One of the biggest challenges facing nearly every organization today is a lack of employee engagement at work. Recent Gallup reports show that only around one-third of employees indicate that they are truly engaged employees at work – leading to HR nightmares and billions in lost revenues and productivity each year in the United States alone.
In order to help combat this employee engagement management problem, most companies around this time of year, whether they have employee engagement managers or not, will send out comprehensive employee engagement surveys with average participation rates ranging from 65-90%. Most employees dread completing these surveys, which often times include way too many questions, and many even fear potential retaliation for honest answers despite company claims of anonymity. And once the survey data is complete, it is typically outdated and unactionable.
In short, having to measure employee engagement is a mess!
But with the help of AI powered Natural Language Processing (NLP), this is all about to change for the better by enabling a much more effective employee engagement strategy. And that is where a new system called Maxwell comes in. When I first discovered Maxwell, I was amazed by how simple and effective this new employee engagement management tool really is. Unlike other employee engagement management tools that typically require expensive data integrations and ongoing manual survey requests, Maxwell can be setup in minutes and requires no further requests or actions to use.
Maxwell was designed using advanced AI powered NLP technology that measures key drivers of employee engagement levels simply by monitoring employee communications. Currently, Maxwell takes in data directly from Slack which has quickly become the preferred messaging app for many companies who want to move on from traditional internal email communications. The ability to connect Maxwell with a user’s Slack channel and workgroups literally took me less than a minute to complete after my initial registration. Now that was fast!
Although Maxwell is currently limited to Slack communications, it was designed to be system agnostic. So if you are a MS Teams user instead, you will likely have that integration capability as well in the very near future. In speaking with the founder of Maxwell, not only is MS Teams integration on the product roadmap but so are a host of AI powered prescriptive analytics functionality that will not only help interpret your data but also provide suggestive alerts, actions, and remedies. And for those employee engagement managers who may be concerned about privacy issues with Maxwell, you will be happy to know that nothing is tracked at the user level, so your employees are free to communicate without potential negative repercussions.
When you first login to Maxwell, you will see your “Engagement Dashboard” which allows you to see data on any channel you want to monitor in Slack by selecting “All Channels” or specific channels from the drop-down menu. You can also select timeframes and see trend lines as well based on four primary areas: overall engagement, mood, collaboration, and productivity. If you ever wanted an up to date employee engagement score for your organization, you can now have it with Maxwell. The left side menu also provides you with more detailed conversation analytics, additional reporting, and the ability to add/remove channels being monitored. Pretty simple and straight forward for the average user to understand.
When you first signup, it takes about a week and a half to populate enough data to start seeing solid reporting. Trendlines start appearing around 30 days. Maxwell provides new users with a free trial for 30 days so you should have plenty of time to fully test drive it before you start paying for the service. Pricing is based on workspaces monitored starting at $49/month/workspace. Maxwell also includes a free version which only provides limited data and no trending analysis – which I would think most HR leaders would want.
So, what can you do with this new data? That is a question that commonly plagues many HR technologies. But at first glance, there seem to be many important questions that Maxwell can help me answer if I was a people leader in a larger organization. These could include:
- Where are my strongest and weakest leaders within the organization?
- How productive are my remote versus in-office employees?
- Where can I see potential HR issues and higher staff turnover rates before they occur?
- Where are my most and least effective locations, stores, offices, and/or regions?
- Where within my organization do I need to focus more attention and employee engagement efforts?
- How can I better develop best practices in employee engagement and help create more engaged employees?
- How do our voluntary employee turnover rates correlate with our engagement scores by month?
- What are people talking about in specific teams and locations that could be cause for action?
- What kind of seasonality do we see in our historical engagement trends and what can we do to help address it in the future?
- How productive are our employees, team performances, and how does it trend over time by team, segment, and/or location?
- How can I focus and proactively improve our employee performance management processes?
- How can we more effectively monitor our company culture and take action when needed?
Beyond answering these types of questions to create actionable information, I could also see CHRO’s and employee engagement managers placing these dashboards and key drivers of employee engagement data in their regular executive management reports as well. What executive manager in any organization would not want to see this type data on a regular basis? If only a third of employees are currently engaged at work, I can think of few other places that they could focus more attention to make the greatest impacts on their growth and success. And to now do this all for only $49/mo. seems like a great value for any HR leader who needs data-driven answers to any of the questions listed above.
So, if your organization is still conducting employee surveys (annual, semi-annual, and/or pulse surveys) as part of your employee engagement strategy, sign up for Maxwell for the next 30 days at no cost and see what kind of value it can provide you and your organization. My guess is once Maxwell’s employee engagement management data is incorporated into your regular HR reports, no executive will think twice about paying $49/mo. for these actionable insights moving forward. It only takes a few minutes to setup and connect, anybody can easily do it, and reporting is real-time and always on. What’s not to like about that? In my opinion, it’s now time for any organization running Slack to get engaged with Maxwell! Signup today at GetMaxwell.ai
– Dustin Ruge
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