Digital Enterprise. White Paper. Capturing the Voice of the Employee: Enterprise Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

Transcription

1 Digital Enterprise White Paper Capturing the Voice of the Employee: Enterprise Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

2 About the Authors Praveen Mishra Praveen Mishra is a Business Development Lead with the Digital Enterprise Group at TCS. He has over nine years of experience spanning multiple technologies and domains. His areas of expertise include digital channels, mobility, and social media. Ankita Bhattacharjee Ankita Bhattacharjee is a Research Analyst with the Digital Enterprise Group at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). She has over two years of experience in social media management and marketing. Her responsibilities include managing listening tools and analytics platforms such as the TCS Listening Platform and its various social management offerings as well as supporting product related project deliveries. She holds both engineering and management degrees.

3 Abstract In today's highly competitive environment, people serve as a powerful differentiator and are at the heart of running successful businesses. Front-ending customer management, employees have a deep understanding of customer needs and concerns, an aspect crucial to service or product development and innovation. Not surprisingly, employees are now considered one of the best advocates as well as critiques of a brand, and their opinion is as important as that of customers' in determining brand health. Listening to and recognizing the voice of employees is therefore essential to enhancing the brand and driving positive customer experiences. Organizations are using internal communication strategies to provide employees with a robust platform to express their opinions and offer suggestions. The advent of Enterprise Social Media (ESM), which provides employees a platform to share ideas, opinions, and experiences across departments and geographies, has further revolutionized internal communication. Such 'virtual water cooler' platforms are a potent source of information that can be used to understand employee mindset. They also enable organizations to collaborate with employees to create long term strategies for achieving enterprise goals. There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization's overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE This paper discusses the importance of capturing and analyzing the voice of the employee. It outlines an integrated approach to ESM monitoring and analysis that can help companies better understand their employees, and engage them as active drivers of brand and organizational growth and customer service.

4 Contents Internal communication - Then and now 5 The importance of listening to the voice of the employee 5 Separating insights from the noise: A holistic approach to ESM monitoring and analysis 6 Voice of employee analytics and employee engagement 8 Listen, learn, and grow: The strategic benefits of ESM 9

5 Internal communication - Then and now Internal communication is an essential component of the marketing mix, especially in the services industry, where employee orientation towards enterprise goals and strategies is key to ensuring service excellence. Over the years, internal communication has evolved from static one-way memos and mails to more participative platforms such as discussion forums, blogs, and communities. Hierarchical organizational boundaries are being broken, initiating a free flow of thoughts and opinions among employees across departments and geographies. While organizations continue to use traditional methods such as surveys, performance management feedback, and others, they are realizing that focusing on standard scores fails to offer a holistic picture of employee opinion. ESM platforms help fill the gap, enabling senior management to understand not just the what but also the why behind an employee s opinion or feedback at a personal, departmental, and organizational level. The importance of listening to the Voice of Employee According to the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, ESM platforms are web based platforms that allow employees to communicate messages with specific co-workers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization. They enable employees to post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others. Such platforms enable employees to conveniently view messages, connections, text, and files that are posted, edited, and sorted by anyone in the organization, at a time of their choosing. More importantly, these platforms explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal employees who regularly act as communication partners¹. Frost and Sullivan, in their report, Analysis of the Global Enterprise Social Networking Market, revealed that the number of full-suite enterprise social networking subscribers reached 208 million in This represented an increase of nearly 30% from The firm expects that number to hit 535 million by 2018². The workplace is being reimagined from being a pure physical place to a digital environment and in many cases a combination of the physical and digital. Enterprise social media platforms are becoming the water coolers of the modern day workplace. The ability of enterprise social networks to transcend location and time barriers across global organizations in spreading knowledge and identifying talent is becoming crucial. As enterprise social media increases the velocity of communication and democratizes, companies have an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine a far more productive workplace. Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Head, Digital Enterprise Unit, Tata Consultancy Services. ESM has played a critical role in enabling enterprises to provide a voice to their employees. The logical next step is to listen to and interpret what they have to say, and translate their feedback into an actionable plan that can be implemented across departments. Enterprises can draw unique actionable insights from the vast repository of [1] Wiley Online Librabry, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History, and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations, 18th October 2013, 20th March, 2015, [2] EnterpriseApssToday, Enterprise Social Adoption is Growing, 6th June, 2014, 23rd February, 2015, 5

