“The real competitive advantage in any business is one word only, which is ‘people’ “ – Kamil Toume
Businesses realize the value of mining Voice of Customers (VoC) to derive actionable insights. However, they do not pay much attention to generating and mining Voice of employees (VoE). Mining VoE and acting on these insights can help create a very engaging workforce. This recent article from economist estimated that a one-point gain in employee satisfaction raises that of customers by 3.2 points in industries where workers have the most direct contact with customers, such as retail, restaurants and tourism.
To practice what we preach to our clients, we at SetuServ aimed to generate and mine feedback from ~50 employees we have. When we initially requested employees to provide constructive feedback, we generated some data but not enough to derive systematic insights. We then ran a contest to write kudos on anyone that they interacted with. This generated ~10x more data. Combination of a variety of such tactics and incentives helped us generate sufficient VoE data to analyze.
We then analyzed the comments using our proprietary text analytics solution to understand the areas our employees were strong and the areas they needed to improve. The following chart shows all the topics that our employees were strong at. We were glad to see that these strengths are what we need to build innovative solutions for our customers.
Analyzing the constructive feedback comments and performance evaluation comments showed that our employees needed to get better at communication and handling high pressure situations. We came up with a Learning and Development plan to improve these skills through training sessions, case studies and mock projects. We also created staffing opportunities that would help our employees practice these newly learned skills.
Overall, listening and acting on the voice of employees has helped us reduce the project time cycles, improved quality of deliverable and improved employee satisfaction. We plan to repeat this every quarter. Even large companies with hundreds of thousands of employees can adopt this solution. The new generation of text analytics solutions (such as our solution) can easily scale to mine the high volume of employee feedback.