While many organizations have a system for obtaining
Here's the problem: Appearing to ignore
If workers sense that their employers are indifferent to their feedback, it will affect their feelings toward their workplace, says product leader, Wojtek Kubik, head of product, employee experience at Qualtrics, an experience management company specializing in survey and data collection. But even for the most well-intentioned employers, effectively gathering, analyzing and acting on employee feedback can be a challenge.
To improve the process, Qualtrics has added three new AI capabilities to its suite of offerings: a dashboard assistant that aggregates and summarizes survey feedback, including open-ended questions; a widget that interprets employee engagement data and offers science-backed actions for improvement; and a tool that prompts respondents for additional input if an answer seems incomplete or vague.
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The result is a quick turnaround of unbiased, helpful information that leaders can immediately make use of, whether it be a deeper look at how employees are feeling, or planning ways to make the workplace better.
"Employees want to feel heard, and organizations need feedback mechanisms to not just hear them, but interpret that [feedback] and prioritize what they are going to work on," says Neal Quinn, group product manager for Qualtrics XM for Employee Experience product line.
Fortune 500 companies such as adidas and Allstate are already putting the new technology to use and are seeing good results.
"To turn something around within 48 hours, with our fresh data, for high-level executive board presentations is not something we'd been able to accomplish," Kiera Connerty, global employee listening and engagement team lead at Allstate, said in a release. "We can now go beyond engagement and other scores, glean things employees are talking about, [and] how they feel about them in such a short timeframe."
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By leveraging AI to save time and present easily digestible information, managers can immediately isolate common themes among both straightforward and longer, complex responses, speak with their team about the results and put action plans in place if necessary, says Kubik. All suggestions are pre-researched by Qualtrics before being integrated in their assistance tool.
"AI is phenomenally good at taking data, as well as open text, summarizing it and presenting it back to an individual to help them understand and make it a little bit more human," he says. "There are a number of things that we do [at Qualtrics] to ensure people actually trust our AI, like citing sources and letting them know where the data actually came from."
When employees feel like their opinions matter, organizations reap benefits such as more meaningful feedback. Qualtrics found that, when prompted to expand upon answers, it was not perceived as burdensome and respondents who did so generated responses that were four times more descriptive.
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A well-constructed, timely employer response also establishes trust with workers and a ROI for businesses in the forms of higher retention, engagement and productivity rates.
"You build trust based on action, not on words," says Kubik. "This gives you the opportunity to show employees that you care about their input, that you care about making the business better. You care about creating a better experience at work. Once you do that, once you build baseline trust, and once you do that repeatedly, you actually help the conversation and the organization become much more open in terms of feedback and in terms of how to create a great workplace."
