People Analytics Technology

People Analytics Technology: Deep Dive Into Employee Engagement & Experience | 1© 2021 RedThread Research. All Rights Reserved.
People Analytics Technology: Deep Dive Into Employee Engagement & Experience
Authors: Priyanka Mehrotra & Stacia Garr
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
Appendix 3: Authors & Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
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 .
About RedThread
Key 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 .
b) 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
Introduction
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
43%
60%
58%
67%
Source: RedThread Research, 2020 .
PAT 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 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 by the U .S . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 41% of American adults struggled with mental-health issues stemming from the pandemic .3
For example, orgs that leveraged this tech to boost their existing (or to design new) listening strategies were better able to support their employees as they faced rapid and unexpected changes .4
Today, as COVID vaccinations roll out worldwide, a sense of hope is 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 to keep employees engaged, PAT can be pivotal in helping employers redesign their workplace strategies .
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
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.
Once again, people analytics tech is poised to play a crucial role.
2020 . 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 .
Understanding 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
Narrow scopeBroad scope
So how should we understand the relationship between these 2 terms?
Basically, how an employee behaves is a direct result of their perceptions based on all their interactions with the org throughout their lifecycle . So, employees will be more engaged with their work if they have an overall positive experience with the org .
Figure 3: Understanding The Relationship Between Organizational Interactions, Employee Experience & Employee Engagement
Employee Experience
Ongoing Organizational
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 .
Employee engagement is an outcome of employee experience.
Employee 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 perception data
directly from employees
on interactions / work / environment
drive employee engagement and experience
Highlight areas of concerns
Specific 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
Collect and analyze perception data directly from employees
From employees via COVID-19, reopen- and return-to-work-specific surveys, pulses, and feedback
To keep a check on employees’ needs and challenges due to COVID-19 and remote working
To understand the different preferences and needs as offices reopen
Collect and analyze passive data on interactions / work / environment
On interactions, work, networks, and environment via communication and productivity tools
To identify shifting patterns and work behaviors to improve wellbeing and help avoid burnout
To understand different work behaviors patterns and activities of a hybrid workforce, and promote overall wellbeing
Integrate and analyze different data that drive employee engagement and experience
Perception data from different surveys (e.g., engagement, return- to-work, COVID-19, onboarding, exit, etc .) and passive data
To understand the impact of COVID-19 across the different digital aspects of employee engagement and experience
To understand the different employee needs and their impact across the different digital aspects of employee engagement and experience
Highlight areas of concerns and recommend actions to users
Identify areas of concern and recommend actions to specific users (e.g., managers, HR business partners, people analytics practitioners, and employees)
To help facilitate a shift to remote working
To help facilitate a return to offices or adoption of a hybrid approach
Customers 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
Total Eng / exp vendors with customer responses = 12; minimum 5 customer responses per vendor
-100 100
Needs improvement (-100 - 0) Good (0 - 30) Great (30 - 70) Excellent (70 - 100)
Average NPS score
61
Some 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 .
Employee 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 acquisition history .
At the end of each category, we provide a set of checklists to help both customers and vendors think about some key questions when selecting or selling tech (respectively) .
We provide our summary thoughts on each vendor included in this space, which includes details on their approach to data creation, acquisition history, a customer NPS, if available, along with what excites us, in the 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 .
The origins and backgrounds of the vendors, as well as if they’ve been acquired or have acquired others, influences the capabilities they offer and how they go to market.
Employee 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 .
Figure 7: People Analytics Vendors That Focus on Employee Engagement
Professional services
background EE
Putting 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 professional services background:
Can your engagement survey product be purchased as a standalone?
Are there additional costs for professional services or are they included as part of the annual subscription cost?
Those that are employee engagement native:
To what extent do you connect engagement data with other organizational data?
To what extent, if any, do you collect passive data?
Those that drive engagement via other talent areas:
Which other talent areas, beside engagement, are the majority of your customers currently using your solution for?
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?
Real-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 .
Employee Experience Vendors For vendors in the employee experience (EX) category, we created a framework 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 .
Figure 8: People Analytics Vendors That Focus on Employee Experience
Focused on EE + EX
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 .
Those focused on engagement and experience:
To what extent, if at all, do you collect passive data to measure employee experience?
What listening channels do you use to capture employee data?
