Understanding Employee Experience in Real-Time with Aware

Greg Moran, a C-level digital, strategy, and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience provided this article as a companion piece to his podcast What Your Team REALLY Thinks…in Real Time!  

Current Challenge

Most companies have no way of understanding how topics, messaging, internal/external events are truly impacting our employees and culture. According to Gartner, 82% of employees agree it is important that their organization sees them as a person, not just an employee.  In order to illuminate this topic, ILI has asked me to provide an overview of Aware’s approach to addressing the challenge of listening and giving a voice to employees.

Why This Matters, Now.

Gartner recently stated that human-centered work design can increase employee performance by as much as 54%. The market is quickly shifting to leverage human analytics to inform practices like performance management, building engagement, enhancing culture and experience, and improving retention.

Current Gaps

Traditional engagement questionnaires and pulse surveys only provide point-in-time insight on specific questions or topics. Without additional solutions, companies will continue to fall short in their ability to understand employee experience in a fully comprehensive and real-time manner. In order to drive faster response and more proactive change, companies require new solutions to close these gaps:

The challenges with a survey-based approach:

• No comprehensive understanding of what employees are currently talking about and how they talk about specific topics.
• No ability to look at toxic or disgruntled behavior separately from sentiment (negative sentiment is not always a cause for concern in the enterprise).
• Lack of data to inform an approach to employee experience
• Inability to capture a silent majority or know if an issue is brewing before it turns into a larger distraction.

How Innovative Companies are Closing the Gap

Forward-thinking, global companies go beyond pulse surveys, performance reviews, and focus groups. They augment the information derived from traditional sources with a real-time, continuous understanding of employee voice and experience. These companies use technologies that derive authentic insights from conversations already happening naturally within platforms like Slack, Workplace from Meta, Teams, and others.  In the words of one of Aware’s customers “The ability to understand and listen to our partners, and look at sentiment differently, be clear on where we’ve missed something and where we need to lean back in has been incredibly important this last year.  Giving this glimpse into how [employees] are humanly responding to things … has been really supportive of a broader enterprise goal of ‘it’s not an us and them’ piece.’ This is a way we can help them see each other as people.”

The Aware Solution

Your company needs a system in place to understand real-time employee engagement, so you can authentically say, ‘We hear you’. Innovative companies who do this well are adopting platforms such as Aware, which offers best-in-class technology to understand and make sense of employee signals:

• Derives continuous, authentic insights from conversations, without relying on surveys
• Understands and treats sentiment and toxic behavior independently
• Offers automated reporting and alerts that fit within your existing business review framework
• Provides controls to align with existing data privacy and compliance frameworks
• Does not require IT resources for implementation and can integrate within minutes

What’s in the Box?

Aware offers a robust platform that solves additional challenges you may face across your business, including eDiscovery, retention, legal holds and compliance monitoring. Aware is committed to providing leading security, compliance, and analytics for collaboration, no matter which tool you use to get work done, now or in the future.

Intelligent Data Fabric

Aware’s data fabric is built to capture unique collaboration characteristics. Securely “listening” to all posts, messages, and shared files, and preserve revision and deletion histories.

Data Retention and Destruction

Reduce the liability of litigation by systematically purging stored conversation data.  Apply records retention policies and automatically purge select content from both the collaboration platform and the data fabric.

Data Holds and Search & Discover

Preserve and protect data from spoliation. Create legal holds, quickly search held data by custodian, date range, and/or keyword.

Privacy and Compliance Monitoring

Confirm that employees remain compliant with industry regulations when communicating on your collaboration platform. Easily fulfill data subject access requests and the right to be forgotten.

To learn more, please visit www.awarehq.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture and teaches part-time on the topic at Ohio University.

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