As an HR leader, you’re no stranger to employee feedback surveys. Employee surveys are an essential tool for measuring and managing your organization’s progress, ensuring employee well-being, and determining areas for improvement. But after the results come in, that’s where the real work starts — manually analyzing your employee data is an arduous task, to say the least.
That’s why HR leaders are turning to AI tools with natural language processing (NLP) to optimize the analysis of qualitative data, such as written responses to employee surveys. HR tools with NLP functionality can help you gain a clearer organizational picture, and sharpen your strategic decision-making.
In this post, we’ll be exploring:
- Some background on NLP and its business use cases for HR.
- Why it’s risky for HR leaders to rely on manual data management.
- How atwork uses NLP to help companies reach their full potential.
Let’s dive in and see what NLP can do for your HR department.
What Exactly is NLP?
NLP is an area of artificial intelligence (AI) that can allow HR software like atwork to recognize, read, and analyze qualitative data and survey responses. In order to accomplish this, software equipped with NLP leverages machine learning and deep learning algorithms, using several techniques to process and understand text, beginning with tokenization.
When a computer tokenizes a text, it breaks it down into smaller parts. This dramatically speeds up the linguistic analysis process, and helps the software better understand the meaning of words and sentences, and how to use them when generating text to summarize employee feedback and survey responses.
As you might expect, NLP has significant implications for your department’s efficiency and productivity — and, by extension, your company’s long-term performance.
How Does NLP Help HR Teams?
NLP can revolutionize the way your HR team handles the collection and analysis of qualitative employee feedback and survey responses, strengthening your department’s company-wide impact.
Spend less time analyzing feedback and more time acting on it.
Especially as your company grows, manually analyzing employee feedback can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. This is a huge liability for HR leaders, because meaningful organizational change comes from acting on data, not analyzing it. NLP can help you slash the time it takes to arrive at action-worthy insights, so you can focus on creating lasting change.
NLP sharpens strategic decision-making for HR leaders.
Especially as your company grows, manually analyzing employee feedback can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. This is a huge liability for HR leaders, because meaningful organizational change comes from acting on data, not analyzing it. NLP can help you slash the time it takes to arrive at action-worthy insights, so you can focus on creating lasting change.
NLP delivers huge time and cost savings, especially at scale.
For a company of several thousand employees, it could take your team several months to sort through and analyze feedback on a survey. That’s both time-consuming and extremely costly. Software with NLP could accomplish the same task in a matter of seconds.
Let’s look at the other side of the coin for a moment. What problems do HR teams encounter when they rely on manual workflows?
The Operational Risks of Staying in “Manual Mode”
If your department operates manually, it’s important to take stock of the risks involved in that. Below are two of the most important pitfalls to consider.
1. Losing Time For What Truly Matters
HR leaders and teams need to place strategic action at the top of their list of goals, and be rigorous about keeping it there. However, when you tackle HR survey analysis manually, the mountain of work in front of you just keeps snowballing, and before you know it, analyzing data is the priority instead of acting on it.
When you outsource the analytical heavy lifting to AI, suddenly you and your team are left with an abundance of time for more meaningful, human work. And that’s what moves the needle of long-term, company-wide change.
2. Huge Amounts of Costly Manual Work
Manual HR workflows can become extremely pricey. As we mentioned, it can take months of ongoing work for an HR team at a company of several thousand people to analyze the results of a survey. Not to mention that you’re paying HR employees for two distinct workflows — first, you’re paying them to analyze survey data, and then you pay them to translate that data into an action plan.
AI can streamline the analysis and organization of huge volumes of survey data, freeing up financial resources that can be used for your company’s long-term improvement.
atwork’s groundbreaking HR software can help you spend less time and money looking for insights, and get busy acting on them instead.
How Does atwork Harness NLP for HR Teams?
atwork leverages state-of-the-art NLP technology to help HR teams streamline their operations and gain critical real-time insights into employee sentiment from qualitative feedback. Our HR software can help your department accomplish in a matter of seconds what used to be a months-long, labor-intensive process of survey management and analysis.
Cluster Massive Amounts of Qualitative Data in Seconds
Once your organization scales to a certain level, manual data management becomes a real pain. If you’re dealing with thousands of employee surveys but you’re looking for data about a specific topic — time management or company leadership, for instance — it can be a serious undertaking just to find and organize the info you need.
With atwork in your department, you could immediately cluster all your survey data and feedback around the areas you’re currently interested in, making data management significantly easier.
Filter Comments Based On Your Organization’s Needs
Every company has a unique vision, and a unique set of goals and priorities. Our NLP technology can help you rapidly zero in on specific questions or areas of interest.
If you’re trying to gauge whether your employees feel they have room to grow at your company, for example, you could filter out comments that don’t address that question.
Anonymize Surveys to Encourage Honest Feedback
For HR teams, anonymizing surveys and feedback is a powerful way to encourage employee transparency. When employees know they can respond to questions anonymously, they’re much more likely to provide their honest opinion rather than simply saying what they think the company wants to hear.
With atwork, you can communicate with employees publicly or anonymously in different situations. It’s how we help organizations maximize transparency to boost long-term performance. After all, you can’t make profitable organizational changes unless you get honest feedback.
The Future of HR Has Arrived
NLP is completely changing the game when it comes to the way HR teams operate. AI and NLP can help your department devote more time to strategically valuable work, rather than spending months manually sorting through surveys.
To learn more about what atwork can do for your company, contact us today.
