#13: Get Better Employee Engagement Metrics with AI

Welcome back to another episode of The Junction.

All right, Chase, today we're

talking about employee engagement.

I'm really excited about this one.

I've always felt very passionate about communications,

keeping people in the loop, and just

understanding the health of an organization.

So let's just jump right into it. Yeah.

People make organizations move without them.

You really can't do a whole lot.

I mean, unless you automate your entire

business, which that'd be really impressive.

But even then, there's still one person involved. Right.

We found that to keep people engaged,

you have to talk to them. Right.

You have to engage with them and see how they're doing.

And that's something that's really a struggle

for maybe nerdy folks like us. Right.

We're just like, oh, I have to

talk to you to figure that out.

What do you mean, for you? Speak for yourself.

Yeah, I mean, I'm the ultra nerd.

So one of the things we thought of, I think this

was a couple of years ago, was how do we kind

of gauge employee sentiment in an automated fashion on a weekly

basis so we could have ongoing trends to figure out, like,

well, Mel is not doing so hot this week.

Or, she's been riding a high, and all

of a sudden she dropped real low.

Something happened, right.

Like, that's a leading indicator for us to go

have a conversation or for her manager or for

her boss to come and say, hey, just wanted

to check in and see how things are going.

Well, as an organization grows, you go from being,

like, shoulder to shoulder in an office, being able

to maybe pick up on more physical cues, like

somebody's body language or just by virtue of being

across the way from them.

You can ask them how they're doing.

But then there's also the so as

you start to scale, that gets harder.

You also have organizations that have never

had an office, and they are completely

remote, so that model doesn't really work.

But then you also have the level of anonymity.

Maybe even if you can attribute the survey response.

If you're like gauging how people are feeling week

to week, there's maybe not the comfort level to

tap your boss on the shoulder or tell your

coworker you're having kind of a crummy week, or

whether it's personal or work related.

There's just that layer of I don't

know, kind of removes the awkwardness. Right?

It's just like, hey, I'm not doing so hot.

And that's what we wanted to uncover.

So every Friday, I think, at noon in Slack, each employee

gets a message, and it asks, how was your week? Right.

And there's kind of three options.

I think it's good, meh, and bad.

And of those three, you pick one, right.

And the thought is that every week, you just

pick one, and there's not, like, an underlying tone

behind it, like, oh, Mel picked bad every week.

But the thought is that that's a way for you

to let us know that, hey, maybe something's up.

Raise your hand.

Yeah, even if you don't.

I've seen it before too. Where? I don't know.

I kind of fall into the I can

always find something good in my week category.

But I started to really like, we look at this

every week, at least as a leadership team, to sort

of gauge, especially if we have we've actually noticed a

trend when we do certain employee engagement type activities.

We've got a bunch of green we

never have, like a red and yellow.

Not never, but rarely. Right.

And you see things that you would come to expect,

like if there is an outage or something that requires

folks to work more irregular hours or longer hours that

may take them outside of the bounds of comfort, and

we see, oh, there's a bunch of people who are

yellow this past week, and we understand why.

So there's definitely some things that you may

not be surprised by, but it's really nice

for the ones that you are. Right?

Well, it's great because this

automation is so simple, right.

What we haven't done is put 50 questions in front

of people and ask for 50 different types of answers.

The goal is just to get an overall engagement.

And part of the process, though, at least what

we talk about is there's people, process and technology.

A lot of folks I've been probably on

LinkedIn too much lately, and a lot of

folks love to focus on one thing, right?

Like, well, let me focus on the technology.

Let's talk about Chat GBT, or let me focus on

why it's really important to get this process understood.

Nobody really talks about the people, and if

they do, they're only talking about the people.

It's all of these things combined that help

you understand that employee engagement from kind of

that leading indicator path that we're going on.

So this tool, I think, has been in

place for years, or this process, and it's

helped us uncover things for managers where the

manager maybe isn't fully wrapped in right.

Or read in on what's going

on with that individual person.

And it just gives us that nudge like you were talking

about, like Mel just put in, like, maybe you should go

have a conversation with her and see what's going on.

