Employee Research

Achieving employee engagement “success” begins with understanding your unique audiences, challenges and goals — and then gathering the appropriate information to measure progress against those goals. We are a data-driven company. That means we believe that both qualitative and quantitative research are important in understanding how effective a campaign was and how we can iterate and improve the future communication.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on gathering information from employees by asking them open-ended questions and listening to their answers. The analysis is performed by looking for recurring themes and the level of consistency among the people being investigated.

This type of research is especially good at the discovery phase of a project, allowing for important topics to be uncovered. It also helps us look for the motivations behind certain behaviors. The methods we typically use include interviews, focus groups, open-ended questions on a survey and document reviews (e.g., historical analysis).

Quantitative research

Quantitative research asks questions with specific answer sets pre-determined, using a structured research instrument, and summarizes outcomes numerically.

This type of research looks for common attitudes, levels of knowledge and anticipated or actual behaviors from a specific audience. To do this, we use include surveys, behaviors and characteristics. For example, when researching behaviors, we can collect data on the number of people who visit a website, use a web tool, watch a video or open an email. And when looking at characteristics, we can gather metrics on the number of employees who are enrolled in a certain plan or who are over age 50 in the organization.

Choosing the right metrics

You don’t need to be a behavioral scientist to collect metrics. We help you determine what types of quantitative and/or qualitative data are available to measure. Then, we work with you to match specific communication tactics to your primary objectives.

Let’s say you launch a custom benefits website. We’ll be able to measure a large amount of quantitative data describing the behaviors of employees on this site. Then, we can correlate this data (total users, sessions, pageviews, time on the site, user actions, etc.) with outcome-based objectives, such as enrollment in a specific medical plan or increased education about the 401(k).

Learning from the data

Once we have the data in hand, we can use it to learn, iterate and improve. That means you can find answers to questions like: What content is most valuable to your employees? What web tools successfully drove user actions and which ones didn’t work as well? Were there any outliers or audience segments that were more or less engaged than others? Answers to these questions will help to inform your ongoing strategy and how PartnerComm might improve specific tactics.