Understand Organizational Emotional Health

Understanding how something works doesn’t necessarily communicate the full value. Understanding that the how enables a variety of capabilities is also important. Because Feelalytics uses emoji as a stand-alone form of communication and then quantifies the responses, the system is able to empower businesses and organizations to do several things.

·       You can diagnose a company’s internal emotional health.

·       You can actively contribute to your team’s emotional and mental health.

·       You can improve and clarify brand and marketing communication.

·       You can enhance market and product research.

·       You can create more connection during live online events.

Over the course of a series of articles, we will delve into each of these possibilities.

First, let’s consider a couple of aspects of how you can diagnose your company’s or organization’s internal emotional health.

Photo by Edward Jenner from Pexels

Find out how people really feel about something

There are times in a company’s lifecycle when things need to change, but it is difficult to gauge how that change will affect the people responsible for implementing the changes. Often the feedback needed to guide successful, healthy change is not exactly politic.

Let’s use the current corona virus situation as an example. What if you had been able to get feedback before and during full shut down and now during phased reopening?

You would be able to ask your employees, “How do you feel about working from home?” And you can ask it again over time to see how people are coping with that transition. You could also ask, “How do you feel about coming back to work in the office?” Or you could ask, “How do you feel about wearing a mask in the warehouse?”

Because the feedback is processed and comes back as a Net Emotional Index score, you get a high-level view of how people feel overall. Granted, any of those questions are likely to get a negative response. The value is knowing to what degree most of the employees feel either positively or negatively about a change.

Vital feedback like this is possible because Feelalytics takes a lot of the judgmental filtering out of the response. If you asked these same questions via email, you would get a very different, and likely equivocated response. Feelalytics can remove a lot of lines that you’d normally have to read between.

Compare feelings between groups of people

In large organizations we can take the feedback a step further. What if the whole company’s response to masks and distancing is fairly neutral, but when you segment responses based on department you see volatility in the responses? While you can’t segment a group down so small that you can identify the individuals responding, knowing that the teams in fulfillment and shipping are eager to do anything that enables them to work in the warehouse safely is helpful. If the push-back is coming from departments that have been able to work from home, it’s useful to know that. Those teams probably don’t object to the new policies on site, but may be more concerned about their ability to work from home and deal with the need for greater flexibility for their school age children.

Complex issues require sophisticated feedback. Getting honest input that is quick, easy, and non-judgmental can go a long way to making the workplace continue to be safe and productive.

Compare feelings before and after an event

Some changes need to be made even if we don’t like making them. Again, workplace changes due to corona virus work as an excellent example. In certain situations, like masks for food service and cashiers, the changes are mandatory. Getting a sense of how the team feels about this can help you guide the communication and implementation of that change. And by pulsing over time, you can discover if they are adjusting well to the change.

As circumstances improve and things get back to what everyone might recognize as normal, the ability to understand feelings about events is still valuable. The same techniques used for big changes during a pandemic and also be used for feedback about all kinds of events.

How will your teams respond to hosting an event on-site when it’s safe to do so? You would be able to ask those questions before, during, and after and combine the NEI to the rest of your success metrics. The quick emotional responses can also guide you about how you formally survey event attendees for feedback.

Increase transparency

Trust is necessary to get honest feedback from your team. Transparency helps build trust. Feelalytics translates the emoji responses to a question into the Net Emotional Index. The resulting NEI is then showcased in a bubble chart that can be shared with the respondent group and create transparency in the feedback process.

For example, when your team answers a question, they get a link that says, “click here if you want to see the results.” Then, they are able to see the same feedback that you see. Seeing the group results can help either validate their emotional response or help them accept that they don’t feel the same as most everyone else. This kind of transparency also makes them feel less like test subjects that have no control over the change.

Think back over the course of your career. How often have you been asked to take a company survey that ultimately ended in the deep depths of HR never to be seen again? By automatically providing transparency with the results, your team is encouraged to continue to participate.

At Feelalytics, we have created a technological platform that can leverage the power of a tiny text image as a method of discovering emotional trends. It starts with calculating a one-time NEI.

Michelle Stinson Ross, CMO Feelalytics

I’m currently practicing as a digital strategist and marketer, and applying mindful practices to marketing communication and storytelling.