Energage is awarded the patent equivalent of a unicorn
Employees are the customers of your culture. If you really want to know what matters most to them, an employee engagement survey is your best first step. But administering a survey is the easy part. Knowing what to do next is where it gets tricky. All too often, momentum is lost in the analysis, understanding, and sharing of the employee survey results. Efforts stall and the data just sits there, collecting dust. And there goes the meaningful insights, quick action, and culture improvement. Until now.
How you see employee survey results is about to change
We’ve been hard at work for years, looking for new, simpler ways to analyze and visualize survey results. And well, we’re ready for the big reveal. Our new approach simplifies the data in a way that makes it easy to truly understand what’s going on inside your culture. It means you can move quickly from insights to action and improvement — precisely, and with confidence.
It’s all made possible with our massive database of 20 million employee survey responses that we’ve built over the past 14 years — and the help of super-smart analytics. Here’s what you can expect.
Benchmarking your culture at a new level
Benchmarks are critical. They’re the gauge that tells you what good and bad cultures look like.
With traditional benchmarking, each company is compared to groups in the same sector — or a sector of choice. Here, Energage has already set ourselves apart from the pack by providing every customer with their own unique custom benchmark specifically tailored for both matching subsector and employee count.
But, inspired by analytics from the high stakes testing industry, we’ve added a new dimension. Now we also compare each individual employee to similar responders in the benchmark. We call this “individualized benchmarking,” — a more reliable and accurate way of identifying key themes in your culture.
For our larger enterprise customers, we are pushing our benchmarking analytics even further. For our multinational customers, we can insightfully adjust for regional variations in survey responses. And finally, for our customers who have multiple distinct business lines in different industries, we can accurately compare each individual employee to other similar employees in their matching industry. No other survey vendor can even come close to this level of accuracy.
This all means that our survey results call out insights that other survey providers either miss entirely or, worse, get completely wrong. What would – at best – take highly experienced experts weeks is now built in automatically.
Identifying the most impactful focus areas and celebrations
Individualized benchmarking is also crucial to the next step: identifying the most impactful focus areas and celebrations. Building on the accurate scoring, our patented algorithm blends together a wide variety of inputs, such as:
• Change since last survey
• Correlations to business outcomes
• Population size
• Difference from parent score
• Unusual response distribution patterns
• Overlap with other potential focus areas
It’s hard, if not impossible, for human experts to factor in all of these variables, but any one of them can hide or derail an insight.
Now, this level of analytics is available not only for your organization as a whole, but also for each of your departments, locations, and any other way you slice your organization.
Seeing the story in your employee survey results
Our new approach also brings a new and unique look — known as “dot plots.” It’s a visual hierarchy that communicates the story in your results. Early adopters tell us it does a much better job than traditional charts in helping them tell the story of what is really going on internally, and here’s why:
A: Based on your individualized benchmark, and AI-driven predictive analytics, the charts provide a clear picture of where we would expect your results to be. This sequences your conversation to focus on key strengths and improvement areas.
B: Circles represent your scores (low to high, horizontally) and importance (small to large, based on strength of tie to employee engagement and size of the group). This draws attention to extreme and important scores.
C: Arrows represent year-over-year change. Green for noteworthy increases, red for decreases, and gray for less significant changes. The intuitive color scheme helps keep the conversations focused on what is changing the most — good or bad.
The patent equivalent of a unicorn
We think this new approach is pretty novel. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agrees, so they approved the Energage application upon first review — a process known as a “first action allowance.” Some call it a “patent equivalent of a unicorn.” It’s a testament to both the indisputable usefulness and uniqueness of our new approach.
We won’t bore you with the details, but you can read the entire patent here.
Employee engagement surveys are as important as ever. We know that you will also see how powerful our new approach to employee survey results can be in your organization.
