Reduce Employee Churn with Advanced Sentiment Analysis

Employee churn is highly disruptive and costly for an organization. When employees leave an organization they take their experience and skills with them. This talent loss can cause a significant hit to business productivity and ultimately its competitiveness and bottom line. Not only is there a time and financial cost involved in recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, but a high rate of employee turnover also hurts the reputation of a valued business and makes it harder to hire talented staff. This is especially true in today’s competitive job market.

A high rate of employee churn is often related to employee dissatisfaction. Common causes for dissatisfaction include long hours, uncompetitive pay, poor benefits, ineffective management, or a negative atmosphere.

Monitoring employee satisfaction is crucial to guard against employee churn. If an organization can identify a pattern of discontent among its employees, it can take corrective actions before the discontent grows and translates into costly talent loss.

Monitoring workforce satisfaction

Some organizations use anonymous employer-sponsored surveys to monitor employee satisfaction and identify complaints among its workforce. Surveys are very useful because they provide a good overall view of the good and bad in the eyes of the employees. However, employee surveys are costly and infrequent and employees may not completely trust them even when they are anonymous.

In today’s digital age, employees are more likely to express their true opinions and air their discontent on social media and 3rd-party review websites such as Glassdoor. The challenge with these sources is the sheer amount of data to monitor. Facebook alone produces hefty amounts of data every second from its 2 billion monthly active users. Manually monitoring and aggregating all this unstructured information on a regular basis and in a timely fashion would be too expensive a proposition. Instead, these Big Data volumes call for automated solutions.

Sentiment analysis for employee retention

Sentiment Analysis software identifies opinions and emotions in text. For instance, in a recent analysis of employee reviews for a large retailer, NetOwl’s Sentiment Analysis revealed that employees were unhappy about management and pay but very happy about the company’s employee discount. An organization armed with this information can look into the specific management issues and making pay more competitive while maintaining their widely popular employee discount for employee retention and to attract new talent.

When looking into procuring Sentiment Analysis software, it’s important that the software go beyond identifying positive and negative language and be able to identify the precise objects of those sentiments (e.g., pay, management, employee discount) in what is known as Entity- and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.  In addition, it should be able to normalize both the sentiments and their objects so that the information can be aggregated and quantified for the larger picture of emerge.

To summarize, to preserve and grow an organization’s valuable workforce, it’s necessary to monitor employee satisfaction and identify their likes and dislikes. The more satisfied the employees, the lower the rate of employee turnover. For more information on how NetOwl’s advanced Sentiment Analysis software can help your organization contact NetOwl today.