Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Human Resources
By: Jeff Headley
Human Resource teams have diverse and critical areas to focus on. From hiring to managing salaries to talent retention to ensuring competitive benefits, one of the most important roles is serving as stewards of company culture. Monitoring the health and wellbeing of culture is critical to ensuring happy, productive, and engaged employees. The value of monitoring culture is amplified now that so many are working remotely and dealing with the new challenges to work-life balance.
One of the most common ways of understanding and monitoring culture is through employee engagement surveys. Open-ended questions are a valuable way to understand what is on employees’ minds. The opportunity to provide feedback through open-ended questions is a great way to directly learn about topics, suggestions, and concerns that are relevant now to the workforce. It gives people a chance to share in their own voice and be heard. However, deriving insights from large quantities of employee verbatims is time and resource intensive. Even if resources are available to read and analyze all the comments, arriving at consistent, unbiased results is a challenge for any organization.
Advances in data science are allowing Human Resource professionals to address these challenges and create actionable insights in a timely manner. Specifically, the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly being applied to this challenge.
So what exactly is NLP?
What is NLP?
Source: https://aliz.ai/natural-language-processing-a-short-introduction-to-get-you-started/
In general terms, Natural Language Processing refers to a relationship between computers and human language. More specifically, NLP is the computer understanding, analysis, manipulation, and/or generation of natural language (according to dictionary.com).
For our purposes, you can think of NLP as a set of algorithms that extract topics, sentiment, and emotion from words your employees have written. Consider this example comment from an employee engagement survey:
“I am so appreciative of the new work-from-home policy during the pandemic.”
Topics - work-from-home, policy, pandemic
Sentiment - Positive
Emotions - Happiness, Joy
Now imagine you could compile this kind of insight from 10,000 employee verbatim comments within an hour or two of receiving all the responses. This scenario is definitely achievable.
Extra credit: If you want to explore some of the techniques behind the science of NLP, please take a look at this article by my colleague, Aayush Dua.
Surveys are not the only method for monitoring the health of your company’s culture. Where else might we apply NLP to gain insights?
Onboarding & Leaving
Many companies capture feedback from candidates during the hiring process. Candidate experience is a critical aspect of a company's reputation. Using NLP to periodically review candidate feedback is a great way to ensure future candidates will be eager to engage with you.
Likewise, exit interviews can provide unseen patterns of why a company loses talent. And to increase your understanding further, applying NLP to your Glassdoor reviews (or other such websites) can give you a more complete picture of areas that need to be addressed.
Employee Performance Reviews
Employee performance reviews, whether annual or more frequently, provide a unique window into the culture of an organization. Applying NLP could help HR answer questions like:
How aligned are conversations with the goals of the company?
Can we provide better coaching to our managers?
Answering these questions is very doable on a case-by-case basis, but becomes difficult when attempting to understand the company as a whole.
Always On Monitoring
Finding ways to monitor your organization’s culture in a continuous fashion should be every HR department’s goal. Thus far we’ve looked at monitoring methods that are episodic. And if it takes you too long to extract insights out of surveys, reviews, etc., then you miss golden opportunities to address new challenges as they arise.
The new frontier of this “always on” culture monitoring is in the tools your employees use throughout their day; namely email and chat platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. Using NLP in these spaces can provide a near real-time look into the mental state of your teams, trending topics of conversation, and overall engagement. But most importantly, it gives you a chance to address opportunities early.
Important Considerations
NLP algorithms can be valuable tools to drive insight quickly and at scale within your organization, but there are important considerations to take into account:
Privacy
I suggest being very clear with your employees on where, when, and how insights are being created. Most HR professionals know that anonymity is a key element of getting high response rates on surveys.
Volume of data
Most NLP approaches deliver better insights when you give them lots of data. For small teams, you’re better off reading all the comments yourself.
Managing Risk
While NLP is a great way to surface topics that are unseen, it is also capable of searching for topics HR professionals need to know about. For example, every occurrence of keywords or concepts such harassment, safety, ethics, etc., needs to be followed up.
Natural Language Processing can be a valuable tool for Human Resource departments in their quest to provide care and feeding of their organizations’ culture. When properly applied, NLP can provide consistent, unbiased, and timely insights into what employees are thinking and feeling. HR has an opportunity to leverage these insights to help leaders continually make sure the health of the culture is trending in the right direction and matching the desired outcomes of the organization.
CompassRed is a full-service data agency that specializes in providing data strategy for clients across multiple industries.