PEOPLE ANALYTICS TECHNOLOGY: DEEP DIVE INTO EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT & EXPERIENCE AUTHORS: PRIYANKA MEHROTRA & STACIA GARR - REDTHREAD RESEARCH
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
People Analytics Technology: Deep Dive Into Employee Engagement & Experience Authors: Priyanka Mehrotra & Stacia Garr © 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 1
Contents
About RedThread. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Key Findings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
PAT Critical to Staying in Touch with Employees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
PAT Market Evolving Quickly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
A Closer Look . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Understanding Employee Engagement & Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
How Tech Can Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Employee Engagement And Experience Vendors’ Capabilities . . . . . . . 11
Customers Are Happy With Their Engagement And Experience Vendors. . 13
Employee Engagement And Experience Vendors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Employee Engagement Vendors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Putting the framework into action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Employee Experience Vendors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Putting the framework into action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
“Passive Primary” Vendors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Putting the framework into action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Looking Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Appendix 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Appendix 2: Summary of methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Appendix 3: Authors & Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 2
About RedThread
Sure, we’re experts in performance, people analytics, learning, and
D&I—and we’re well-versed in the technologies that support them. But
we’re also truth-seekers and storytellers in an industry often short on
substance, and too full of @#$%. Our mission (indeed, our very reason for
existing) is to cut through the noise and amplify what’s good. We look for
the connections (or red threads) between people, data, and ideas—even
among seemingly unrelated concepts. The result is high-quality, unbiased,
transformative foresight that helps you build a stronger business.
To learn more, reach out to us at hello@redthreadresearch.com or visit
www.redthreadresearch.com.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 3Key Findings
1. Employee engagement and experience became extremely
critical in 2020-21. People analytics tech that focused on employee
engagement and experience helped business leaders understand
what was happening with their people—both with data and at scale.
67% of PAT vendors from our study reported employee engagement
as a primary area of focus in 2020, compared to 60% a year earlier.
Similarly, 58% of vendors stated employee experience as a primary
area of focus in 2020, versus 43% in 2019.
2. Employee engagement and experience are different but related
to each other. Employee experience has a much broader scope than
employee engagement. Engagement is the outcome of employee
experience. A people analytics technology vendor is a company that
uses people data to help companies understand their employee
engagement or experience.
3. People analytics tech vendors in this space fall into 3 categories.
Each category comprises of a framework for the vendors included
within it:
a) Employee Engagement Vendors:
• Professional services background. Vendors founded
by people with a strong background and experience in
professional services, such as consulting.
• Employee engagement native. Vendors for whom primary
bread and butter continues to be engagement surveys.
• Employee engagement via other talent areas. Vendors
known for their other products, such as performance
management, along with employee engagement.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 4b) Employee Experience Vendors:
• Focused on employee engagement and experience. Vendors
primarily focused on creating and improving personalized
experiences for employees throughout their lifecycle
• Focused on customer experience. Vendors that capture and
analyze customer experience data, and connect that to other
types of data
c) “Passive primary”:
• Text analysis. Vendors use sophisticated text analysis to
understand how employees feel
• Organizational network analysis (ONA). Vendors
collect employee communication and network data, and
apply collaboration analytics to understand employee
engagement levels
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 5Introduction
In December 2020, we wrapped up our year-long study on the people
analytics technology (PAT) market. One of our key findings from the study:
PAT vendors responded quickly to customers’ needs that arose from the
twin pandemics of 2020 (COVID-19 and racial injustice).
Practically speaking, this meant vendors focused much more heavily on
employee engagement and experience than before. As Figure 1 shows,
67% of PAT vendors from our study reported employee engagement as a
primary area of focus in 2020, compared to 60% a year earlier. Similarly,
58% of vendors stated employee experience as a primary area of focus in
2020, versus 43% in 2019.1 (Readers can access important details on the
vendors in this space, including our summary thoughts on them, in the
appendix as well as via our interactive tool.)
Figure 1: Primary Areas of Focus for PAT Vendor Solutions—2020 vs 2019
67%
Employee engagement
60%
58%
Employee experience
43%
2020 n = 47
2020 2019 2019 n = 37
Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 6PAT Critical to Staying in Touch with Employees
People analytics tech has enabled leaders to keep a check on employee
pulse throughout the year, especially as fatigue from the pandemic began
People analytics
to set in. For example, 75% of employees in the U.S. reported symptoms of
burnout toward the last quarter of 2020.2 Further, findings from a survey
tech that focused on
by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 41% of employee engagement
American adults struggled with mental-health issues stemming from and experience helped
the pandemic.3 business leaders
For example, orgs that leveraged this tech to boost their existing (or understand what was
to design new) listening strategies were better able to support their happening with their
employees as they faced rapid and unexpected changes.4 people—both with data
Today, as COVID vaccinations roll out worldwide, a sense of hope is and at scale.
starting to emerge. Leaders are looking to reshape the future and redesign
new ways of working. To do this effectively, they must understand how
employees are feeling and how their needs are changing.
