In an employee survey, comments are the closest we ever get to a 1:1 conversation with every employee. They add a lot of context to help understand the reasons behind their quantitative responses and can provide invaluable insight. But manually analysing thousands of comments and categorising each item of feedback, is time-consuming, laborious, and impractical for most people leaders… until now.
WorkBuzz has today announced the launch of its new Text Analytics tool designed to help people leaders better understand how their employees are feeling and provide actionable insights, in real time.
This uses machine learning (artificial intelligence) algorithms to analyse employees’ comments and surface actionable insights. Opinions, judgements, and emotions are scanned to determine the sentiment – whether this is positive, neutral, or negative, before comments are grouped into the most important themes, called Topics. Within minutes of a survey closing, a people leader can determine what’s top of their employees’ minds without having to review thousands of comments, line-by-line.
WorkBuzz’s Principal Employee Experience Consultant, John Backhouse, added: “This will be a huge benefit to HR leaders, giving them the ability to quickly cut through hundreds or even thousands of open comments to know if, on balance, employees feel positively or negatively about key employee experience challenges such as leadership, diversity and inclusion, career growth, and recognition, and identify any emerging themes.”
Available from 1 February 2022, Text Analytics will be accessible to customers on the newly launched ‘WorkBuzz Plus’ plan and has been custom-built by WorkBuzz’s internal development team.
“We initially explored integrating with an ‘off-the-shelf’ text analytics tool but found these were too generic and not accurate enough for employee feedback,” said Mitchell King, WorkBuzz’s Product Owner.
“With this in mind, over the last six months we’ve been carefully developing our own tool, which is powered by machine learning and training – this using thousands of anonymised comments from our clients’ actual surveys. AI is a developing field so it’s not always perfect, but at an overall level provides reliable insights, in real-time to our clients. And this is just the start. We plan to build on this initial version by feeding our algorithms more feedback which will further improve the accuracy.”
The WorkBuzz platform enables employers to receive insightful, real-time feedback from their staff via regular surveys which track employee experience and help companies to improve engagement and build more inclusive cultures
WorkBuzz is also introducing new platform plans – ‘WorkBuzz Starter’ and ‘WorkBuzz Plus’ – with Text Analytics being the main differentiator between the two. The new plans mean customers can select the best fit for their organisation and strategy requirements, whilst still benefiting from an employee engagement platform that allows for custom questions, flexible survey frequencies, and extensive reporting options.
To learn more about the plans and to see pricing, please click here.
Or to book a demo and see the WorkBuzz Text Analytics functionality in action, please click here.