A New Era in Employee Feedback Analysis
Introducing Sunbeam for Employee Feedback
Employee engagement surveys have long been a staple in organisations seeking to foster a motivated, productive workforce. There is a broad consensus that a bottom-up approach to dealing with the output of engagement surveys is the best approach to driving change at the team level. Consequently, survey platforms have quickly evolved to enhance the manager's experience, with the logic that the manager is the key stakeholder who needs to be supported.
However, understanding and taking action on themes at a company level cannot be overlooked. Some issues are beyond any individual manager's control and must be addressed by HR and executives, especially where many managers find they are all facing the same issues.
From talking to countless HR leaders, we consistently hear the same challenge: qualitative feedback at a company level is overwhelming. That makes it difficult to know where to take action, and the existing approaches aren't fit for purpose.
The Limitations of Topic Analysis in Engagement Surveys
They Are Too Broad: Existing topic models are a slight evolution of word clouds, grouping problems into categories that are too broad to drive meaningful action. They typically reiterate what is already known and easiest to detect, such as frequent mentions of salary and rewards, or comments about noise in offices. Not a single HR leader we’ve spoken with has been able to recall a business improvement or insight that was uncovered by this type of model.
They Offer a False Promise of Time Saving: Although presented as time-saving tools, the reality is that you end up having to read through hundreds of comments anyway to provide the necessary context needed for action. Additionally, it’s tricky to do this without unconscious human bias creeping in, leading to a focus on comments that fit a particular agenda.
The Existing Solution: Insights from HR Leaders
Additional Consultancy Spend: Organisations often incur additional fees to have survey providers conduct further analysis for deeper insights on either the entire company or specific topics. A hidden cost but essential to fulfil the promise of the purpose of the survey itself.
Manual Analysis by HR Leaders: This process can take days and is again subject to human bias that fits a certain narrative.
Leaders Resort to ChatGPT: This demonstrates a desire to leverage AI advancements for better qualitative data analysis. However, this approach has two main drawbacks:
Privacy Concerns: Putting user feedback into an unapproved tool raises significant privacy issues.
Utility of the Summary: ChatGPT (or similar models), while advanced, is not a specialist. It provides a mix of good and bad advice, and is difficult to drive action from.
They do nothing: Recognising that there is a huge amount more insight within the comments themselves but the task too cumbersome to take on manually, they rely solely on the topic analysis of broad themes to guide decisions.
Sunbeam: A Better Way
At Sunbeam, we leverage the latest advancements in AI combined with extensive domain expertise to deliver precise, actionable insights that go much deeper than current topic models.
Here's how we do it:
Advanced AI with Domain Expertise: Our model digs at least two levels deeper into topics compared to existing solutions, replacing broad topics such as ‘salary’ with insights such as “your employees believe the salary model is unfair ”, or “pay rises were not in line with inflation”. We have used our years of experience in the field to train our model to be a true expert, rather than a generalist.
Actionable Themes: We break broad topics down into tangible problems that can be addressed at the company level. We help enhance HR’s role, while also elevating the strategic involvement of the C-suite in addressing employee feedback in a simple way.
Vision for the Future: Our goal is to make interpreting and taking action on text based feedback, from any source, as seamless as handling quantitative data. With Sunbeam, organisations can transform qualitative feedback into strategic actions, ensuring that feedback can truly be used as a way to inform strategic decisions.
Conclusion
The ability to understand and act on qualitative feedback is more critical than ever. Sunbeam offers a solution that not only improves the efficiency and accuracy of feedback analysis but also empowers HR leaders and executives to take meaningful action.
Sunbeam ensures that organisations can navigate the complexities of qualitative data with confidence and precision.
Discover how Sunbeam can overlay on your existing survey tools to elevate your organisation’s ability to act on feedback by contacting us.