What we're not trying to do, though, is

figure out, like, well, why was she red?

Well, let's figure that out.

You're not automating that piece of it.

There's a balance.

The technology has enabled us to pay attention.

And now, if we're not already and then the

human element of engaging with that person, whether it's

over slack or picking up the phone or taking

them to coffee to say, hey, I'm noticing a

trend, or I saw that acknowledging that they flagged

an irregular response and now opening up a dialogue.

And hopefully you can get to a path

of resolution or alleviate the stressor, particularly if

it is work or task related. Right.

Well, in the beginning and still today, we want to

be an organization that we want to work for. Right.

Like, I don't want to come up on Sunday.

I'm like, oh, I got to go back into work.

But this, I feel like, is probably

a common thing across other organizations.

You threw an article from Fortune in here that the title

is too many CEOs don't know what their workers need.

Employee engagement surveys can make

that problem even worse.

And I think as I read this article, what kind

of stuck out to me was that most folks just

want you to be doing good, and they don't want

to deal with the fact that you're not doing like,

I don't care if Mel's Red forget it.

Just make her happy. Right.

So we can keep trucking down

the road, and that's the problem.

And then it's like, well, let's just throw

more surveys at them so we can try

to figure out what's wrong or worse.

The companies that do one annual survey a year

with the 50 questions that you're talking about, I've

never worked for an organization like that.

I'm a huge fan of collecting feedback, so

I don't want to knock a survey.

And given this circumstance, I mean, I just

went through one the other day that was

more customer facing, and I stepped through I

don't know how many pages towards the end.

I'm a little like, okay, you've collected

all of my feedback as your customer.

I did it I think I do it because

I'm in marketing, and I know how much the

marketer on the other end of that is super

excited to get that insight about their customer.

Did you also connect your bank account and tell

them your DNA sequence and your blood type?

I'm not supposed to do that.

No, but in all seriousness, so these companies collect.

They ask a ton of questions at the end

of the year, and then it usually takes months

to present it to the leadership team or the

board, and then they collect those insights.

The HR team works with

your communications team or something.

Then they roll out a series of communications and

direct touch plans between manager and staff, and it

takes a long time to act on it.

Yeah, it's indicative of the fact that they haven't

built out processes behind all of these things. Right.

It's like, well, let's just ask

them a bunch of questions.

In fact, in the Fortune article, for instance,

it says, a poorly worded question might ask,

do you feel management supports your professional development?

I've seen that question in lots of surveys that I'm

taking in, and it's like, well, if they were really

worried or wondering about that, wouldn't you focus on connecting

with me directly and just asking, well, we went and

did a lot of things together. Right.

Do you feel professionally supported.

It's kind of like you've lost touch, right?

If I have to ask you that, then I don't really

know you or I don't understand how you as a person

are affected by the organization and the work that we do.

And if I don't have that, well, yeah, a survey might

help me out, but I'm already a step behind, right?

Like, if I have to go read the paper to

figure out how Mel feels about it, we've already lost.

I worked for an organization years

back that we partnered with.

Uh, he was a founder at the time.

His name is Stephen Huerta. Shout out to him.

He started a company called Workify, and he

took this principle of we need to collect

feedback in smaller, more like regular pulses.

And so it could be a weekly thing.

Then they would have quarterly pulses, and then you

would do sort of an annual roll up.

But they really emphasized the fact that you

don't have to tackle all of these issues

or things at once in one big survey.

Let's focus on one area of the organization that you

want to tap into or don't understand, or you want

to engage or understand the employee engagement scores there.

And then we can take those little bit of

insights and roll out small iterative changes and then

do the same thing with different topic areas.

So that's one way that I've seen it done very well,

and that was several years ago, and now I don't know.

I'm sure there's other newer

capabilities within that platform itself.

But then also, I just actually did a Google search on

AI tools for employee engagement, and there's this list of seven

on some random blog article that I pulled up.

So these things are out there, and so you don't

have to go build a Slack integration like we've done.

We actually built our own tool. How does it work?

Is it built in salesforce? Break it down for me.

Yeah, I'll break it down for you.