What other data do you integrate with?
Those focused on customer experience:
What percentage of your customers are using both customer experience as well as employee experience products?
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?
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 do we ensure that our insights and recommendations have an impact?
Real-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
With the help of its people analytics tech, Southwest tackled challenges specific to the time of the crisis, such as:
• Creating bite-size virtual learning
• Giving employees new opportunities
• 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 .
“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 on employee attitudes and work behaviors, and, thus, understand engagement levels . Others apply their services—such as text analysis—to feedback data already collected by the customer to identify patterns and themes that can be used to understand employee engagement .
For vendors in this category, we created a framework with the following 2 groups:
• Text analysis . Vendors in this group use sophisticated text analysis to understand how employees feel
• 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 .
“Passive primary” vendors are PAT solution providers that use passive data to produce insights for the purpose of understanding and improving employee engagement and experience.
Figure 10: People Analytics Vendors That Impact Employee Engagement and / or Experience
Text Analysis ONA
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 .
Those focused on text analysis:
What kinds of themes and categories, as well as prescriptive comments that relate to 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 on ONA:
What kinds of employee data do you analyze to measure employee engagement?
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?
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?
To what extent do we currently work with our customers as partners on issues around data ethics, security, and privacy?
How do we ensure our insights and recommendations have an impact?
Real-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
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
than 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 .
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 .
Conclusion
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 .
Appendix 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 management-focused solution, acquired Hyphen, an employee engagement solution and a participant in our 2019 study. The acquisition allows Betterworks to compete in the performance / engagement / 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.
• Connections to key results that allow users to track progress toward achieving them
• Ability for employees and managers to share information with HR through a “Confidential Questions” tool
A long-time leader in the employee engagement / experience space, Culture Amp delved into the world of performance management with its 2018 acquisition of Zugata. We’re now able to see the deeper integration between these engagement and performance products that can help users to have a more holistic view of their employee experience. This approach allows Culture Amp to offer employees and managers information that is actionable, in addition to providing HR and leaders with powerful insights. The vendor has been expanding to diverse industries, including technology, construction, and engineering. Customer NPS: 89
• Integrations with core workplace tools (e.g., Slack and Teams) to enable feedback giving and collection in the flow of work
• Guided support for 1:1 conversations within its performance tool
• Clear principles that guide the work (i.e., employee experience is everyone’s responsibility; trust and accessibility is paramount; research and science guide us forward)
• Passive data collection for network analysis
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
One of the only 2 vendors in our study that’s founded and led by a woman, Fortay is different from the other employee experience platforms with its focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). The company was a grant recipient of Women Entrepreneur Fund awarded by the Government of Canada in 2018. Customer NPS: 40
• Focused on helping customers hire talent that’s a “culture add” instead of a “culture fit”
• Strong focus on belonging in the platform, from creating belonging at hiring to measuring it as a key business metric during the employee experience
• Offers intersectionality enhancements to provide more nuanced insights relative to demographic segments
Acquired by LinkedIn in 2018, Glint has grown over the years from a solely employee engagement solution to connecting development and learning to improve the overall employee experience. Much of the leadership from before the acquisition remains in place, allowing Glint to continue to benefit from its start-up roots while taking advantage of the scale offered by LinkedIn and Microsoft. Customer NPS: 57
• Its upcoming solution for individual contributors – allowing employees to seek feedback, set goals, check-in on progress, and learn new skills
• NLP for feedback • One thing that stood out to us when we
tested the vendor’s demo environment was the simple dashboard design and the seamless manner by which managers 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 is an employee engagement / experience vendor founded in 2015 in Denmark. Given its relatively younger age, the vendor has built into its system from the beginning some of the newer engagement / experience capabilities we see, such as integration of employee NPS scores, D&I analytics, and action-focused manager and employee portals. Customer NPS: 67
• Offers True Benchmark® capability, which adjusts for biases in how different employee demographics respond to surveys and builds custom benchmarks based on the composition of teams
• Simple manager dashboards • Generally transparent about NPS and
customer satisfaction scores • Our testing of the demo environment
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
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Perceptyx has invested significantly in thought leadership on how the people analytics community can adjust to the challenges of 2020. For example, once the pandemic hit, Perceptyx launched a series of weekly roundtable discussions during which leaders shared actions, approaches, and insights on how their organizations were responding to the crisis. As 2020 has worn on, the vendor shifted its focus to conversations on ongoing challenges, like understanding civil unrest, addressing stress and burnout, and retaining women during the pandemic.
