Augmenting Employee Retention Strategies With Sentiment Analysis

Employee turnover is a massive cost to businesses. It costs employers an average of 33% of a worker’s annual salary to replace a single employee. Per a research study published in the International Journal of Science and Research, “turnover rate among Fortune 500 companies in the IT industry is highest among all industries surveyed.” According to Gallup, only 15% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work, and this lack of employee engagement is what proves detrimental to employee retention.Gartner predicts that companies will spend roughly $100 billion a year by 2025 on market research. In the same vein, companies have begun adopting technologies to better gauge their internal workforce, as employee retention is as pivotal as customer retention to protecting the company’s bottom line. Machine learning algorithms are helping to predict an employee’s potential resignation before it hits the boss’ desk. It can also help employers assess candidates who seem promising culture-fits to the company during the hiring process, thereby further enhancing employee retention (and cutting costs) over time.

In a world with millions of employees, it’s not always easy to know exactly how each individual feels. Employee sentiment analysis powered by machine learning makes it easier for organizations. Employee sentiment analysis is the process of collecting large volumes of feedback and opinions from employers to analyze their perception of the organization and their feelings about work. While it is possible to send out time-consuming surveys by hand and begin to review feedback, the manual method is neither scalable nor efficient. It results in disparate spreadsheets across various HR personnels’ computers, which can result in more time, money, and energy spent in order to try to extrapolate any useful findings. As a result, organizations are turning to employee sentiment analysis software powered by artificial intelligence.

Employee sentiment analysis software leverages natural language processing, text analysis, predictive sentiment analysis and more to interpret employees’ emotions based on sarcasm, mixed opinions, qualified statements, and more. The software will predict whether a sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative by applying a numerical score between -1.0 and +1.0. Then, these scores are aggregated and presented visually to stakeholders, managers, HR, business units, and relevant personnel for assessment and discussion. All of this can take place in real-time, which results in supporting a more agile and proactive organization. As more data enters the software, the tool evolves and becomes smarter without the need for human intervention. With employee sentiment analysis technology, employers can overcome many of the hurdles that previously existed when it came to collecting feedback from employees, including:

• The ability to remain anonymous
• Having access to honest feedback rather than what employees think that HR wants to hear
• The option to collect a massive amount of data within a short amount of time (having a large data set helps to ensure that the results are statistically valid)

With this knowledge, managers and HR teams are able to proactively work towards boosting employee engagement and resolving issues before they become uncontrollable. In practice, having access to AI’s sentiment analysis allows employers to improve work culture, provide skills development opportunities, enhance team collaboration, share valuable information to increase productivity, and resolve engagement issues in real-time. With the ability to monitor how employees feel on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, employers have the insights they need to make better business decisions that are focused on improving the overall employee experience. In turn, this effort to increase employee retention will result in cost savings as the cost to recruit, hire, and train new talent is expensive.

Research from the Corporate Leadership Council has shown that highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave an employer, proving that employee retention and employee engagement go hand-in-hand. Thus, employee engagement should be of top priority within any organization so that employee retention can be maximized, as engaged employees lead to higher profits, higher shareholder returns, boosted sales, increased customer satisfaction, and better service, to name a few upsides, and employee engagement requires that employees are aligned with the organization’s goals and actually care about their role. Employee sentiment analysis software helps employers determine whether that is the case, and hopefully offers the ability for them to course-correct as needed.