6 information provided by ESM, traditional data (survey, feedback), and social or online media monitoring. Monitoring and analyzing the voice of the employee provides valuable input for product innovation, workforce optimization, IT support, marketing, operations, and much more. Separating insights from the noise: A holistic approach to ESM monitoring and analysis Monitoring and analyzing the voice of the employee, especially in the case of large conversation volumes, can be challenging. In a recent Big Data industry study by TCS, sifting through this overwhelming data was listed as one of the top challenges in realizing value from Big Data initiatives in HR and/or talent management. Organizations need to first identify whom to listen to and when, and then decide what must be analyzed and how to interpret the analysis. A comprehensive ESM monitoring and analysis solution (Figure 1) should: a. Track employee conversations across the ESM platform b. Collate information from internal surveys and feedbacks c. Compartmentalize the data based on themes d. Analyze conversation sentiment and opinions e. Provide brand and enterprise level comparative analysis based on social buzz and online sources analysis f. Provide a single view of analyzed data for multi-level cause and effect analysis g. Visualize the analyzed data in the form of comprehensive dashboards and insights for executive flexibility Figure 1: Enterprise Social Media Monitoring Workflow Architecture Overview 6

7 The most important step is identifying and compartmentalizing the conversations that are most relevant. The theme of such conversations could be repetitive such as regular discussions on pre-determined or diverse topics ranging from ideation to gathering grievances about new company policies. Bias could impact data relevance, as some employees may be apprehensive about sharing negative feedback on social media. In addition, data use may be restricted, since some ESM platforms allow employees to form internal communities and groups where discussions are guarded by a privacy clause. Another challenge is combining information from traditional sources such as surveys, performance management feedback, exit interviews, and others with ESM data. Such a combination provides a more holistic picture of employee opinion, enterprise image, as well as internal PR effectiveness and grievance redressal. However, understanding employee opinions in the context of internal communication and ESM alone may not provide a complete picture of brand or enterprise health. Social media monitoring tools can be deployed to assess employee opinion related to competitive shifts, industry trends, and brand and/or enterprise performance. A 'cause and effect' understanding gained by combining multiple data sets is crucial for a more balanced view of employee opinion. The insights thus generated will also have to be logically compartmentalized and visualized to enable users at every organizational level to utilize them effectively. Flexible dashboards, logical compartmentalization, and strong analysis options will turn the employee opinion into actionable points, which can then be routed to concerned departments for swift attention. The various functional features that social media monitoring and analytics tools provide can be effectively extended to monitor, track, and analyze conversations on ESM. Dynamic and targeted monitoring criteria, coupled with effective text and opinion analysis can help enterprises gather important insights from their ESM conversations. Functional features such as multi-language content, demographic, location, and influencer analysis can also address specific enterprise requirements. 7

