Why is it important to measure employee emotions?
The desire of company management to elevate processes, delve into the KPIs and the task progress led to a massive spread of productivity tools across the market. Behind this aim, however, lies a bigger trigger — communication. Communications are the basis of the value stream and its levels are critically important for any company.
With the worn-out wooden ruler
Products established in the niche of employee engagement tools and organization health analytics a few years ago, use methods that seemed completely new at the time. Some of them analyze internal company correspondence via email or Slack to determine the status of communications, based on response speed to queries and the map of social connections. The quantitative data extracted serves as a basis for interpretation that is executed by corporate culture specialists. However, the data on its own doesn’t disclose much.
Other products in this category use surveys or a combination of surveys and communication statistics. Despite its popularity, this method is obviously useless in toxic teams, where employees can hide the truth for fear of getting into trouble. In addition, when answering survey questions, a person may be unfocused, overly subjective, or be inclined to ignore obvious facts. Therefore, taking the data of the employee surveys seriously or process them together with the engine performance seems a bit naive today.
All eyes and ears
This is where machine learning and affective computing comes in. Presenting a set of state-of-the-art techs and algorithms that can analyze a person’s communication behavior without the help of experts or a third party.
The key role here is played by postures, gestures, intonations, grimaces, as well as breathing and heartbeat — the data that rival approaches aren’t able to extract. What do these elements of human behavior tell us? A set of reactions related to cognitive processes that can be easily recognized using computer vision can be referred to as Attention. The higher this metric for team members, the higher the productivity of the team as a whole. Keeping a consistently high level of Attention over a significant period of time is a sign of a well-performed team.
Emotion detection
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overestimate team performance and consider it a tool for all occasions. As Simon Sinek has convincingly demonstrated in the example of Seal Team 6, performance without trust promotes toxicity and does not contribute to the stability of companies in the long term.
How can emotion recognition help? This technology gives a new perspective on the problem of trust in the team. It is well known from experience that in a toxic corporate culture, employees will try to restrain their emotions, leaving their level close to neutral since any emotional action can be used against them. In contrast, in organizations with an open culture, people are not afraid to display emotions because they are part of the human identity and it is extremely difficult to avoid them under normal conditions. Therefore, the levels of emotional engagement and emotional comfort of employees are directly related to the quality of communications, which can only be studied in depth without human involvement using affective computing.
3D Modelling
As a result, we can observe a sort of a 3-part structure that includes quantitative indicators of engagement, the productivity of teams, levels of emotional trust and comfort in the group, and another factor that Prof. Alex Pentland called exploration. By definition, exploration is the effectiveness of sharing experiences and ideas between people who are closed in different groups where their communication mainly takes place. He proved the dependence of ROI on the diversity of information sources and showed that overcoming social diversity leads to better financial performance.
What will this give our clients? They will get an AI mentor who can not only diagnose the state of teams in the company but also build a dynamic picture of the future based on predictive analytics.
This article is the author’s contribution to The Suite Medium page.
The Suite is a productivity & video conferencing app powered with human-centric AI. We are on a mission to help virtual teams stay productive, motivated, and happy (through time!). Curious? Join us today.
