CASE STUDY: Using PlaetosEQ to dig deep on eNPS data

BY BARBARA SHARP

Our customer is a global software company.

Their problem: declining Employee Net Promoter (eNPS) scores. After steadily climbing for two years they had suddenly taken a dive; across the business, across the world. They weren’t sure why and what it meant for their attrition risk.

Their existing pulse survey data – and the vendor's analytical tools – didn't provide any useful insights on the drivers behind the eNPS results.

Their solution was to ingest 18 months of free-text survey responses – together with organisational metadata on divisions and regions – into PlaetosEQ.

The automated analysis of the meaning and emotion within these free text responses was embedded in a knowledge graph - a form of data storage that creates an interconnected, searchable web of meaning and entities, specific to their organisation.

Trends around concepts, entities, problems, employee mood and other features extracted from the data were explored through the PlaetosEQ drill-down visualisations.

The results were clear: COVID did NOT cause the decline as was suspected. Underlying the dropping eNPS scores was a convergence of factors, all of them under leadership control:

• anxiety about return to the office policies

• lack of leadership communication on organizational strategy, and

• challenges of balancing work-life balance when working across timezones.

All were increasing employee dissatisfaction and causing some people to re-evaluate their role. Early warning of a systemic flight risk was found.

The leadership team was able to respond directly to the core issues surfaced, and increased their communications around organisational strategy. A deep-dive on the Plaetos discussion platform is under consideration.

The key learnings were that even if you’re using pulse surveys and collecting free text as well as numerical responses, if you’re not asking the right - very open - questions, you can’t be sure you’re hearing what’s most important.

Numbers don’t tell you what’s important to your people, and you can make big mistakes if you act on numbers alone.

Barbara Sharp is CEO of Plaetos Group, a provider of innovative active and passive employee voice technologies for large enterprises. Plaetos active forums enable thousands of employees to engage online in psychologically-safe, asynchronous discussions. The PlaetosEQ insight platform makes sense of Plaetos conversations and other workplace data sources to generate a rich understanding of emotion, sentiment and meaning across the enterprise. It's how inclusive leaders walk their talk.