As the calendar year is coming to its half way mark, many companies are preparing for H2 and asking workers to fill out surveys that can give them a glimpse into what can be improved for the last half of the year.
Chief people officer, HR departments, and team leaders all want to know the same thing at this time: how content are my employees with their jobs, compensation, benefits, career trajectory, etc. This informational is crucial to the improvement of any business and when correctly addressed can be extremely beneficial to the lives of the employees.
So why is collecting this information so difficult? As it turns out, most of the friction in collecting accurate data from employees happily is due to the method of data collection. Said in other words, the way surveys are administered to the workforce is the reason they are not effective. There are 2 large blockers that prevent surveys from doing their job effectively: the lack of true anonymity and empathy.
True Anonymity Trumps
Engagement surveys all boast anonymity, but are they really? In the constant whirlwind of corporate America, anonymity often gets confused with confidentiality. Though it’s true that there is never a completely sure thing such as anonymity in the workplace, different products do take different precautions to help protect employees by putting guardrails on their engagement solutions that limit scope of managers. However, if management really wants to find out who said what on a typical survey, they can easily do so. This inherent flaw in survey design breaks trust between employees and the engagement solution, meaning that employee responses won’t represent reality and should not be taken at face value.
Weeve’s employee engagement program works around the basic assumption of true anonymity for all employees. We know if employees don’t feel comfortable using our products, we won’t be getting to the truth of employee issues moving forward. Thus, we have built a product and process that puts anonymity and trust at the center. Team leaders can never see at the individual worker level what employees said which phrase, what their specific emotions and tones were, or how they scored on certain responses. This is communicated to all employees when speaking with Kim and emphasized throughout the entire process, hoping to drive home the fact that we take anonymity very seriously.
Empathy and Trust are key
When administering and analyzing survey results, honestly of the responses from employees is key. If an employee doesn’t trust that their team leader will be able to properly address their concerns and instead will retaliate against them for speaking their minds, workers aren’t likely to be honest about their concerns in the first place. For this very reason, surveys are known for being very poor substitute for face-to-face communications: they do not inspire trust and thus they do not capture honest employee feedback.
Weeve’s empathetic AI chatbot, Kim, changes all of that. The idea behind Kim is for her to create enough trust between managers and employees that such people feel comfortable speaking up about their concerns without hiding behind typical “1-5” survey questions. Kim will continue to keep talking to your people all year long, allowing you to stay in touch with their issues and inspire them about the mission and purpose of the organization.
Weeve
Weeve is a SaaS solution that can help with all your employee engagement needs. Utilizing a first-in-class ML based chatbot named Kim, Weeve allows businesses to have human conversations with employees to figure out workplace issues and solve them faster - all at scale and a price that is right. With Weeve, you can be sure that your employees will be heard and engaged.