Back in the day when I was getting my PhD and had to walk up the hill, in snow, both ways, backwards, I also had to code all my open-ended research questions by hand. Most of this statement is true, mostly the last part 🙂 Coding and analyzing open-ended questions produced rich insights, but wow, was it time consuming and hard to scale.
Fast forward to today, luckily there are many survey softwares that offer open-ended analysis. Yet, whenever I talk with someone who uses employee surveys as a part of their listening strategy, they tell me that if there is one thing we could do at QuestionPro that would really set us apart from others, it is to create a better way to analyze open-ended answers than is available in the market today. Well, challenge accepted.
Meet the next version of QuestionPro’s open-ended text analysis
We just incorporated our newest AI methodology into the results, and combined it with a team of HR experts and I/O psychologists who reviewed the themes, keywords, and overall analysis all manually as well. We leveraged the best of both worlds to come up with the text theme analysis that produces really valuable insights for our clients. Is it perfect? Of course not. It will be hard for any technology to truly replace the comprehension of a human reading every comment. But, does it produce really well thought through analysis and actionable insights? Absolutely.
In our most recent release we focused on enhancing the themes that most commonly come up in employee surveys. Things such as career advancement, wellbeing, DEIB, social connection, compensation (I can’t believe that’s not a four letter word) and so much more.
Our beta test clients have already shared feedback with us about the great benefit from the analysis they have seen. For example, the ways that teams show up for each other and pull through tough times. Or how recognition can be a very powerful way to keep employees engaged, and how it can be used effectively without monetary incentives to drive motivation. They are getting to real actionable insights and stories they can share much quicker and in a more meaningful way than they could before.
Upon thorough analysis we realized that most questions we asked in HR are directional, such as asking what a company can do better (e.g. How can we better support your growth and development?) or what a person likes the most (e.g. What about our culture do you like the most?). This is why we created a version of analysis that does not include sentiment, as it’s not a valuable functionality for these types of questions. Updated sentiment will be layered on in our next release, where the person doing the analysis will be able to choose whether it’s a valuable enhancement for the particular question they are analyzing, or not, and decide whether to use it in their final analysis accordingly.
To make sure all of the stakeholders can benefit from this new feature, the new text analysis is available and configurable for every manager dashboard, so that way every person leading the team in the organization can be even closer to hearing and knowing what their immediate team thinks and feels. Like the rest of the analysis, the responses can be kept anonymous and reported within a confidentiality threshold that the organization chooses.
We are really proud of this newest release because we know that it will help our clients make even more significant improvements in their employee experience, and we are already starting to see the results.
Log into your analytics portal to check out our new Text Analytics feature!
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