No, man, I'm definitely never going to be cool.

We took Salesforce and another tool called Workato,

which are big partners of and obviously Slack.

And so between those three, there's a chat bot

type functionality inside of Workado where we can pose

questions to all of the active employees. Right.

So we have people come in the door.

We need to add them in.

It'll automatically do that.

It'll ask them the question every Friday.

If they don't respond, it actually asks them again.

It kind of bumps the question.

I think it's on Sunday when they do respond.

We've got a data model inside of Salesforce that then

attaches that to we call it a resource record. Right.

So every time I've ever answered

that question, you have that record.

We go way as long as I've been here.

Yeah, three years.

For every time that I've said good or bad. Yes.

All the way going back.

And I kind of get the sentiment even from

you talking that it's kind of Big Brothery like,

oh, wow, how much data are we tracking?

But let me ask you, there was a thought.

I think this was like right when COVID was coming

around and people were going all remote and they were

taking three and four jobs or maybe quiet quitting.

How much data is too much?

If we've got data going back three years

on your three responses, should we could we

maybe not use the sentiment in your calls? Right.

The transcripts.

Let's start with the data that you have going back

three years of just asking me how my week was.

I actually think that's no on the Big Brother.

I think that's fantastic because can we

get to a place where there's more?

Can you predict maybe there's like, seasonal

I don't think I do this. Okay.

But again, I generally feel like I

can find something good in my day.

I try to answer honestly.

If it's been a little bit of a hairdo of

a week or something, that to just try to flag

it from a maybe I'm drowning and I haven't been

good about communicating with my manager about it.

But I do think that that's really neat because it

takes a lot of data for these models to learn

on, to train on, and it's just one simple indicator.

Now you start getting into listening to calls.

I think that's a really interesting point.

We've talked about that in the context

of sales calls, and we've talked about

that in the context of recruiting.

Now you're talking about it in the way of how is Mel

feeling this week or last week or three times a year?

She hits a wall, maybe.

I don't know.

Seems like an awful lot of data, though.

And what about the employee that never gets on calls?

We do have some team members that are not

all customer facing, or they may have three to

5 hours of more, like internal meetings a week.

Well, we've talked about this before.

Maybe we judge how many emails this person sent.

And I wish I had that article in front of me

because it talks about how some of these bigger orgs are

watching, like, well, how many times did you log in?

How many emails did you send?

How many phone calls did you have?

Even with present sensors, like in the buildings right.

They walked through the door.

I'm sure there are organizations that are going way

too far down this to just collect a bunch

of data and then figure out right.

But I keep going back to in all of our

discussions, it's about the people, the process, the technology.

If you have way too much technology, people

are already kind of lost in the weeds. Right.

You already lost. Right.

And it's going back to this focus

of, well, what is employee engagement?

It's ensuring that the employee wants the

job they get it and that they

enjoy it, that they're actually learning.

And all of these things that we've talked about,

if you're going to automate them or you're going

to add some level of AI, some kind of

sentiment analysis, those are easy things to think about.

It's a lot harder to think about, at least

for me, kind of being the nerdy guy, right?

Like, well, let me sit Mel down and let

me have a one on one conversation and ask

her these really difficult questions, because now I'm already

like, let me just tech it.

Let me just throw some surveys at

her and figure out what happens. Well, okay.

So let's step back for anyone listening, if you're

not already doing maybe something like a weekly pulse

check, something that has worked really well for our

organization, we also look at we are a professional

services organization, so we do track times, so we

look at hours logged.

And so that paired with you

can look at multiple data points.

So if you can see someone was red

and they worked 62 hours last week, then

you have data to lead your conversation.

These things I don't think should

ever just be used in silos.

So we're big on that, connecting the data.

But right now, none of this beyond us receiving

a time submission from the team member and receiving

the I'm feeling this way this week.

The rest of it is a manual.

We look at it as a team via a

salesforce report, and then we act on it.

So if you're not already doing it, maybe consider that and

then take it a step further with, can we combine some

of these things to maybe do, like, a roll up score

that can help us be a bit more proactive in how

we lead our teams and lead our people?

