What is Sentiment Analysis and How Can HR Use it?

Computers Can Know Our Feelings

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is the Artificial Intelligence process of analyzing and interpreting people's feelings, opinions, and emotions from their text or speech. It is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) and is often used to automatically classify text into positive, negative, or neutral categories. Why do we use it? In the past, it was impossible to offload certain tasks to computers because while they could process data very quickly, certain tasks like understanding the meaning and emotions behind human writing was not possible. Now with sentiment analysis algorithms, computers can do the grunt work of understanding large amounts of text that in the past we had to have people read and summarize.

Sentiment analysis is used in a variety of applications, including social media monitoring, customer service, and market research. In social media, for example, sentiment analysis can help businesses understand how their brand is perceived by analyzing the sentiment of social media posts about their products or services. In customer service, sentiment analysis can be used to identify customer sentiment and provide personalized recommendations or solutions. In market research, sentiment analysis can help businesses understand consumer sentiment towards their products or services and identify areas for improvement.

Sentiment Analysis Techniques

There are several techniques used in sentiment analysis, including lexical analysis, which involves analyzing the words used in a text to determine sentiment, and machine learning, which involves training a model on a large dataset of labeled text and then using the model to classify new text. Other techniques include rule-based systems, which rely on predefined rules to classify text, and hybrid approaches, which combine multiple techniques.

One challenge in sentiment analysis is the subjectivity of language. Words and phrases can have different meanings and connotations depending on the context in which they are used. For example, the word "good" could be used to express positive sentiment in one context, but be used to express sarcastic or negative sentiment in another context. 

Despite these challenges, sentiment analysis has become an increasingly important tool in a variety of industries. It can help businesses understand consumer sentiment, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions based on real-time data. As natural language processing and machine learning techniques continue to improve, sentiment analysis is likely to become even more widely used in the future.

Sentiment Analysis in HR

In the context of human resources, sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool for understanding and improving the employee experience. HR professionals can use sentiment analysis to gauge employee engagement, satisfaction, morale, and cultural health within an organization. By analyzing the voice of the employee, HR can identify areas of strength and weakness and take action to improve the overall well-being of the workforce.

Five Ways HR Can Use Sentiment Analysis Today:

1. Employee Engagement: HR can use sentiment analysis to measure the level of engagement and commitment of employees towards their work and the organization. By analyzing employee feedback, HR can identify factors that are contributing to or detracting from employee engagement and take steps to improve it.
2. Employee Satisfaction: HR can use sentiment analysis to understand the overall satisfaction level of employees with various aspects of their work, such as their job duties, compensation, benefits, and working conditions. By analyzing employee feedback, HR can identify areas for improvement and take action to increase employee satisfaction.
3. Morale: HR can use sentiment analysis to assess the overall mood and morale of the workforce. By analyzing employee feedback, HR can identify factors that are affecting morale and take action to improve it.
4. Cultural Health: HR can use sentiment analysis to gauge the health of the organizational culture and identify areas for improvement. By analyzing employee feedback, HR can identify cultural issues that may be affecting the overall well-being of the workforce and take action to address them.
5. Passive Listening: HR can use sentiment analysis as a part of a passive listening solution to analyze insights found in corporate communication and web boards to identify trends and patterns in employee opinions. As these insights are gathered in an automatic and continuous way, HR teams can have a steady stream of automatic feedback from employees without them having to fill out surveys.

Sentiment analysis can be a very powerful tool for HR professionals to understand and improve the employee experience without having to devote a lot of people to the task. By using a computer to analyze the voice of the employee, HR can identify areas of strength and weakness and take action to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, morale, and cultural health. This can ultimately lead to increased employee retention and overall organizational success.