From measuring how employees feel about returning to offices, to making
recommendations to managers on how they can communicate effectively
Once again, people
to keep employees engaged, PAT can be pivotal in helping employers
analytics tech is poised to
redesign their workplace strategies.
play a crucial role.
PAT Market Evolving Quickly
Given how rapidly business needs have changed, it’s no surprise that the
PAT market has continued to grow and evolve in 2021. In the first 3 months
of this year, we’ve witnessed some big players make important moves that
reflect the growth and evolution of this market.
• Workday announced its acquisition of Peakon, an employee
engagement solution
• The IPO of Qualtrics, an experience management platform
• The launch of Microsoft’s Viva, an employee experience solution
A Closer Look
The employee engagement and experience market is critical and
changing rapidly, and it deserves a deeper study than we gave it in
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 72020. The purpose of this research is to provide those responsible for
employee engagement and experience (HR leaders, people analytics
practitioners and managers) with greater insights on this technology,
specifically around:
• The role of people analytics in employee engagement and experience
• The different vendors in this space and how best to understand
their offerings
Before we dive into the specifics, we want to take a moment to define the 2
terms “employee engagement” and “employee experience”—and how they
connect to each other.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 8Understanding
Employee Engagement &
Experience
Let’s start with first clarifying the definitions for both of these terms.
Employee engagement: A measure of energy, involvement, and concentration
that is exhibited in work attitudes and behaviors. It is a measure of how an
employee feels and behaves at a particular point in time.
Employee experience: Employees› collective perceptions of their ongoing
interactions with the org. It encapsulates the ongoing perceptions of an
employee’s interactions with the org through their entire journey
Given these definitions, it is clear that employee experience has a much
broader scope than employee engagement. Figure 2 below highlights a
few other main differences between these 2 terms.
Figure 2: Differences Between Employee Experience & Employee Engagement
Employee
Experience
= Employee
Engagement
Cause Effect
Bottom-up Top-down
Broad scope Narrow scope
What employees perceive What employees do
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 9So how should we understand the relationship between these 2 terms?
Basically, how an employee behaves is a direct result of their perceptions Employee engagement is
based on all their interactions with the org throughout their lifecycle. So, an outcome of employee
employees will be more engaged with their work if they have an overall experience.
positive experience with the org.
Figure 3: Understanding The Relationship Between Organizational Interactions,
Employee Experience & Employee Engagement
Ongoing Employee Employee
Organizational Experience Engagement
Interactions
What organization What employee How employee feels
does perceives and behaves
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
How Tech Can Help
Tech plays a critical role in helping orgs with both employee engagement
and experience. Such solutions can:
• Offer tools for leaders to check-in and connect with their employees to
improve their interactions with people
• Provide an internal platform for employees to communicate and share
information to improve interactions with the overall org
• Enable orgs to listen to their employees in a continuous manner to
understand how they feel
So, how has PAT leveraged these capabilities to help leaders with their
challenges around employee engagement and experience? We take a
closer look at this in the next section.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 10Employee Engagement
And Experience
Vendors’ Capabilities
Before we venture any further, let’s define an employee engagement or
experience people analytics tech vendor.
Employee engagement or experience technology vendor:
A vendor that uses people data to understand employee engagement
or experience.
In our 2020 people analytics study,5 we grouped all participating vendors
under 9 categories, based on their tech and analysis (organizational
network analysis, text analysis, workforce planning, or multisource
analysis) or the talent areas they focus on (labor market analysis, learning,
employee engagement and experience, employee coaching, or HCM /
integrated talent management).
Employee engagement and experience was the biggest category in our
study, with 36% of all vendors. PAT providers in this space offer capabilities
that enable customers to do four things, as outlined in Figure 4:
Figure 4: Role Played by PAT in Employee Engagement & Experience
Collect and analyze Collect and analyze Integrate and analyze Highlight areas
perception data passive data different data that of concerns
directly on interactions / drive employee and recommend
from employees work / environment engagement and experience actions to users
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 11Specific to current times, vendors have leveraged these capabilities in
several ways to help their customers. Figure 5 provides details on each of
the roles identified in Figure 4.
Figure 5: Roles Played by PAT Vendors to Help Customers with Employee Engagement &
Experience—2020-2021
WHAT HOW IN 2020 IN 2021
From employees via To keep a check on To understand the
Collect and analyze COVID-19, reopen- and employees’ needs different preferences and
perception data directly return-to-work-specific and challenges due to needs as offices reopen
from employees surveys, pulses, and COVID-19 and remote
feedback working
On interactions, To identify shifting To understand different
Collect and analyze
work, networks, and patterns and work work behaviors patterns
passive data on
environment via behaviors to improve and activities of a hybrid
interactions /
communication and wellbeing and help avoid workforce, and promote
work / environment
productivity tools burnout overall wellbeing
Perception data from To understand the impact To understand the
different surveys (e.g., of COVID-19 across the different employee needs
Integrate and analyze
engagement, return- different digital aspects and their impact across
different data that drive
to-work, COVID-19, of employee engagement the different digital
employee engagement
onboarding, exit, etc.) and and experience aspects of employee
and experience
passive data engagement and
experience
Identify areas of concern To help facilitate a shift to To help facilitate a return
and recommend actions remote working to offices or adoption of a
Highlight areas
to specific users (e.g., hybrid approach
of concerns and
managers, HR business
recommend actions to
partners, people analytics
users
practitioners, and
employees)
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 12Customers Are Happy
With Their Engagement
And Experience Vendors
Our people analytics study of 2020 included a poll of 72 customers, which
revealed that customers of these PAT solutions are generally satisfied
with them. Specifically, customers gave an average NPS score of 61
for employee engagement and experience vendors (see Figure 6), as
compared with the average score of 67 for all vendors in the study. To put
that into a bit more context, the average NPS for SaaS companies in 2020 is
a score of 40,6 making 61 a great score for PAT vendors in this category.