Yeah, I agree.

Mel, actually, I have a question for you.

I'm looking at the data, and this indicates

that you have never been read in the

three years that you've worked here.

Tell me the secrets.

How are you never read?

I'm in marketing.

It's really fun.

Well, I'm looking at mine and your data.

I've never had a red.

You've never had a red.

I'm looking at mine, and I've had in the three

years that you've worked here, you haven't had a Red.

And this goes back to February 2021. That's accurate.

I mean, I started late 2020.

I've had 1234 Red weeks up until last week.

I think it's got to be pretty like scorched earth.

Something is nuclear.

I'm just making it to work.

I don't think I want to be here that week.

I don't know.

I'm also like a ten on the logic

for the culture index, so you might not

even know that I'm feeling that way covert.

Yeah, I don't have a secret to that.

But again, I do think it points to the fact

that you can look at three years worth of data

on me and say generally, maybe that means maybe you

can look at someone's threshold for certain things.

Right.

You kind of can see even through certain times.

Not trying to pump myself up

here, but maybe there is that.

And there's also probably just a little bit of level

of I know after the first time I put meth,

my manager reached out to me, and I didn't know

that the team looked at this every week at that

time, and I was like, oh, they know.

So if I put meh or bad, someone's going to talk to me.

So, I mean, just keep those things into consideration.

I think it's none of this you shouldn't

roll this out and not tell the team

why that starts to feel big brother.

You have to remind your teams, we're doing

this so that we can continue to gauge

the health and well being of our organization.

It doesn't replace one to one managerial conversations.

It does not replace you feeling like you can come

in and tell me that you're having a crap week.

But it's a tool for us to look at

the organization as a whole, along with other data

sets, timesheets, events, outages, just a variety of things

and be able to see how those things impact

us and then lead our teams well through it.

What's really interesting about this is you can

see the trend for a specific person. Right.

And so I don't know what that individual was going

through in that moment, but I do know that it

kind of dips down and then it dips back up.

I wish we could do, like, a marker the

way that you have in SEMrush, Google Analytics.

You could kind of be like, this event happened here.

Not to say that, to necessarily attribute it to that.

That would be interesting because if you saw, like, a

spike or a flag, you could kind of point on

the record, well, there was this particular change.

Right.

Well, it would be nice to utilize the

data beyond what we're already doing to further

define, hey, in this moment, this thing happened.

And because of that, three of

the product dev folks right.

Were not feeling so hot, be like,

well, we probably shouldn't do that again.

Whatever that thing was.

Whatever that thing was.

Yeah, I think that's really insightful.

All right, well, let's go on to headlines.

I love this part.

So IBM says 40% of the global workforce

will have to learn new skills over the

next three years due to AI implementation.

This headline feels a little

like rinse, rinse and repeat.

Yeah, same stuff, different day.

What makes this one new?

I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure

out how AI is going to change our world.

There was a ton of hype at the beginning of

the year, and now it seems to be trailing down.

But I do believe that what is already in place, like

with chat GPT is going to accelerate your productivity to a

level that prior to any of this, wasn't there.

And so if you don't keep up with what's going on,

even with just like regular old prompting regular old like it's

been around forever, but if you don't keep up with Chat

GBT and how it can expedite some of the things that

you're doing, well, you're going to be behind the person that

is right before you go off of that.

How does one keep up?

That's such a broad term.

I've heard some suggestions

around enrolling in classes.

I know I personally try to register for webinars on

these topics, but what's a good way for someone to

actually gain a skill set or understand basic principles beyond

listening to The Junction and attending a webinar?

And what other suggestions do you have?

I actually just figured this one out recently.

My LinkedIn fee has been terrible forever and I

really haven't ever enjoyed LinkedIn beyond the Rolodex.

But I realized that it's because I've never really kind of

massaged my filter, the people that I follow and the topics

that I'm in and the groups that I'm in.

And I just recently started doing this and it made

me realize that I've been doing LinkedIn all wrong.

But there are, to answer your question, algorithms whack

because you haven't been in there and engaging.

Oh, totally.

I'm like the worst social media guy ever.