• Manager dashboards that quickly highlight areas which need focus, suggested actions, and learning resources to help enable those actions
• Communities that provide access to “best-practice experts”
• Integration of data from LMS and CRM systems
• Offering complimentary pulse surveys, as well as industry specific surveys, to clients and nonclients during the pandemic
• Strong customer NPS score • Strong connection between vendor’s
values and the products it delivers
Qlearsite provides a predictive HR analytics platform.
• Did not participate in the 2020 briefing
A performance management-focused solution, Reflektive recently went through a leadership change and will be making significant updates to the product, as well as its UI / UX in the coming year.
• Ability for users to build action plans in the future
• Advanced sentiment analyses capabilities in the future
A new addition to our technology study this year, Willis Towers Watson has more than 100 years of experience in offering insurance, advisory, and consulting services across the globe, and launched its SaaS employee engagement solution in 2017. The company also recently announced a merger with Aon.
• A ready-to-use Inclusion and Diversity survey template, along with several others, such as Corporate Function Effectiveness, Onboarding, Performance Management, Cyber Risk Culture, COVID-19, and Leading Through Crisis, among others
• 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
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
One of the older vendors, Confirmit is a new addition to this year’s study and joins the category of EX vendors that also offers CX capabilities. Customer NPS: 67
• Manager dashboard that allows users to quickly see insights that matter to them and take action on them
• Built a “Ask me @ Home” app to allow 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 sharing the necessary data and insights with the user, based on their roles and areas of concerns. Shared in a clear and quick-to- understand manner via the dashboards, users are able to identify areas that need focus and do a deeper dive on them if needed. Customer NPS: 83
• Offers the ability to download a PowerPoint presentation directly from the tool that contains the results, along with suggestions on how to proceed in sharing them at a team meeting
• Provides a one-point access to its full EX product portfolio that includes engagement, Pulse, 360, Journey, self- 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 combines behavioral science and machine learning to nudge managers and employees toward behavior change with time-based alerts.
• Did not participate in the 2020 briefing
Established in 2018, Macrova is a relatively new entry into the employee engagement and experience market as well as our study. The company was founded by partners that are focused on streamlining the user experience and interface to identify gaps in employee and customer experience.
• Provides the ability for users to export their recommended actions to tools where people work, such as Asana, Slack, Teams etc.
• Manager specific recommendations, in addition to individual actions, to help them better support their team
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
2019-20 was a busy year for Medallia as not only did the vendor go public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2019, raising $326 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, but it also completed 7 acquisitions with 2 additional acquisitions announced and pending completion. The vendor also launched some “freemium” offerings during the COVID-19 pandemic along with an EX Micropulse, a 3-question survey with integrated text analytics tuned to COVID topics. Customer NPS: 40
• Athena, an AI product, that automatically discovers suggestions and ideas within employee feedback comments and identifies employee actions most likely to impact customer satisfaction
• Employee dashboards that allow individuals to access metrics on how the company and their team are performing over time, and feedback given by them to the company, as well as track their own sentiments and experience over time
• 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 Decisions (SMD) in 2019, a participant in our previous study, Press Ganey is, thus, kind of a new addition to our study this year. With the combination of SMD and other recent acquisitions, such as Avatar Solutions (a patient and workforce solution), NarrativeDx (an NLP technology) and Doctor.com (a consumerism technology), Press Ganey has created a robust offering to help healthcare customers manage employee engagement effectively. Customer NPS: 67
• Offers a holistic and data-integrated solution for understanding all aspects of healthcare employees’ experiences and impact on critical patient outcomes
• High-quality data science embedded throughout the solution
• Cleaner, easier-to-consume UI as a result of the acquisition
• Expansion of the workforce comment analytics (NLP) to integrate patient experience sentiment that includes analytics from social sites, such as Yelp, Indeed, and Glassdoor
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Qualtrics continues its extremely strong growth, partly due to the expanded need for employee listening and actioning resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic (it launched 10 new COVID-19 solutions – 6 free and 4 paid). Qualtrics designed its Employee XM (EXM) platform to build a no. of targeted solutions on top of it (engagement, lifecycle, continuous, etc.), which enables it to flexibly develop and deploy new offerings quickly. With a recent announcement of an IPO in August, Qualtrics will be going public 2 years after its acquisition by SAP (https:// redthreadresearch .com/2020/07/27/ why-is-sap-selling-qualtrics/), though SAP will maintain a majority ownership stake. It collects perception as well as passive data. Customer NPS: 40