Figure 6: Average Customer NPS Score for PAT Employee Engagement & Experience
Vendors
Average NPS score
61
7 vendors scored ≥ 60
5 vendors scored ≥ 40
-100 100
Needs improvement (-100 - 0) Good (0 - 30) Great (30 - 70) Excellent (70 - 100)
Total Eng / exp vendors with customer responses = 12;
minimum 5 customer responses per vendor
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 13Some of the quotes from the most satisfied customers in this
category include:
“An innovative vendor, constantly improving the
product and providing excellent customer support and
flexibility.”
—Large healthcare company for an employee
experience / engagement analysis solution
“Comprehensive surveying and reporting tool with
good support.”
—Large retailer for an employee experience /
engagement solution
“High flexibility can be used for multiple purposes.”
—Large pharmaceutical company for an employee
experience / engagement solution
PAT will continue to play a crucial role in helping customers as they
prepare themselves to face a new set of challenges related to employee
engagement and experience in 2021 and beyond.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 14Employee Engagement
And Experience Vendors
Let’s turn to the specific employee engagement and experience vendors,
which we divide into 3 categories:
1. Employee engagement (EE) vendors
2. Employee experience (EX) vendors
3. “Passive primary” vendors
In the content that follows, for each category, we provide a framework
that is based on the heritage of the vendors, such as founder or
The origins and
acquisition history.
backgrounds of the
At the end of each category, we provide a set of checklists to help both vendors, as well as if
customers and vendors think about some key questions when selecting or they’ve been acquired
selling tech (respectively).
or have acquired others,
We provide our summary thoughts on each vendor included in this space, influences the capabilities
which includes details on their approach to data creation, acquisition they offer and how they
history, a customer NPS, if available, along with what excites us, in the
go to market.
appendix. For a complete RedThread assessment on each vendor, please
visit our interactive tool. Readers can use the tool to click on the logo of a
vendor and read our assessment for them.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 15Employee Engagement Vendors
For vendors in the employee engagement (EE) category, we created a
framework with the following groups:
• Professional services background. Vendors in this group were
founded by people with a strong background and experience in
professional services, such as consulting. Their offerings come tightly
coupled with professional services (although the tech can also be
purchased on its own).
• Employee engagement native. These vendors started out as
engagement survey providers, and their primary bread and butter
continues to be engagement surveys.
• Employee engagement via other talent areas. Vendors in this
group are known for their other products, such as performance
management, along with employee engagement. A number of vendors
in this group have either acquired other talent solutions in the past or
have been acquired themselves—which influences their approach to
the market and areas of focus.
A clear distinction among these different groups is difficult due to areas of
overlap and, thus, some vendors fall into more than 1 group. All vendors
included in this category:
• Have a very strong focus and background in developing employee
engagement and pulse surveys
• Go to market as an employee engagement platform and have
traditionally focused on engagement as a primary talent area
• Have customer success stories that primarily feature examples of
understanding employee feedback and improving engagement
Figure 7 below shows our framework for this category.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 16Figure 7: People Analytics Vendors That Focus on Employee Engagement
Professional EE via
services EE other talent
background native areas
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 17Putting the framework into action
In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential
customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their
needs, respectively.
Questions to Ask—Customers to Vendors
Those with a Can your engagement survey product be purchased as a standalone?
professional
services Are there additional costs for professional services or are they included as part of the
background: annual subscription cost?
Those that To what extent do you connect engagement data with other organizational data?
are employee
engagement
To what extent, if any, do you collect passive data?
native:
Those that drive Which other talent areas, beside engagement, are the majority of your customers
engagement currently using your solution for?
via other talent
areas: How do you connect insights from employee engagement to insights on other
talent areas?
All vendors: To what extent do you partner with other vendors or solution providers?
How do you enable users to take action on challenges and areas of concern identified
by the solution?
What resources do you provide to enable customers to take action?
Questions to Ask—Vendors to Themselves
What are the different talent areas our solution can impact, beside engagement?
What are some of our strengths and capabilities that set us apart?
How can we better partner with other solutions to improve insights for users?
To what extent do we enable our users to take quick and agile actions on areas of concern?
How do we ensure that our insights and recommendations have a bigger impact?