But I've started following people that in

relevant topics that are interesting to me. Right.

And now all of a sudden my

feed is a little bit more exciting.

Opening up a whole new world. Oh, totally.

Well, this is like if you want to get involved in

understanding how AI is changing the world, go follow some people

out there that are at the top of that list.

And I'm going to call out a

name only because I recently found him.

His name's Ruben Hasid.

Hopefully I got his name right.

But looking through his story, it was almost a

year ago when he started doing LinkedIn and posting

chat GPT videos and how tos and all these

things that you can do with this stuff.

And while most of it, it's kind of like yeah, I mean

I could figure out how I would use that in my work.

His thought process, right?

Like how he does these things,

how he's connecting the dots.

His video, I think, from today is taking YouTube

names from YouTube, executing some not necessarily code, but

he's just doing something unique to get the titles.

He's putting that in Google Sheets and then he's pasting

all that in the Chat GBT to get the most

viral to generate a viral YouTube video name.

Right.

The response from GBT is pretty good and

I'm not posting tons of YouTube videos and

I'll never have a hundred million people following

me, but not with that kind of attitude.

You're right.

I'm starting today.

But what he does is it's the

combination of those where he takes chat

GBT, Google Sheets, this kind of browser.

I'll call it a hack, but it's not really a hack,

but he's combining all three of those to expedite this one

thought process of if you were trying to name your YouTube

video in a way that was most SEO viral, right?

If you did, like, you would expedite

how fast it would take you.

It would be so much faster because of this.

And that's where I think a lot of people

are kind of missing the boat on this AI

stuff is that it's not just chat GBT.

You have to connect chat GBT to your

data, to these other programs to accomplish this

one thing, and that's really challenging.

So the next headline is, what if generative

AI turned out to be a dud?

Sometimes I wonder that myself.

In playing with chat GPT and anthropics chatbot,

you kind of wonder, Is this going anywhere?

And I think there's probably a sentiment, especially if

you've read this article, like, okay, that was cool.

It didn't really help me, but all right, whatever.

I'm going to go back to my work.

But I think what people are missing is

the idea that it's not just chachi, BT.

It's all of these other things in combination that

are going to help you be more productive, to

be a better person, to solve these problems faster.

Like, you name it.

And we've only got kind of one

piece of the pie right now. When you look at chat

GBT, it's like generative content.

That's kind of what people have

kind of honed in on, right?

HubSpot has chatspot.

We've seen some of this with kind of email generation.

Everybody's kind of focused on, well, let

me write the email for you.

What people aren't focused on is what this

guy, like I was talking about earlier, what

Ruben's doing, and he's connecting multiple platforms to

then do something really unique.

And that's probably the biggest challenge because

we're also focused on just one part

of that people process technology.

We're just focused on one thing, not all of them.

You talked about in an earlier episode that there's

a lot of people using it to do things

faster, but they're not using it in the way

that gets them insights that they wouldn't otherwise have.

So I think that's kind of where

you're going with connecting more applications.

It's like supercharging those insights that you

may not get from just connecting applications

or even doing it manually.

Yeah, I think what I've found is that it's not

going to be, at least in today's model, what we

have access to right now is not something that is

going to do something totally new and unique.

Like, it's not going to go figure out how to

bust the stock market and make you a billionaire overnight.

But what it can do is it can help

you replicate things that you're already doing manually.

Right.

Or maybe things that you haven't tackled because you know, it

would take you a very long time to do it. Right?

Like the transcripts. Right.

We're taking the podcast transcripts, we're dumping them in

there and we're having it generate the topics.

Okay, well, that's not I mean, I don't

think that's necessarily revolutionary, but it's the time

that you've now saved so you don't have

to go back and do that yourself.

Those are the, like, forget the transcript

piece and pulling out the topics.

It's that idea that I can utilize this thing

to do something that I was already doing to

speed up what I was doing before.

One of the things that this article also points out,

they actually pull in a tweet from someone saying, I've

been using Chat GPT for half a year and I

really don't see any valuable use for it.

I'm kind of disillusioned.

My friends feel the same way.

