Silverman Research

12/10/2023

While HP's recent research reveals shocking statistics about workers' unhealthy relationship with their jobs globally, it prompts a more fundamental question: Are we just realising this now?

Perhaps the traditional work model has been broken for longer than we'd like to admit. In an age where technology allows for flexible work arrangements, it's a bit surprising that companies now understand the need for emotional intelligence in leadership and tools that cater to remote work. The research might be new, but the issue is ancient. Is the corporate world too slow to adapt, or have employees been too quiet for too long?

One in three employees have an unhealthy relationship with work, and this is impacting business bottom lines. That’s according to new global data from tech giant HP.

10/10/2023

This article reveals a troubling trend where employee benefits are becoming the primary driver for job choices. While they're important, we must question whether this shift towards individualism is eroding the sense of community and shared values within workplaces. Are we losing sight of the collective good in favour of personal perks?

Panellists at the CIPD’s Employee Experience Conference discussed how power has shifted, with businesses now having to show why people should want to work for them

02/10/2023

This article from People Management suggests that rather than relying on an annual or quarterly staff survey to assess engagement, anonymised AI email/messaging monitoring can allow an organisation’s HR team to pick up on prevailing employee sentiment. This is a bad idea for the following reasons:

1. Monitoring communications can infringe on employee privacy, creating a "Big Brother" environment that stifles open communication and trust.

2. AI can still misinterpret human emotions, especially nuances like humor or sarcasm.

3. Monitoring may deter employees from discussing sensitive issues in emails, leading to a culture of silence and making AI monitoring less effective.

4. AI could perpetuate existing biases, and human interpretation of AI data could introduce additional biases.

5. Unclear laws regarding employee privacy and AI monitoring pose compliance risks, with potential for litigation if employees feel their privacy has been violated.

AI has much to offer employee listening, but a focus on monitoring emails and messages is not the way to go.

13/09/2023

Did you know that the latest trends in employee surveys are moving towards AI-assisted tools that allow for a faster response time and deeper insights? Increasingly, employers are seeking to collect data quickly and efficiently in order to uncover key trends in the workplace.

At the same time, employees are seeing increased engagement with surveys that have interactive features such as gamification and questions that ask for open-ended responses. These approaches help encourage employees to share their true thoughts and feelings in order to inform decisions.

12/09/2023

UK employers are struggling to keep up with low employee engagement 🤔 The latest trends suggest that outdated HR practices, inadequate employee feedback, and a lack of diversity in the workplace are to blame.

The UK has one of the lowest employee engagement rates in the world. Some of the key causes can be traced all the way back to the industrial revolution

19/04/2023

You don't hear much about personal narratives in employee experience. This article suggests that understanding employees' personal life narratives can help create fulfilling work experiences that attract and retain talent.

A different approach to personality at work could help employers retain workers.

24/01/2023

Great resource from Mike Stevens on text analysis solutions. One helpful thing I've found when comparing text analysis software is to get a few hundred comments from an old survey, understand and categorise them yourself first, then put them through the various tools and compare their outputs to your own analysis.

A roundup of some of the leading tools for text analytics for market research, user research and customer experience feedback data.

06/12/2022

Employee Experience trends for 2023 from Stephen Young of WTW:

While it’s difficult to predict any specific event, one thing we can predict is that through 2023 and beyond, business and employees will face ongoing disruption.

22/11/2022

🆃🆁🅴🅽🅳🆂 🅸🅽 🅴🅼🅿🅻🅾🆈🅴🅴 🆂🆄🆁🆅🅴🆈🆂 - 🅲🅾🅽🅲🅻🆄🆂🅸🅾🅽

Despite the occasional disparaging remarks I make about employee surveys, there are many ways in which they remain helpful.

✅ They give increased prominence to HR and Comms Leaders in the boardroom.

✅ They focus senior leaders on important issues.

✅ They form the backbone of most listening strategies.

If they’re done well, with a focus on action, they can sometimes make a difference. However, the recent emergence of employee experience management and continuous listening suggest employee surveys on their own are unlikely to achieve the kind of action that organisations want to see – and this is the cost of inaction in this area.

It’s clear that employee surveys, and how they are being used, is changing. Looking for more signals and giving people the opportunity to have their say in a more transparent way is likely to improve people’s experience of work.

The way that work gets done these days, and the technology available, provides so many opportunities to find out how people are feeling, their issues and their good ideas.

This last point is particularly salient, as many employee surveys are naturally skewed towards looking for problems. As a consequence, organisations do not always spend much time looking for opportunities. Attending to gripes, complaints, and low scores ignores half of the potential insights out there. What about ideas and suggestions for better ways of working, policies and procedures, products and services or structures?

👉 Interested in improving the impact of your employee surveys? 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝗮 𝗗𝗠 𝘃𝗶𝗮 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻.

👉 Read 𝟭𝟬 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆𝘀 here:

Over a decade ago, I wrote an article for HR Magazine. It argued that employee surveys weren’t particularly good at giving employees a say or bringing about action.

17/11/2022

To Craft a Better Employee Experience, Collect the Right Data

When rethinking their employees’ experience at work, leaders need tools that allow them to efficiently and effectively learn what their diverse group of employees actually needs so that they can craft policies accordingly. For the past 10 years, in their respective work, the authors have been appl...

15/11/2022

🆅🅸🅳🅴🅾 - Trends in Employee Surveys No. 8

Why bother to get survey respondents to write a comment to an open-ended question when you could just ask them to submit their response as a video recording?

Afterall, how much of a considered or nuanced response are people really giving when they have to type everything out? One thing I’ve learned over the years is that experiences and issues at work are often very complex, with many interacting elements. Yet most of the written responses to open-ended questions in a survey are barely one or two sentences long.🤔

Surely allowing people to actually talk through their feedback in some detail would elicit more insightful data?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, collecting data using video in employee surveys has been very slow to take off. The confidentiality/anonymity issues it raises and how comfortable participants are with this have been major sticking points. However, there are some signs of movement in this area.

This main thing to be aware of is that automated video analysis has been surging in other areas of opinion/market research over the past decade. Video analysis is not only able to analyse what someone is talking about (using speech recognition and NLP), it can also capture sentiment and emotion through analysing facial expressions, vocal tone and breathing patterns. Facial expression data (eg through a we**am) can also be captured alongside other data collection methods, (eg as the participant is conversing with a chatbot).

As this approach becomes more ubiquitous in other areas of research, and acceptance of giving feedback by video grows, perhaps video might become a more common response option in employee surveys.

👉 Interested in improving the impact of your employee surveys? 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝗮 𝗗𝗠 𝘃𝗶𝗮 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻.

👉 Read 𝟭𝟬 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆𝘀 here: https://lnkd.in/ehPwM3VX

11/11/2022

I can't recall an instance of when pay emerged as key driver of job satisfaction in any employee survey analysis I've been involved with. But it looks like this is changing. The cause? Inflation and pay equity of new hires.

Increasing pay has suddenly become the #1 topic at work. How can companies stay ahead of inflation yet manage rewards strategically?