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 18Real-World Threads7
Formed in 2010, Coffee Circle is a German coffee-roasting company that
employs 70 people.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, Coffee Circle began leveraging the
people analytics solution for engagement purposes to support its employees
through the crisis. As Deborah Moschioni, Head of HR, explained,
“We wanted to understand how everyone was feeling during this
difficult period so that any means of supporting them better could
be identified. Additionally, the wording of the COVID response
templates was particularly compassionate and mindful of the
situations many of the respondents may be facing.”
In April 2020, Coffee Circle ran its Recent Changes survey, based on its people
analytics solution’s Emergency Response template. With a 74% response rate,
the survey identified 3 areas as having the most positive ratings:
1. Trust and support in regard to the measures the org had put in place to
address the pandemic
2. An appreciation of how the leaders had been communicating
3. An appreciation of having more free time and flexibility
The survey highlighted pain points around the difficulties in staying focused,
remaining productive, a lack of social connection, and having feelings of
anxiety. The company addressed these issues by introducing daily check-in
calls between leaders and their teams, and a virtual kitchen so that people
could still find a space where they could chat with others.
As the situation started to normalize, Coffee Circle began to explore what
employees needed moving forward and identify any aspects of their working
life which may be holding them back. The company used its people analytics
solution’s tailored Return to Work template and launched a Needs and
Learning survey at the end of June 2020.
The data showed that people’s attitudes had shifted, with 42% now valuing
professional growth. Since the data also showed an appreciation for flexibility
and autonomy (42%), Coffee Circle decided to continue operating a hybrid
working model, with people able to choose how and where they work best.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 19Employee Experience Vendors
For vendors in the employee experience (EX) category, we created a frame-
work with the following 2 groups:
• Focused on employee engagement and experience. Vendors in this
group focus on engagement and experience, and provide insights
that are primarily focused on creating and improving personalized
experiences for employees throughout their lifecycle
• Focused on customer experience. Vendors in this group provide
capabilities to capture and analyze customer experience data, and
connect that to other types of data
Given our focus on employee experience vendors, we don’t include
vendors that only focus on customer experience. Instead, we included
vendors that focus on customer experience in addition to the other two
areas of employee engagement and employee experience.
All employee experience solutions included here also focus on
engagement, and provide engagement and pulse surveys. However, we
included these vendors in this category instead of engagement because:
• Several vendors have a strong focus and background in customer
experience, and can help users connect those insights with
employee experience
• Several vendors provide capabilities that collect data from the digital
exhaust and connect active data with passive data—thus, providing a
more continuous listening approach
• They go to market as an enterprise experience platform
Figure 8 shows our framework for this category.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 20Figure 8: People Analytics Vendors That Focus on Employee Experience
Focused on Focused
EE + EX on CX
Viva
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 21Putting the framework into action
In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential
customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their
customers’ needs, respectively.
Questions to Ask—Customers to Vendors
Those focused To what extent, if at all, do you collect passive data to measure employee experience?
on engagement
and experience: What listening channels do you use to capture employee data?
What other data do you integrate with?
Those focused What percentage of your customers are using both customer experience as well as
on customer employee experience products?
experience:
To what extent, if at all, do you collect passive data to measure employee experience?
What is your approach to using employee experience data to drive customer
experience?
All vendors: To what extent do you partner with other vendors or solution providers?
How do you enable users to take action on challenges and areas of concern identified
by you?
What resources do you provide to enable action taking?
Questions to Ask—Vendors to Themselves
To what extent are we providing additional capabilities, beside engagement surveys, that can impact and
improve employee experience?
To what extent are we holistically capturing and measuring all the significant experiences in the employee
journey?
What other additional data sources can we leverage?
How can we better partner with other solutions to improve insights for users?
To what extent do we enable our users to take quick and agile actions on areas of concern?
How do we ensure that our insights and recommendations have an impact?
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 22Real-World Threads8
Southwest Airlines has always believed that, if the company takes care of its
employees, then the employees will take of its customers.
Once the pandemic hit, the company soon realized that, due to the low load
factors on its flights along with the unpredictability of the virus, it needed to
adjust very quickly. Luckily, a few years earlier, Southwest had partnered with
its people analytics tech provider to map out its employee company journey.
So, when the company began feeling the impact of COVID-19, leaders turned
to that journey to make sure they were thinking through all the moments
that matter.
Figure 9: Southwest Airlines Employee Journey
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 23With the help of its people analytics tech, Southwest tackled challenges
specific to the time of the crisis, such as:
• Creating bite-size virtual learning
• Shifting resources to move people where they’re needed
• Giving employees new opportunities
• Developing enhancements for remote learning
• Providing tools and resources
The company offered employees voluntary time-off and a voluntary
separation package, and set up a recognition program for departing
employees. The company rolled out a range of surveys throughout the year
that focused on specific areas, such as:
• For frontline and HQs employees focusing on overall sentiment,
leadership communication, confidence, and health and safety
• Remote work, productivity, leadership support, and return to campus
sentiment
• D&I and hospitality
Southwest also created an exit survey for those who voluntarily separated
from the company. The insights from the PAT solution helped the company
focus on better equipping its leaders and served as key inputs into the future
remote work policy.