• Launch of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion methodology and index
• Focus on quick starts for customers and the ability to have service thresholds customized to customers’ needs (i.e., ranging from truly self-service to high- touch custom solutions)
• Greater focus on managers and teams via manager and team action collaboration
• Integrations with Slack, SMS, and web intercepts for a more continuous employee listening approach
• Advanced NLP capabilities through semantic text analysis that allow users to understand the wider context of the 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 competitors in the EX space, offers a combination of employee experience, customer experience, and market research to customers. The vendor launched “Freemium” offerings during the COIVD-19 pandemic to help organizations manage their employee experience. Based in Norway, the vendor currently has offices in 9 countries. Customer NPS: 57
• Greater investments in the ability to pull any type of existing active or passive data from different sources, including other existing survey platforms with organizations, and data management capabilities
• Upcoming investments in capabilities for users to automate workflows to help manage employee experience through their lifecycle journeys, 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
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Focused on employee experience, SMG – while a comparatively older XM (experience management) vendor – is a new addition to our study this year. The vendor offered free, limited-time offerings during COVID-19 that included pulse surveys to focus on COVID preparedness and return to work initiatives, and an always-on Voice of Employee offering available to clients as well nonclients. Customer NPS: 60
• Provides users with a “period end” report that includes areas of focus using algorithms customizable by clients which recommend areas of focus to improve engagement for each unit: The areas are different for each unit or team, based on the survey responses
• Action planning tool within the solution that is prepopulated with areas of focus 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 from just focusing on providing insights on employee experience via dashboards to different users, to helping people analytics teams aggregate and manage their passive employee data. People analytics practitioners can import that data and metrics into their existing data warehouses or data lakes, as appropriate. Customer NPS: 60
• Began providing a “WFH Readiness Score” to companies during the crisis, along with a benchmark score based on ~20 companies as comparison, to help them understand what’s working well and what needs to be improved for remote work
• The insights and recommendations from WFH reports can help organizations plan 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 that helps customers with their digital transformation. The latest upgrades and changes in the solution include a shift to helping customers understand employee experience by analyzing (passive) collaboration data and (active) employee surveys. Compared with the last time we saw this solution, Yva has increased its focus on employee privacy, choice, and security.
• The increased focus on data anonymization, employee privacy, and security by aggregating data, allowing employees to opt-in and opt-out of data collection when they want, and ensuring customers either self-host their data on the cloud or on-premise
• 4 very clear user roles (CEO, HR, manager, employee) with different types of insights provided for each
• Recent addition of ability to measure 5 styles of informal / influencing leadership
PASSIVE PRIMARY
One of only 2 text analysis vendors in our study, Organization View offers niche capabilities for advanced multilanguage semantic text analysis. It uses text data provided by customer (passive and/or perception data) The company’s completely self-funded.
• Offers users the ability to access the coding interface that can be maintained and refined by domain-experts by reviewing ambiguous text, creating new themes, and refining terms
• Recent offering of a “standard” prebuilt coding model for some of the most commonly asked survey questions
• Future larger applicability, beyond HR or people analytics, such as sales and innovation teams
One of the newest vendors in the space, Rsquared was launched to the public in late 2019. The vendor uses NLP to analyze corporate communications to help companies understand issues related to (but not limited to) employee engagement, D&I initiatives, succession planning, and team performance.
• Applying NLP to understand the tone of the comments, levels of toxicity, racism, and sexism in feedback and communications
• Integration with external data sources, such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor
• The combination of NLP with ONA for a deeper and wider understanding of company culture and behaviors
SWOOP is an employee engagement platform that helps companies improve collaboration by conducting organizational network analysis (ONA). The company analyzes data collected from collaboration tools such as Yammer and Teams to understand how individuals and teams collaborate and engage with each other and the company.
