The Key to Workforce Retention and Innovation
It’s time we moved beyond eavesdropping on social media and polling our employees as if they were test subjects or laboratory rats. We need to banish obviously outdated and ineffective listening strategies such as focus groups if we want to amp the hearts and collective minds of our team members. The essential frame we need to retain and grow employees for the future is authentic engagement.
Although research has shown that engaged employees are motivated to contribute ideas, the standard methods of engagement – focus groups, surveys, polls, video meetings, and digital social events – have failed dramatically in retention efforts. More than 25% of the employee workforce has quit in the past two years, and according to Deloitte and Fortune’s Winter 2022 Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, CEOs and Chief People Officers are aware they need to encourage a culture of participation, despite the past two years of remote work that is morphing into hybrid work for what may be the long term.
Employees recognize that the innate rewards they want in a job are changing. They are no longer placated with coffee and social signals that reward participation. They desire real, transparent connection points that fill the psychological void in their personal and professional lives. They want to be heard, seen, and valued for their unique perspective and contributions.
But what does that participation require? Imagine if every employee truly had a voice in product development. If bias were eliminated in decision making. If collaboration became the psychological reward that drives participation. How could we encourage smart – as in interactive -- conversations with your workforce and other stakeholders?
We’re doing just that at CrowdSmart™. We use AI to refine thousands of conversations, leading to the best, most innovative solutions for your organization. The knowledge model we developed not only drives employee innovation and retention, but it also reduces bias and divisiveness. We do this by allowing employees to submit their ideas anonymously and then respond to their team members’ ideas anonymously as well. This drives the best ideas to the top and aligns employees in a positive, supportive direction.
The reason nobody has offered these smart, interactive conversations at scale before now is because they have lacked any method of facilitation. The idea of AI using human inputs instead of training data; then coupling them with advances in NLP to parse the inputs accurately enough to calculate semantic distance and conversational themes; and then layering in learning algorithms to move a group to conclusion is predicated on a combination of major advancements in deep learning and AI that only appeared in the past four or five years. So it is that confluence of advancements that make it possible to build something that is as powerful yet as simple to use like CrowdSmart.
The solution we’ve developed can scale to help an organization with thousands of employees to identify critical insights and risks by leveraging AI to unify individual thoughts and preferences into clear recommendations. Essentially, by combining the best of both human and artificial intelligence, and rewarding employees for their insights, CrowdSmart brings out their best ideas while authentically engaging your workforce and keeping them on the job.
