues and create a workplace where people can thrive. It gives you a window into how they’re thinking, and helps you retain your top talent. But you might be thinking “isn’t that just employee engagement”? No. Employee sentiment is a predictor of engagement, which is why understanding it is so key to your business.

In this article you’ll find out:

• What employee sentiment is and how it differs from employee engagement
• Why understanding employee sentiment is crucial to your business
• How to measure employee sentiment
• Using AI in employee sentiment analysis

Employee sentiment versus employee engagement: What’s the difference?

While they’re linked, employee sentiment and engagement aren’t the same thing, so let’s get clear on the distinction:

What is employee sentiment?

Employee sentiment measures an employee’s (or team’s) feelings about their overall workplace experience. It’s a way to predict engagement levels.

You need to understand both team and individual sentiments as it will vary, but if feedback’s overwhelmingly positive, engagement is likely to be high. Frequent negative comments, on the other hand, will almost certainly result in low engagement, if not disengagement.  

To ensure you’re addressing the right issues, you need to listen to both the individual and group comments, although great employee check-ins can go a long way to supporting individual concerns.

What is employee engagement?

In simple terms, employee engagement is the end-result. It’s the extent of someone’s commitment and attachment to their role, the business and their colleagues. You can measure it against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) including:

• Pride in your work
• Feeling valued by managers and colleagues
• Willingness to give discretionary effort

And these factors contribute to each other. So, feeling valued may predict high engagement. High engagement may predict discretionary effort.  

How employee sentiment analysis benefits your business

Employee sentiment is a predictor of engagement, so analyzing it is a proactive and future focused tool. It offers a number of benefits to employees and the business as a whole:

• Actionable insights – sentiment analysis provides you with the big picture. It highlights positives, and also draws out complaints, outliers and isolated incidents which you might otherwise miss. You can see what’s coming down the road and implement changes or introduce new programs. And you get timely feedback on how people are receiving that change.
• Gives employees a voice – people who share their thoughts and who feel heard display greater organizational loyalty. They want to know their opinions matter, and measuring employee sentiment lets you do that ahead of time. Individuals see their comments being taken into consideration and they’re much less likely to bail for greener pastures.
• Promotes innovation – if you only draw wisdom from the same handful of sources, it quickly becomes rigid and stale. By giving everyone a voice, you open yourself up to solutions you might not previously have considered, driving increased business development and growth.
• Increase retention – once you commit to measuring employee sentiment and acting on the feedback, you are less likely to lose good people. Why? Because people feel valued. You champion their ideas and recognize their experience, and they see themselves as part of the future of the business.

As an HR leader, it’s impossible to know what everyone’s thinking, and sometimes you can get caught out responding to those who shout loudest. Employee sentiment analysis gives you access to employee thoughts in a very different way, and helps them flag those parts of the daily grind that need to change first.

Measuring sentiment in your business

Your initial thought might be to use employee survey results. After all, they tell you what people are thinking and you probably run them anyway, right? Wrong!

While well-meaning, traditional annual engagement surveys have a lot of flaws. Poor response rates and large gaps between surveys can limit their insight. They tend to over-rely on quantitative results that can be easily biased and focus heavily on what’s happened before. So basing your analysis on last year’s survey results won’t give you the right information.

Instead, you need a specific sentiment analysis tool which works alongside your regular employee check-ins. Why? Because weekly check-ins address the shortcomings of traditional surveys. They include plenty of qualitative, open-ended questions so people can answer in their own words. More importantly, their frequency means you receive real-time feedback rather than a snapshot from several months ago.

“But how am I going to analyze all that?” we hear you cry.

Don’t worry. Modern sentiment analysis tools like Engage365 are AI-assisted so they can do it for you. At the click of a few buttons, you can produce reports to understand:

• how teams are feeling, so you can see who’s loving life and who needs more support
• comparisons between departments and functions so you can identify successful strategies and replicate them
• long-term trends which might impact future engagement, allowing you to reflect and take action before they escalate

Once you understand the overall employee sentiment within the business, you can see the trends and start to get an idea of how you’re doing against the five KPIs for employee engagement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key to success

 You can’t talk about employee sentiment surveys without understanding a little about the role AI plays. You won’t be surprised to know employee sentiment reports are generated using AI software. But how does it work, and what does that mean for the business.

Without going into the intricacies of the technology, there are normally three main things you want to understand when thinking about employee sentiment:

What does the AI do?

In simple terms, it analyzes what people have written. And it does it far quicker and more efficiently than you could do yourself.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), the technology interprets what’s in people’s reviews and updates and draws inferences from it. If you like, it’s like producing the action points from a meeting, except its analyzing piles more data and applying much more sophisticated analysis and pulling out trends and themes.

You can find out more about how NLP is used here.

Are we encroaching on people’s privacy?

The short answer is no. You aren’t accessing anything which people aren’t freely providing you through things like their weekly check-ins. The difference is, rather than letting them sit there and be ignored (such was the joy of the old-style performance review), sentiment analysis tools help you understand what’s really happening.

You’re likely getting reports on how well people are tracking against their goals or identifying struggling managers who are failing to hold regular catch-ups already. Using sentiment analysis, you can take that a few steps further and see what impact those things are having on your teams. You can be proactive and focused around how you support the business, and take action on issues which really matter, rather than making assumptions about where you should focus your attentions first.

Where does sentiment analysis get its data?

It all starts with your weekly check-ins and what we call usage behavior (including how people are using your systems, how long they’re in them, what tasks they’re performing and which applications they’re using, or avoiding). By pulling together this information, Engage365 can analyze trends and see how your organization is performing against the five Key Performance Indicators of employee engagement.

This creates a benchmark for your business, and, once you have that, you can dig deeper. You can run reports to make comparisons between teams and departments or identify which KPIs require particular focus. It allows you to use data you already have, and assess the precise nature of employee engagement within your business, identifying those factors which are influencing it (positively or negatively).

Taking the next step

Now that you understand the difference between employee sentiment and engagement, you can see why introducing a tool to measure sentiment in your business is a great idea.

It’s a simple way to move your business and your culture forward as you start to hear and implement people’s great ideas and feedback. And, Engage365 is specifically designed for Microsoft platforms, so it integrates seamlessly with your existing systems.