8 Voice of employee analytics and employee engagement Today, organizations are doing everything they can to retain talented employees and increase the pool of motivated and engaged employees. Several vendors are addressing this need by including voice of employee analytics in their employee engagement solutions. Table 1 provides a high level comparison of three such solution providers who currently provide basic ESM monitoring and analysis features as highlighted in the previous sections. This is not an exhaustive comparison of all tools, but a quick preview into key features. Features Allegiance: Maritzcx Dropthought: VoE Kanjoya: Employee Engagement ESM platform conversation tracking Yes (online feedback forms) Not specified Yes (Yammer, Facebook at work, internal ESM) Integration of offline source data Yes (specialized surveys) Yes Yes ( s, open-ended surveys) Classification of data into meaningful themes Not Specified Yes Yes Opinion and sentiment analysis Not Specified Yes Yes Social data inclusion and analysis Yes No Yes Analytics and reporting Yes Yes Yes Workflow management and routing Yes Not Specified Yes Additional features Real time reporting Real-time alerts via the DT Manager mobile app n n n Real-time user specific customized reporting Integration with leading HCM solutions Additional segmentation filters for units, positions, demographics and time Drawbacks n Data segmentation clarity not available n Cannot integrate internal ESM information n n Cannot integrate internal ESM information No social data tracking and integration Restricted to performance management module Figure 2: Comparative analysis of voice of employee features in employee engagement solutions The comparison highlighted above drives home the point that vendors are focusing on the inclusion of both online and offline sources for voice of customer analytics along with in-tool provisions for classifying and analyzing the data. The additional features that should essentially be a part of such solutions include ESM data integration, social media tracking, workflow management, and organization-wide accessibility of information. The common understanding of employee engagement being an HR driven initiative may constrain solutions to focus only on the 8

9 performance management module. The various features of conventional social media management tools such as workflows, social and online media tracking, offline data integration, workflow management modules, sentiment and opinion analytics, flexible data presentation capabilities, and others can supplement the dedicated ESM analytics tools to provide a complete Voice of Employee analytics solution. Vendors who currently have dedicated solutions for voice of employee tracking and analysis continue to evolve in their ability to provide a 360 degree view of employees and their opinions. Logical compartmentalization and text analytics provide actionable insights to boost employee engagement. Integration of ESM, traditional data sources, and social data will bring in greater flexibility and improve the quality of data interpretations. Listen, learn, and grow: The strategic benefits of ESM The rise of the social enterprise is transforming the future of internal communication as organizations dig deeper into employee pain points and understand what drives and motivates them. Capturing employee opinion on a single platform is a key component of the workplace reimagination process and bridges the gap across management levels, functions, and geographies. It offers several strategic benefits such as reduced communication costs and better employee engagement. Listening to employees and interpreting their opinion and feedback is also key to achieving a highly motivated and customer oriented workforce. This ultimately leads to increased employee and customer satisfaction as well as revenue growth. The voice of the employee is also an important strategic input for creating a more effective support environment aimed at managing and nurturing talent. In addition, tracking changes in employee behavior with respect to enterprise policies, departments, or industry trends allows organizations to initiate timely corrective actions to improve employee retention. ESM connects employees at every level and is critical to creating the perfect environment for collaborative ideation and innovation, key differentiators for competitive advantage. 9

10 About TCS' Digital Enterprise Unit The TCS Digital Enterprise unit applies the Digital Five Forces Mobility and Pervasive Computing, Big Data and Analytics, Social Media, Cloud, and Artificial Intelligence & Robotics to meet the unique needs and opportunities of each industry. We help clients reimagine their business models, products and services, customer segments, channels, business processes, and workplaces by leveraging a combination of the Digital Five Forces to gain sustained competitive advantage. Our experienced global team includes business strategy consultants, business analysts, digital marketers, user experience designers, data scientists, and engineers who are passionate about today's digital technologies and their impact on businesses. Backed by our technology vendor partnerships, pre-built customizable products and reusable assets, and deep industry expertise, we offer everything an enterprise needs for complete Digital Reimagination. Contact For more information about the TCS Digital Enterprise unit, visit: digital.enterprise@tcs.com Subscribe to TCS White Papers TCS.com RSS: Feedburner: About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled infrastructure, engineering and TM assurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata Group, India s largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has a global footprint and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at IT Services Business Solutions Consulting All content / information present here is the exclusive property of Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS). The content / information contained here is correct at the time of publishing. No material from here may be copied, modified, reproduced, republished, uploaded, transmitted, posted or distributed in any form without prior written permission from TCS. Unauthorized use of the content / information appearing here may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties. Copyright 2015 Tata Consultancy Services Limited TCS Design Services I M I 11 I 15