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Sentiment Surveys: Employee Experience Based On Feelings & Attitude

Updated: May 18, 2023

Sentiment Surveys: Employee Experience Based On Feelings & Attitude

In this day and age, sentiment regarding a company’s product or service is more valuable than ever before. Sentiment surveys and analyses can help companies know if their existing client base and future consumers have a good or negative attitude about their product or service may be game-changing for businesses.


What Are Sentiment Surveys?


Sentiment surveys allow decision-makers in an organisation to learn how their workers feel about the assistance they get and other experiences they have while working there. You may proactively find the best methods to help your employees by conducting such surveys and analysing them. Review the findings of the survey with your team and other stakeholders, such as the Chief Information Officer and the Experience Manager, or Chief Experience Officer, and utilise the information to enhance the employee experience.


However, getting genuine emotion from a sentence written in English, let alone across all languages, is difficult. That’s because human language can be vague, and humans can be sarcastic at times, while computers struggle to grasp sarcasm. Even while we are improving with each passing year, we still have a long way to go.


How To Start A Sentiment Survey?


Establish An Objective For A Sentiment Survey


Think about what you want to discover from your survey in terms of how you can enhance employee support and working conditions. How effective are your strategies for achieving success? How well-supported do your employees feel when they go through training and strive for results? In order to reach their key performance indicators (KPIs), how prepared and supported do they feel?


Collaborate With The Team


Developing a successful sentiment survey begins with your management team—after all, they are the ones who know their employees best. You could wish to put together a team of your top executives to assist you with the process. Then have a look at these suggestions:

  1. Set a clear survey goal.

  2. Examine the best practices and suggestions for question length, variety, balance, and style.

  3. Consider the future reporting data points by thinking backwards. Consider long-term data points that will allow you to observe a before-and-after comparison that you can share with other decision-makers.

  4. Make your survey as diverse as possible. Use a variety of question types rather than just simple Yes or No inquiries. Use Likert scales and the occasional open question to allow the respondent to expand upon their sentiment.

  5. Consider customising questions depending on survey replies.

  6. Make sure surveys adhere to your institution’s privacy and security rules.

Sentiment Surveys: Employee Experience Based On Feelings & Attitude


Explore Sentiment Survey Implementation Options


Ask yourself these questions as you plan your implementation:

  1. Who would you like to conduct surveys for?

  2. What method do you intend to use to disseminate surveys?

  3. How would you like to keep track of survey responses?

You’ll probably want to restrict survey creation to a few members of your team. They’ll be referred to as survey administrators. They’ll collaborate with support personnel to construct surveys and compose questions before distributing them and later reporting on the results.


How Much Should You Trust Sentiment Surveys?


An optimistic or pessimistic attitude stated in a poll does not always imply action. A Forbes article addressed this issue while giving the example of an investor who can claim to be gloomy about the stock market’s short-term prospects without actually selling any of his present assets. This is why, rather than making sentiment surveys the cornerstone of your market study, it is recommended to utilise them as a supplement. Instead, consider a range of indications.


How To Make Sentiment Surveys Practical?


In 2017, Judd Antin, Director, Head of Design Studio at Airbnb had explained how he carried out sentiment surveys around User Experience at Airbnb. According to Antin, this tool could be made a lot more practical and useful in real-life situations by:

  1. Making sentiments measurable. We should be able to understand the mechanism by which we can assess those thoughts and feelings that we have collected by conducting the survey.

  2. Breaking down the measuring of sentiments to the most granular units.

  3. Keeping the sentiments relevant to the things we’re trying to do.

  4. Ensuring that sentiments should be available at scale when we need them and not become a lagging metric.

  5. Asking questions about something specific that has happened, instead of enquiring about “overall experiences” (although, they aren’t completely useless).

  6. Trying to take the survey just after (or during) an event/experience to avoid memory bias.


Problems Faced During Sentiment Surveys


Cultural Differences Leading To Varied Interpretation


Many of the terminologies we use in everyday speech are overloaded. They signify various things to different people because individuals have distinct cultural frames as a result of the contextual reference, which means ours differs from the majority of those taking the survey since people have different educational backgrounds as a result of regional dialects.


Lack Of Employee/Customer Perspective


Frequently, the persons in charge of drafting the questions have no clue who will be answering them on the other end. The survey’s organisers just lack the knowledge. We must find the appropriate words.


Too Much Formal Language Hurts


Formality is inconvenient. It hurts because it hinders understanding and because it may influence how individuals react to your survey. When writing a survey, try to avoid using excessive formality because it makes them more sensitive and precise. Furthermore, answering a survey is a part of the employee experience. Making it too complicated or unnecessarily long would only add to the bad experience that a worker may be having at your organisation.


How Can Bright Horse Help You With Sentiment Surveys?

Our user sentiment survey consultation assists customers with the strategy, development, and execution of their user sentiment survey. Our User Sentiment Survey consultation can assist if you don’t have any survey methodology but want to understand user experience, or if you have a type of user/customer satisfaction survey but it has a poor response rate.


Check out our Sentiment Survey Consulting facilities or contact us for more details.

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