From startups to global enterprises, automation is revolutionizing how work gets done. The Cloud Automation market worldwide is projected to grow by $103.9 Billion, a compounded growth of 24.7%. Many businesses are adopting automation to reduce manual tasks, complete work quicker, and spend more time on complex, human-centered tasks.
Meanwhile, HR leaders are looking for new technology solutions, as Gartner reports that 55% of HR leaders believe their current HR technology solutions do not match their current and future business needs.
So, how could HR teams use automation to better fit their business needs while reducing manual/simple tasks?
One way is rethinking employee engagement surveys that are deployed, reported, and managed manually by HR. The survey is developed and pushed to employees, results are tallied, and an executive shares thoughts on ways in which the leadership team can improve the culture and environment.
This process fails to capture how your employees truly feel on most days. It’s manual and rote, usually relying on the same questions asked again each year. These types of engagement surveys rarely uncover actionable insights that HR teams can use to create change.
A Better Way to Manage Employee Engagement
At Alchemer, we believe there are three key things you can do to improve this process:
1. Send shorter, more dynamic engagement surveys more often.
2. Wire the feedback into the business systems HR teams use.
3. Earn better responses by acting on employee feedback.
Streamlined engagement surveys for more frequent feedback and improved insights
HR teams can use automation to send short surveys with dynamic questions that vary based on an employee’s role, location, or previous answer.
Shorter surveys tend to produce better response rates. Automation can ensure the surveys are delivered at key times, like 30/60/90 days after hire. Getting timely feedback allows your team to address issues they can resolve sooner, rather than waiting until the end of the year.
HR teams no longer need to be so prescriptive in how they ask questions, thanks to the ability of LLMs and AI to understand text and interpret sentiment. This means you can ask simple questions in open text, letting employees put their own voice into the feedback. For instance, a two-question survey could include open text boxes for questions like “What is the company doing well?” and “How could the company improve?” This allows employees to put their own voice, thoughts, and feelings into the feedback.
Thus, feedback platforms powered by LLMs and AI make it easier for employees to share their input and for HR teams to interpret it quickly in a way that drives actionable insights.
The path to receiving valuable employee feedback is reducing friction. HR teams need to make everything that supports how you work as simple as possible.
Integrated feedback: Delivering data directly to the systems HR teams rely on
Being able to connect feedback to the core systems that are running your operation makes that data easier to manage and improve the experience better for all employees.
Now, feedback platforms can integrate feedback data into everyday systems, like Workday or Greenhouse, enabling faster action. Wiring in feedback data empowers HR teams to leverage the information within these systems to make specific, timely changes. With this capability, HR teams can see feedback data in the systems they already use.
The more channels and opportunities you have to listen to your employees, the better. However, the more you integrate that data into your HR team’s workflows, the more employees will feel valued as individuals because challenges are addressed proactively.
Driving action: Simplify planning, prioritizing, and responding to employee feedback
You need to earn employee feedback. Engaging in autonomous feedback methods allows HR teams to listen at scale and take action.
Sometimes responses can be totally autonomous. For instance, you can program feedback platforms to automatically send additional information when a survey response suggests the user needs it.
But integrating feedback makes it easier to take action, even when more complex actions are required. Remember the short, two-question survey discussed above collecting open text responses? For most companies, that remains a manual process, with the time burden on HR teams to decipher all of the open text responses. For larger organizations with thousands of employees, this makes open text responses almost untenable.
But now, text analysis can reveal employee themes and sentiment across vast amounts of employee feedback responses, enabling HR teams to recognize trends and see patterns that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible without AI-powered text analysis.
This text analysis makes it clear to HR teams where they need to apply their efforts to create a better workplace. In short, AI clears up HR teams from doing the most manual tasks while also giving them insight into where to spend their time, clearing up complex problems or solving for wide-ranging issues. In the end, using text analysis to understand how employees really think and feel will make them feel seen, heard, and valued – increasing employee engagement.
Automation helps HR teams drive a better employee experience
Employee feedback platforms are no longer required to use a “big brain” concept where all feedback is stuck in a data silo, only to be accessed at year-end by specific executives.
Instead, most companies are moving to a “nervous system” model where feedback is automatically distributed to the systems HR teams use every day.
HR teams can truly do more with employee feedback by sending shorter surveys (often in open text boxes), wiring the feedback to systems your team uses, and then taking quicker action on trends or sentiments revealed by open text analysis.
Ryan Tamminga is SVP of Product and Services at Alchemer, a customer feedback platform. Ryan has over 15 years of experience in both industry and consulting roles with Fortune 100 companies across products, media, resources and healthcare sectors. He has a proven track record for improving core operations performance, providing thought leadership and driving results through strategy development, operating model design, processes excellence, and implementation of enabling technologies. Ryan’s latest product release is for Alchemer Pulse, AI text analysis that’s purpose-built for customer experience and feedback programs. Learn more at Alchemer.com/Pulse.
