What is sentiment analysis? And how can it change your business?

Imagine having a real-time pulse on all of the people in your business at your fingertips. Finally, you can make sense of all the valuable data flowing into your performance management tools and leverage it to identify risks and opportunities to enhance people and business performance.

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Employee sentiment analysis is changing the way HR operates and will revolutionize how leaders will run their businesses. You no longer need to just imagine how this capability could transform business, the power is already available, and it is rapidly developing.

What is sentiment analysis?

For a long time, HR has relied on quantitative data entered in spreadsheets typically sourced from payroll systems, but there is only so much information you can extract from numbers.

Sentiment Analysis makes use of all your qualitative data, by predicting if it is negative, positive or neutral and to what degree. Qualitative data includes the text content of continuous feedback check-ins, diary notes, comments, onboarding & offboarding feedback, probation reviews, performance reviews, policy compliance, goal chat conversations, compliance interactions, business feedback requests, records, in fact any text that is entered onto the platform by employees.

Employee sentiment analysis graph

intelliHR’s sentiment analysis report

By identifying sentiment and visualizing it in drillable multi-dimensional real-time analytics, we can unlock powerful insights about employees and their supervisors including their current outlook.

Sentiment Analysis tools like in intelliHR’s analytics suite can heat-map positive and negative sentiment over the entire business, giving you a visual snapshot. This will allow you to identify areas of the business that require attention or areas that are doing well so you can replicate their success.

How does sentiment analysis work?

The software uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically natural language processing, to predict whether the sentiment in word combinations and phrases are positive, neutral or negative applying a numerical sentiment score on a range of -1.0 to +1.0. These scores are aggregated and visually presented to support in-application analysis across multiple dimensions including the data source, business units, supervisors, tenue and other general workforce demographics.

By visualizing sentiment among their workforce, managers and business leaders can more easily improve employee engagement, along with culture. They can be proactive in managing issues before they surface mitigating risk to their business and people. They can also use the information to improve their performance management frameworks with a focus on enhancing employee experience.

Gone will be the traditional engagement survey process. There will be no need to wade through pages and pages of text. With this automated alternative, you can process large sums of qualitative data, and even see the overall tone of responses. There is a great opportunity to leverage existing, frequent HR processes like“Check-ins” or employee pulse surveys, removing the need for annual engagement surveys.

How will sentiment analysis develop into the future?

Employee Sentiment Analysis is a powerful first step to help businesses get a real-time handle on their people, performance and culture. It’s an exciting development that can help diagnose areas for improvement and understand how your workforce is tracking.

The next big step will be linking sentiment to performance outcomes and then predicting future sentiment. The power of Sentiment Analysis is already beginning to transform businesses — are you ready for it to transform yours?

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