Working with its PAT solution as a partner, Southwest had previously created
a set of personas that represent where and how its employees work, as
well as where they are in their career journey. Once the pandemic hit, the
company added a COVID lens to these personas to address their specific
employee needs. Leaders also created new personas based on the state
of COVID-19 and the company, and developed a set of actions that leaders
could take to help employees.
Southwest continues to use these insights to design new solutions for pain
points, identify specific communication and training needs, and better equip
its leaders.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 24“Passive Primary” Vendors
Recently, we’ve come across a few vendors that have traditionally swum
in slightly different lanes of talent areas, but which are starting to market
themselves in the engagement space. These vendors are not survey
providers. They do not collect employee perception data directly from
employees, and thus, do not measure employee engagement in the
traditional manner.
These vendors collect passive data—created by employees through digital
communications, emails, and collaboration tools—to provide insights
“Passive primary”
on employee attitudes and work behaviors, and, thus, understand
engagement levels. Others apply their services—such as text analysis—to
vendors are PAT solution
feedback data already collected by the customer to identify patterns and providers that use
themes that can be used to understand employee engagement. passive data to produce
insights for the purpose
For vendors in this category, we created a framework with the following
2 groups: of understanding and
improving employee
• Text analysis. Vendors in this group use sophisticated text analysis to
engagement and
understand how employees feel
experience.
• Organizational network analysis (ONA). Vendors in this group collect
employee communication and network data, and apply collaboration
analytics to understand employee engagement levels
This framework is helpful in introducing consumers to instances in which
employee engagement can be understood through approaches that don’t
involve any surveys. These vendors provide a new way of measuring and
understanding employee engagement.
A big challenge that these solutions are able to overcome is self-reported
high engagement levels in employee surveys. The flipside to this are the
obvious legal, privacy, and security risks that such data collection methods
bring along with them.
Figure 10 shows our framework for these vendors.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 25Figure 10: People Analytics Vendors That Impact Employee Engagement and / or
Experience
Text Analysis ONA
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 26Putting the framework into action
In the following checklists, we offer some key questions for potential
customers and vendors to help them better understand the tech and their
needs, respectively.
Questions to Ask—Customers to Vendors
Those focused What kinds of themes and categories, as well as prescriptive comments that relate to
on text analysis: employee engagement, can the solution identify?
To what extent can the text analysis identify comments and themes that have the most
value for understanding employee engagement?
Those focused What kinds of employee data do you analyze to measure employee engagement?
on ONA:
How do you use network data to understand employee engagement?
All vendors: How do you measure employee engagement?
To what extent do you partner with other vendors or solution providers?
What’s your approach to data ethics, security, and privacy? How do you overcome
concerns around these issues?
How do you enable users to take action on challenges and areas of concern identified
by you?
What resources do you provide to enable action taking?
Questions to Ask—Vendors to Themselves
To what extent are we aligned with our users on how we approach and define employee engagement?
What other additional data should we be collecting to measure employee experience?
How can we better partner with other solutions to improve insights for users?
To what extent do we currently work with our customers as partners on issues around data ethics, security,
and privacy?
To what extent do we enable our users to take quick and agile actions on areas of concern?
How do we ensure our insights and recommendations have an impact?
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 27Real-World Threads9
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) leveraged a PAT solution
to turn Yammer into a listening tool for the executives and leaders: This
provided them with the data to show the impact of their connection on
employee engagement. The data have been a catalyst for getting ANZ’s
executives and leaders connecting on Yammer as it shows the impact of
leaders’ actions, resulting in increased executive engagement. The company
can use the data to look at conversations that’ve been really engaging or not
so engaging.
With an already well-established Yammer network across the ANZ business,
Yammer Communities went “berserk” during the COVID-19 pandemic,
when most employees suddenly found themselves working from home (see
Figure 11). Each day, employees were encouraged to post their questions
in Yammer. The team facilitating Yammer then reviewed the questions and
focused on the most important and popular.
“The engagement was huge. We saw a huge uptake in mobile logins. I
think on our top day we had 14,000 people log in.”
—Richy Cartmell, Yammer Community Manager, ANZ
Figure 11: A Screenshot of ANZ’s Community Dashboard
Source: RedThread Research, 2021.
The team has been using polling as a method of engagement to
discover the wants and needs of employees. Early in the bank’s
COVID-19 response, it posted a poll on Yammer asking how ANZ
employees felt about returning to the office. The poll received more
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 28than 3,500 votes and 120+ replies: People explained they were more concerned about safely getting to and from work than the risk of transmission in the office. Data from the analytics tool is available for all ANZ employees to access, along with the solution’s internal training sessions. When people see their own online behaviors’ data, it acts as a “wake-up call” to encourage the right behaviors on Yammer and leads to conversations on how to improve collaboration. © 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 29
Looking Forward
We expect to see the PAT employee engagement and experience space
change and evolve in the near future in the following ways:
• Increasing number of new players. The market is poised to keep
growing for the foreseeable future for the following reasons:
⸰ Everybody wants more data. As companies look to reopen their
offices or adopt a hybrid approach, deeper and regular insights
from perception and passive data will continue to be critical for
leaders and managers.