I think I've seen this a little bit in

some of my more personal circles professionally working for

a technology consulting firm that specializes in automation.

There's a lot of urgency around this here internally right

now to understand how can we use AI, how can

we adopt it, how can we roll it out, how

can we deliver on it for our clients?

Whereas I'm seeing a disconnect just

in kind of my personal life.

People aren't even using it.

I'm like, you know, you can go out and just do

this just a little bit faster or a little bit better.

And I don't know if you've seen the

similar thing, like, are we feeling it because

of the industry that we're in?

And there's still a ton of people out there

that don't have a ton of urgency around understanding

how it works and why they should adopt it.

I kind of see a little bit of that in

my personal life, but that's primarily because people don't fully

understand what Chat GBT can even do, right?

There's a lack of education on that front.

And the people that do have kind of figured out, at

least with this one tool, it can do some cool things,

it can do some tips and tricks and help me out.

But it's not like for me as

an individual, something that is completely revolutionary.

I'm going to go start up a new

business and automate the whole thing, right?

It can help you write some text.

And that's what I think most folks kind of feel like.

I read something the other day that reminded

me it was an article around SEO and

know that's this whole don't sleep on Chat

GPT marketers because that's where it's going.

It's basically your next Google search.

It was kind of what was happening with TikTok.

We started exploring, should we be on TikTok?

And we were for some time.

And it was the use case, or the

compelling use case for me was we want.

To be where our audience is.

And so if they're searching on how do I

integrate salesforce and HubSpot, we wanted to at least

be in that conversation on that platform.

I definitely see a generation of people

that will eventually be using Chat GPT

the way that we use Google today.

I would say that I probably use OpenAI more within the

work context, and I never think about it outside of, like,

other than if it comes up in a conversation.

But the other night I was trying to I don't frequently

use recipes, I just kind of prefer to cook by feel.

And I went to Google to know, how do I do this thing?

I could have totally punched it into Chat GBT.

You should do it tonight. I should.

I'm going to go home and do that.

So I don't know, that's where

I'm kind of seeing it going.

Like there's just still this huge gap.

We keep saying, adopt it, learn

it, it's not going away.

But then I'm seeing this disconnect in my more

personal circles, and I'm trying to figure out for

the person out there listening that hasn't played around

with these tools, where should they start and why?

I think that's totally fair, and I think

it's primarily because Chat GBT, not the OpenAI's

Large language model, is not going to exponentially

increase your organization's processes on its own.

You have to connect it with something else, some

sort of data source, some sort of roping it

into some level of automation or integration, and then

you'll start to see that exponential value.

One of the things that people don't talk about a

lot right now, and I think it's mainly because it's

very much a coding thing, is that through the API,

you can give the model access to function, right?

So in the documentation, what it refers to is like, here's

a function that allows you to type in the city.

And in the function, we'll just

return the temperature right now.

So if you pass that in and let OpenAI in the API

call know that it now has access to this function, right?

What's, the city?

And it'll spit back the temperature.

It'll then like as a system message to itself.

Let me query what the temperature is in Dallas.

Well, it's like a million degrees, right?

110 yesterday, 110.

We're not well here.

I don't know when this episode is going

to come out, but we're recording it.

We're melting while we chat.

Summer, it's awful, but it knows that it

has access to this kind of program, right?

And then it pulls that 110 out and now it

responds to the user with real time information, right?

It says, hey, Chase, the temperature in Dallas is 110.

It's these functions that are going to exponentially

increase the value of GPT for your organization.

And part of that disconnect is, well,

now I have to code something, right?

And it's no longer chat.

So I think it's going to take some time for this

to be a real big deal, but it's there now.

So understanding how it works to begin

with without the functions is probably the

thing that you should focus in on.

It's all good insight, per usual.

All right, well, that's all we

have for today's episode employee engagement.

Automation.

Can't do it without the people.

People, process and technology.

That's what we're all about.

So thanks for tuning in, as always.

If you have a question, comment, or if

there's a topic out there that you would

like to see covered on a future show,

please email us at thejunction@ventechnology.com.

In the meantime, keep it automated.