Should employee research be more like TripAdvisor?

In the past I have said some pretty hurtful things about employee surveys. I’m not suggesting we give up on surveys (well, not right away), but I am proposing that it’s time to move things forward. In this blog, I’m going to talk about the potential of social media and digital technologies to advance practice in this area. I’m also going to eat my own dog food by inviting you to experience a new approach to generating insight.

There are three recent developments that should be brought into this better approach: social media, text analysis and graphical user interfaces.

Firstly, the advance of social media (technology that allows people to connect and interact) is having profound implications on organisations. I’m not just talking about social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, etc; social media in its broadest sense is creeping its way into many aspects of our working lives. I find this exciting because capturing the interactions between people in a transparent and self-policing environment is a very powerful feedback mechanism. Do you look at hotel reviews on TripAdvisor? Do you read reviews on Amazon before you buy something? Of course you do.

Secondly, the increasing use of social media has had a knock-on effect on the quality and use of text and sentiment analysis to efficiently process huge amounts of written feedback. Many organisations are already embracing these advances to generate insight from their external customers/consumers. However, internally, organisations are lagging behind – this is, of course, no surprise. There are many barriers to organisations adopting social media practices for use internally and there is much work to be done in this area.

Thirdly, people often think about data visualisation as an output to aid the interpretation of data. However, data visualisation can now also be used as a means of input and control. This has huge advantages over traditional lists of comments used in discussion forums and message boards – even the comments at the bottom of this page. Linear lists of comments have many limitations. The worst is that they can quickly grow to overwhelming proportions. Without a means of effective navigation, many comments may not ever be read – people do not have an equal chance of being heard.

Coupled with over-simplistic thumbs up/thumbs down or five-star ratings, lists hide the true diversity of opinion that exists, favouring early birds or those with extreme views.

Interactive visualisations also provide a compelling and engaging experience for participants who can themselves get instant and authentic feedback. There are many arguments that can be used to defend surveys, but I cannot think of one comeback against the assertion that surveys bore participants to death.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? With Unilever’s support we are conducting an open-access research project to generate insight into the barriers organisations face in adopting social media practices and solutions to overcome them.

The ‘Social Media Garden’ will be open from 23 January to 29 February 2012 – a full report of the overall findings will be available to all participants.