⸰ The personal now impacts the professional. Areas that were once
considered separate from the workplace and owned by individuals—
such as physical and mental wellbeing, and work-life balance—became
crucial drivers for employee engagement and experience during
remote work. Employers now see themselves as more responsible for
these areas as they impact an employee’s overall experience with the
org and drive engagement. Tech solutions in this space can help.
• Rise of nontraditional engagement and experience vendors. Users
will increasingly see the value of applying PAT solutions—that use
nontraditional methods of data collection, and don’t go to market
as either engagement or experience solutions—to impact these
areas. Similar to DEIB tech, we foresee more tech vendors offering
capabilities for the purpose of engagement and experience. For
example, with collaboration and wellbeing seen as crucial drivers
for engagement and experience, ONA can offer useful insights to
users. We’re already starting to see this growing shift with vendors as
mentioned in our “passive primary” vendors section.
• Enabling action. PAT vendors within this space will do more than
just collect and analyze data: They’ll increasingly provide specific and
targeted recommended actions as part of their solution offerings.
Additionally, they’ll also offer users more and more resources within
their platforms that’ll enable them to act on those recommendations.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 30Conclusion
Employee listening became a strategic priority for leaders in 2020 and will
continue to be critical in 2021. Efforts to understand and drive employee
engagement and experience enabled companies to weather the storms,
so to speak. While the pandemic will eventually come to an end and
social unrest will be addressed (we hope!), lessons learned during these
turbulent times will stick with us far into the foreseeable future.
Leaders must continue investing in these areas if they want to successfully
survive and work through future disruptions. People analytics tech, that
focuses on these areas, can help orgs care for their employees and be
better prepared for the future.
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 31Appendix 1
This section contains a part of our RedThread Assessments for each
vendor. For additional information and details on the vendors, such as
their customer NPS score and capabilities, check out our interactive People
Analytics Technology tool.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
In early 2020, Betterworks, a performance • Connections to key results that allow
management-focused solution, acquired users to track progress toward achieving
Hyphen, an employee engagement solution them
and a participant in our 2019 study. The • Ability for employees and managers to
acquisition allows Betterworks to compete share information with HR through a
in the performance / engagement / “Confidential Questions” tool
recognition / analytics category that we’ve
seen numerous other vendors join in the
last few years. We’re looking forward to next
year when we can begin to see the results of
the acquisition through new products that
customers have used.
A long-time leader in the employee • Integrations with core workplace
engagement / experience space, Culture tools (e.g., Slack and Teams) to enable
Amp delved into the world of performance feedback giving and collection in the
management with its 2018 acquisition of flow of work
Zugata. We’re now able to see the deeper • Guided support for 1:1 conversations
integration between these engagement within its performance tool
and performance products that can help
users to have a more holistic view of their • Clear principles that guide the work
employee experience. This approach (i.e., employee experience is everyone’s
allows Culture Amp to offer employees and responsibility; trust and accessibility is
managers information that is actionable, in paramount; research and science guide
addition to providing HR and leaders with us forward)
powerful insights. The vendor has been • Passive data collection for network
expanding to diverse industries, including analysis
technology, construction, and engineering.
Customer NPS: 89
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 32EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
One of the only 2 vendors in our study • Focused on helping customers hire
that’s founded and led by a woman, Fortay talent that’s a “culture add” instead of a
is different from the other employee “culture fit”
experience platforms with its focus on • Strong focus on belonging in the
diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging platform, from creating belonging at
(DEIB). The company was a grant recipient of hiring to measuring it as a key business
Women Entrepreneur Fund awarded by the metric during the employee experience
Government of Canada in 2018.
Customer NPS: 40 • Offers intersectionality enhancements to
provide more nuanced insights relative
to demographic segments
Acquired by LinkedIn in 2018, Glint has • Its upcoming solution for individual
grown over the years from a solely employee contributors – allowing employees to
engagement solution to connecting seek feedback, set goals, check-in on
development and learning to improve the progress, and learn new skills
overall employee experience. Much of the • NLP for feedback
leadership from before the acquisition
remains in place, allowing Glint to continue • One thing that stood out to us when we
to benefit from its start-up roots while taking tested the vendor’s demo environment
advantage of the scale offered by LinkedIn was the simple dashboard design and
and Microsoft. the seamless manner by which managers
Customer NPS: 57 can view and set their goals, enable
actions, tag other team members, search
for goals set by others, and track their
progress against key results
• We also really like Glint’s overall focus
on driving actions; for example, the
ability to share goals with anyone in
the organization (not just managers),
to enable cross-functional teams, and
the integration with learning content
within user dashboards, as well as the
provision of Glint-suggested actions to
help users make progress on their goals
A new addition to this year’s study, Peakon • Offers True Benchmark® capability,
is an employee engagement / experience which adjusts for biases in how different
vendor founded in 2015 in Denmark. employee demographics respond to
Given its relatively younger age, the surveys and builds custom benchmarks
vendor has built into its system from the based on the composition of teams
beginning some of the newer engagement • Simple manager dashboards
/ experience capabilities we see, such as
integration of employee NPS scores, D&I • Generally transparent about NPS and
analytics, and action-focused manager and customer satisfaction scores
employee portals. • Our testing of the demo environment
Customer NPS: 67 showed the platform can quickly surface
and highlight drivers of engagement
that the company is performing well on,
and the areas it needs to prioritize by
benchmarking them against the industry
or the rest of the company
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 33EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
Perceptyx has invested significantly in • Manager dashboards that quickly
thought leadership on how the people highlight areas which need focus,
analytics community can adjust to the suggested actions, and learning
challenges of 2020. For example, once the resources to help enable those actions
pandemic hit, Perceptyx launched a series • Communities that provide access to
of weekly roundtable discussions during “best-practice experts”
which leaders shared actions, approaches,
and insights on how their organizations • Integration of data from LMS and CRM
were responding to the crisis. As 2020 has systems
worn on, the vendor shifted its focus to • Offering complimentary pulse surveys,
conversations on ongoing challenges, like as well as industry specific surveys,
understanding civil unrest, addressing stress to clients and nonclients during the
and burnout, and retaining women during pandemic
the pandemic.