• A non-traditional approach to helping companies understand engagement via passive data and without surveys
• Conducts sentiment analysis in addition to ONA
• Does not use meta data from emails, calendars, schedules etc. for their analysis which can reduce the potential risks and conversations around issues of employee privacy
Appendix 2: Summary of Methodology
This report is based on the research completed for our People Analytics Tech 2020 study. We kicked off the study in the spring 2020 by launching an online poll for practitioners and vendors to find out what they want to know most about People Analytics Technology . We received more than 70 responses on the poll .
The next step in the process was the launch of our People Analytics Technology Vendor Survey in June 2020 . In order to participate in our study, vendors had to complete our 317-question survey . Each vendor could share details for up to 3 people analytics solutions . They were also asked to share case studies, representative screen shots of their technology, logos, and complete a 60-90-minute briefing and demo with us. The vendors had the option of providing prerecorded briefing videos if they preferred. The briefings took place during July-October 2020. We also requested of vendors to share with us their login to their demo environments, if possible . For those who could, we were able to test out their solution and functionalities, and have included our reviews for them in the RedThread Assessment section of the tool .
A total of 45 vendors completed our survey . On the practitioner side, we launched a short Customer Poll in June 2020 . Customers were asked to share the challenges they’re using the solution to solve for, give feedback on the vendor’s strengths and areas of improvement, as well as provide a Net Promoter Score and any other feedback. Each vendor was required to receive a minimum of 5 customer reviews to be included in our study . There was no limit on how many reviews they could receive . We received 5 or more customer reviews for 24 vendors as of the end of October 2020 .
For this report, we hosted a Q&A call in early 2021 where we shared our initial thinking and received feedback on it . We also conducted additional briefings and demos with new participants.
Appendix 3: Authors & Contributors
Stacia Sherman Garr Co-Founder & Principal Analyst
Stacia is a researcher and thought leader on talent management, leadership, D&I, people analytics, and HR technology . A frequent speaker and writer, her work has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal as well as in numerous HR trade publications . Stacia co-founded RedThread Research in 2018, after leading talent and workforce research for 8 years at Bersin by Deloitte . Before Bersin, Stacia spent approximately 5 years conducting research and creating learning content for the Corporate Leadership Council, part of CEB / Gartner . She has an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics .
Priyanka Mehrotra Research Lead
Priyanka Mehrotra is a Research Lead at RedThread Research . Before joining the company in 2018, she was part of the research team at Bersin by Deloitte where she worked on talent management, leadership, and people analytics as well as conducted research and contributed content for Bersin’s Midmarket study . Prior to Bersin by Deloitte, Priyanka worked at several non-profits, think-tanks, and international organizations where she published and co-authored several articles and conducted research on international relations, conflict, and development.
In addition, Catherine Coughlin edited the report and Jenny Barandich created the graphics and completed the layout of the PDF .
Endnotes 1 . Our survey allowed vendors to select more than 1 area of primary focus for their products .
2 . “FlexJobs, Mental Health America survey: Mental health in the workplace,” FlexJobs / Brie Weiler Reyn- olds, August 21, 2020, flexjobs.com.
3 . “Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, June 24–30, 2020,” MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep / Czeisler MÉ , Lane RI, Petrosky E, et al, 2020; 69:1049– 1057, DOI: http://dx .doi .org/10 .15585/mmwr .mm6932a
4 . “Insights Discussion: Navigating A Pandemic: Listening To Employees Through Turbulent Times,” Percep- tyx, April 2020, https://blog .perceptyx .com/insights-discussion-navigating-pandemic-video-recording
5 . People Analytics Tech 2020, RedThread Research / Stacia Garr and Priyanka Mehrotra, 2020, https://redthreadresearch .com/pat-2020/
6 . “What is a Good Net Promoter Score?” Retently / Grigore, 2020, https://www .retently .com/blog/good- net-promoter-score/
7 . “Coffee Circle Case Study,” Culture Amp, 2020, https://www.cultureamp.com/case-studies/coffee-circle/
8 . “Southwest Airlines Keep Culture High,” Qualtrics, 2020, https://www.qualtrics.com/work-different/ southwest-airlines-keep-culture-high/
9 . “ANZ – Top Yammer network: Authentic leaders listening to their people,” Swoop Analytics / Sharon Dawson, 2021, https://www .swoopanalytics .com/case-studies/anzlistening

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