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Differences between Survey Sentiment and Engagement Favorability Score.
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Survey Sentiment is an additional metric that can be used to complement the Engagement Favorability Score, offering a different perspective for specialised comparisons and analyses within People Analytics.
What’s the difference?
The table below highlights the key differences between Survey Sentiment and Engagement Favorability Score. Both methods are valid but serve distinct purposes in data analysis.
| Engagement favorability score Exisiting | Survey sentiment New |
Scale | All responses are encoded on a Likert scale (Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Neutral = 3, Disagree = 2, Strongly Disagree = 1) | All responses are encoded on a Likert scale (Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Neutral = 3, Disagree = 2, Strongly Disagree = 1) |
Categorised by | Based on all responses to a question
For each question, responses are categorised by favorability and the percentage of responses in each category is calculated.
| Based on an individual’s responses
For each individual, the average of their responses to the engagement factor questions is used to categorise them by sentiment.
|
Score calculation | The average favorability score across each question within the factor is calculated.
If someone skips a question, they are not included in the factor score calculation
| The percentage of employees who fall into each sentiment category is calculated.
If someone skips a question, they are considered “Unclassified”. |
The diagram below illustrates how Survey Sentiment and Engagement Favorability are calculated using an example of 4 responses. You can see that survey Sentiment averages individuals responses to all questions in a factor, this average is then categorised according to Positive, Negative, Neutral or Unknown (if a response to any single question is missing). Engagement Favorability calculates the percentage of favourable, unfavourable and neutral responses to a single question, the factor score is an average of these percentages across all the questions in a factor.
Why do we have Survey Sentiment?
Survey Sentiment allows employee feedback data to be categorised into discrete categories, in this case neutral, negative, positive, or unknown. This is particularly useful in analyses that require categorical data, similar to demographic data in HR systems (e.g., ethnicity, gender, department). By converting engagement scores into categories, you can isolate specific groups (e.g. positive sentiment) and explore their unique characteristics. This approach also enables you to examine how engagement interacts with other variables, such as turnover or absenteeism rates among different sentiment groups.
When should I use Survey Sentiment?
Survey Sentiment does not replace the existing favorability score; instead, it complements it, allowing companies to gain a more nuanced understanding of the employee experience. While both metrics tend to increase as general favorability improves, they offer different insights. It's important to note that a company’s Survey Sentiment score and Engagement favorability score, while similar, are not identical. Companies can continue to report their Engagement score as the existing percentage favorability and use survey sentiment for particular analysis as mentioned above.
Survey Sentiment protects confidentiality
While survey sentiment is calculated on an individual basis, the same rigorous confidentiality protections as in the rest of the Culture Amp product apply.
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