• Strong customer NPS score
• Strong connection between vendor’s
values and the products it delivers
Qlearsite provides a predictive HR analytics • Did not participate in the 2020 briefing
platform.
A performance management-focused • Ability for users to build action plans in
solution, Reflektive recently went through the future
a leadership change and will be making • Advanced sentiment analyses
significant updates to the product, as well as capabilities in the future
its UI / UX in the coming year.
A new addition to our technology study • A ready-to-use Inclusion and Diversity
this year, Willis Towers Watson has more survey template, along with several
than 100 years of experience in offering others, such as Corporate Function
insurance, advisory, and consulting services Effectiveness, Onboarding, Performance
across the globe, and launched its SaaS Management, Cyber Risk Culture,
employee engagement solution in 2017. The COVID-19, and Leading Through Crisis,
company also recently announced a merger among others
with Aon. • Ability to conduct correlations between
results from different surveys within the
advanced analytics tool
• An upcoming new look and feel for the
manager dashboard that easily surfaces
insights crucial for them
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 34EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
One of the older vendors, Confirmit is a new • Manager dashboard that allows users to
addition to this year’s study and joins the quickly see insights that matter to them
category of EX vendors that also offers CX and take action on them
capabilities. • Built a “Ask me @ Home” app to allow
Customer NPS: 67 employees to give feedback any
time they want; launched during the
pandemic
• A notable list of global Fortune 100 and
500 enterprises with strong customer
success examples
Ennova takes a thoughtful approach to • Offers the ability to download a
sharing the necessary data and insights with PowerPoint presentation directly from
the user, based on their roles and areas of the tool that contains the results, along
concerns. Shared in a clear and quick-to- with suggestions on how to proceed in
understand manner via the dashboards, sharing them at a team meeting
users are able to identify areas that need • Provides a one-point access to its full
focus and do a deeper dive on them if EX product portfolio that includes
needed. engagement, Pulse, 360, Journey, self-
Customer NPS: 83 service team tool, and wellbeing tools
• Works with customers to promote data
transparency, while designing policies to
restrict access to private data
Based on briefing conducted in 2019: Humu • Did not participate in the 2020 briefing
combines behavioral science and machine
learning to nudge managers and employees
toward behavior change with time-based
alerts.
Established in 2018, Macrova is a relatively • Provides the ability for users to
new entry into the employee engagement export their recommended actions to
and experience market as well as our study. tools where people work, such as Asana,
The company was founded by partners Slack, Teams etc.
that are focused on streamlining the user • Manager specific recommendations,
experience and interface to identify gaps in in addition to individual actions, to help
employee and customer experience. them better support their team
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 35EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
2019-20 was a busy year for Medallia as not • Athena, an AI product, that automatically
only did the vendor go public on the New discovers suggestions and ideas within
York Stock Exchange in July 2019, raising employee feedback comments and
$326 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, identifies employee actions most likely
but it also completed 7 acquisitions with to impact customer satisfaction
2 additional acquisitions announced and • Employee dashboards that allow
pending completion. The vendor also individuals to access metrics on how the
launched some “freemium” offerings during company and their team are performing
the COVID-19 pandemic along with an over time, and feedback given by them
EX Micropulse, a 3-question survey with to the company, as well as track their
integrated text analytics tuned to COVID own sentiments and experience over
topics. time
Customer NPS: 40
• Deeper integrations with new tools, such
as Crowdicity, Living Lens, VOCI, and
Zingle, for a more seamless data flow
• New investments in EX thought
leadership, such as a center of
excellence, new research, and an EX
community
• Users can subscribe to personalized
alerts and notifications for metrics and
events that matter to them
• Our testing of the demo environment in
a manager role showed that the solution
can surface to the top key insights
relevant to the manager, broken up into
sections that cover insights on how the
manager’s department is doing, feeling,
and saying
Microsoft Viva Did not participate in the briefing • Did not participate in the briefing
Having acquired Strategic Management • Offers a holistic and data-integrated
Decisions (SMD) in 2019, a participant in our solution for understanding all aspects of
previous study, Press Ganey is, thus, kind of healthcare employees’ experiences and
a new addition to our study this year. With impact on critical patient outcomes
the combination of SMD and other recent • High-quality data science embedded
acquisitions, such as Avatar Solutions (a throughout the solution
patient and workforce solution), NarrativeDx
(an NLP technology) and Doctor.com (a • Cleaner, easier-to-consume UI as a
consumerism technology), Press Ganey has result of the acquisition
created a robust offering to help healthcare • Expansion of the workforce comment
customers manage employee engagement analytics (NLP) to integrate patient
