How Qualtrics analyzes employee morale to build loyalty

What would happen if 28% of a company’s staff planned to quit within the next year? This type of rotation may be typical of fast food restaurants, where working conditions are such that staff come and go as quickly as orders, but where employees need to have several years of experience before bringing a significant contribution to the company is worrying. However, such a turnover is not inevitable. Managers have the means – and the duty – to improve engagement, transforming an employee who is considering leaving into an employee who wants to stay.

At least that’s the theory from Qualtrics, which compiled numbers from its employee engagement surveys and combined them with data from HR systems, collaboration tools and other sources to build a profile. details of an employee’s attitudes, called Employee Experience ID. The company will use these “profiles” in its new tool: Employee Journey Analytics. The latter aims to identify key moments when managers can influence employee behaviors – when hiring or onboarding, when they return from parental leave or get a new work PC – by looking at data. global Employee Experience ID.

HRD and DSI: at the heart of the employee loyalty process

You might think that it’s up to the human resources manager to take care of it, but since a large part of the work today is done with and through IT systems, CIOs have a key role to play on two levels: in integrating experience management systems, whether from Qualtrics or others, and ensuring employees have a positive experience with company IT systems. “The HRD and the CIO are the two people who, firstly, are in contact with each employee and, secondly, have the greatest impact on their engagement and loyalty”, explains Brad Anderson, president of Qualtrics’ products and services segment. To illustrate the potential influence of CIOs on retention, he refers to the Qualtrics study. This reveals that employees who say they have access to technology that helps them in their work are 158% more engaged. 61% of respondents also say that it encourages them to stay in their company for more than three years.

Forrester raises privacy concerns

Forrester senior employee experience analyst David Brodeur-Johnson expressed concern about the privacy implications of being able to dig deep into an employee’s survey responses and their correlation with events in the workplace. Historically, the Qualtrics platform imposes limits on privacy by not allowing managers to break down data into groups of less than six or eight people, thereby preserving the anonymity of individual responses. “This type of information is powerful, but if it can be used in a punitive way, we think it’s dangerous,” he explains.

According to him, CIOs have a stewardship role to play in this regard: “CIOs need to establish certain limits on how this information will be used. Are they adhering to their data governance policies, cybersecurity policies? Are they opening up the business to other risks that have not been anticipated, in HR or elsewhere? “. This must be balanced with the possibility of playing a mediating role. CIOs who support the creation of this type of data can be “considered as strategic partners aiming to gather more insights into the employee experience. »

The analysis of well-being at work: a competitive field

Qualtrics, majority-owned by SAP, isn’t the only vendor trying to give a clearer picture of employee morale, and helping employers act on it. Earlier this month, Oracle announced an addition to its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management suite, called Oracle ME. This includes a feature, Touchpoints, which captures and monitors the morale of employees and suggests, to the manager, measures to take accordingly. Workday also incorporates similar functionality into its SaaS offering. The company in 2021 acquired Peakon, a system for collecting real-time data on employee well-being, and uses this data to provide recommendations to managers, either as a standalone tool or by integrating it into its human resources management platform.

Meanwhile, Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) has added APIs to its core survey platform to exchange data with Salesforce, Teams, and other enterprise apps to provide a broader representation of customer engagement. used for analysis in tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI. The problem today, according to Brad Anderson, is that “companies have many different ways of listening, but it’s all fragmented. »

Welcoming the employee even before their first day

To solve this problem, Qualtrics collects and consolidates much more than data from employee surveys. To create its Employee Experience IDs, Qualtrics also connects to HR software to learn an employee’s position in the hierarchy, recent performance reviews, and key life events such as returning from parental leave, expense management systems to identify frequent travelers, Microsoft Viva to understand team work patterns, and IT service management tools to see how many support tickets are filed by an employee and to what extent they are resolved quickly or correctly. Qualtrics itself does this through an integration with ServiceNow, for example.

Thanks to the acquisition of Clarabridge in October 2021, Qualtrics can also analyze employee sentiment, not only in surveys or support tickets, but also in public channels of chat platforms such as Teams or Slack, reveals Brad Anderson . Conversely, Workday can only perform such sentiment analysis on comments explicitly provided in the free text fields of Peakon surveys. Employee Journey Analytics, on the other hand, provides an overview of morale, either for the whole company or for groups of employees, around various interactions – reception, IT support, return from leave for care. Dashboards present the strength and direction (positive or negative) of employee well-being graphically to help HR departments develop action plans.

Finally, Brad Anderson reported that a multinational retail company found that when managers messaged or emailed new hires before their first day on the job, they were more satisfied and less stressed in their new job. Of course, ticking boxes is no substitute for empathy: employees need to feel that these messages are genuine and not automated, and managers need to follow up regularly.