effectively. experience sentiment that includes
Customer NPS: 67 analytics from social sites, such as Yelp,
Indeed, and Glassdoor
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 36EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
Qualtrics continues its extremely strong • Launch of the Diversity, Equity, and
growth, partly due to the expanded need for Inclusion methodology and index
employee listening and actioning resulting • Focus on quick starts for customers and
from the COVID-19 pandemic (it launched the ability to have service thresholds
10 new COVID-19 solutions – 6 free and 4 customized to customers’ needs (i.e.,
paid). Qualtrics designed its Employee XM ranging from truly self-service to high-
(EXM) platform to build a no. of targeted touch custom solutions)
solutions on top of it (engagement, lifecycle,
continuous, etc.), which enables it to flexibly • Greater focus on managers and
develop and deploy new offerings quickly. teams via manager and team action
With a recent announcement of an IPO collaboration
in August, Qualtrics will be going public 2 • Integrations with Slack, SMS, and
years after its acquisition by SAP (https:// web intercepts for a more continuous
redthreadresearch.com/2020/07/27/ employee listening approach
why-is-sap-selling-qualtrics/), though SAP
• Advanced NLP capabilities through
will maintain a majority ownership stake. It
semantic text analysis that allow users
collects perception as well as passive data.
to understand the wider context of the
Customer NPS: 40
comments and feedback both at the end
of survey administration in dashboards,
as well as during the surveying process
to solicit deeper responses
Questback, similar to some of its • Greater investments in the ability to pull
competitors in the EX space, offers a any type of existing active or passive
combination of employee experience, data from different sources, including
customer experience, and market research other existing survey platforms with
to customers. The vendor launched organizations, and data management
“Freemium” offerings during the COIVD-19 capabilities
pandemic to help organizations manage • Upcoming investments in capabilities
their employee experience. Based in for users to automate workflows to
Norway, the vendor currently has offices in 9 help manage employee experience
countries. through their lifecycle journeys,
Customer NPS: 57 including launching surveys at specific
points of the employee lifecycle, inviting
employees to specific portals, or inviting
them for onboarding feedback
• Flexibility in pricing, ranging from
freemium to DIY surveys to full
enterprise pricing; also has additional
pricing models based on business need,
volume, and value
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 37EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Company’s Name Summary Thoughts What Excites Us
Focused on employee experience, SMG – • Provides users with a “period end”
while a comparatively older XM (experience report that includes areas of focus using
management) vendor – is a new addition to algorithms customizable by clients which
our study this year. The vendor offered free, recommend areas of focus to improve
limited-time offerings during COVID-19 that engagement for each unit: The areas are
included pulse surveys to focus on COVID different for each unit or team, based on
preparedness and return to work initiatives, the survey responses
and an always-on Voice of Employee offering • Action planning tool within the solution
available to clients as well nonclients. that is prepopulated with areas of focus
Customer NPS: 60 specific to the team or unit manager,
allowing them to assign actions against
them, and track and measure progress
over time
• Allows users to integrate content from
their LMS directly into their action
planning tool
Worklytics recently expanded its strategy • Began providing a “WFH Readiness
from just focusing on providing insights on Score” to companies during the crisis,
employee experience via dashboards to along with a benchmark score based
different users, to helping people analytics on ~20 companies as comparison, to
teams aggregate and manage their help them understand what’s working
passive employee data. People analytics well and what needs to be improved for
practitioners can import that data and remote work
metrics into their existing data warehouses • The insights and recommendations from
or data lakes, as appropriate. WFH reports can help organizations plan
Customer NPS: 60 around questions, such as what’s next,
which employees to bring back to the
office, and what’ll be the impact of going
fully remote
• Value for mature people analytics
practitioners looking for raw data
with metrics to plug into their existing
systems and run their own analyses
Yva is a spinoff from ABBYY, an AI company • The increased focus on data
that helps customers with their digital anonymization, employee privacy, and
transformation. The latest upgrades security by aggregating data, allowing
and changes in the solution include a employees to opt-in and opt-out of data
shift to helping customers understand collection when they want, and ensuring
employee experience by analyzing (passive) customers either self-host their data on
collaboration data and (active) employee the cloud or on-premise
surveys. Compared with the last time we saw • 4 very clear user roles (CEO, HR,
this solution, Yva has increased its focus on manager, employee) with different types
employee privacy, choice, and security. of insights provided for each
• Recent addition of ability to measure
5 styles of informal / influencing
leadership
© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved. People Analytics Tech: Deep Diving Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 38You can also read
