Does your manager inspire you? Are you proud about where you work? Such questions have become an American workplace ritual in the past 15 years. Tracking how workers feel about their jobs has become a niche industry in its own right, with more than $1.5 billion a year being spent on “employee engagement surveys.”
For Ryan Smith, the chief executive of Qualtrics Inc., this market is too juicy to resist. Smith’s Salt Lake City-based company has emerged in the past few years as a hugely disruptive presence in the opinion research realm. The company has been expanding its product line, targeting various types of users for its sophisticated, cut-price surveys that are done entirely online. Qualtrics this month announced a push into employee surveys, providing a basic survey platform that companies can customize with whatever specific questions they want.
Until 2006, Qualtrics was a small family business, helping business schools and other university researchers conduct the sorts of public-attitude surveys that could turn into publishable research papers. Demand was brisk but academic budgets were annoyingly tight. So Qualtrics began targeting more the more affluent corporate market, running market surveys for the likes of eBay and Heineken, as Forbes writer Victoria Barret chronicled in June 2012.
Why stop there? During a Silicon Valley visit this week, Smith explained Qualtrics’s latest growth push. His starting point: Qualtrics serves what he calls “insight seekers.” By building a survey platform that’s cheap and simple to use, Qualtrics is catering to a corporate world that’s “full of insight seekers,” looking for survey-based knowledge of all varieties. In some companies, as many as 1,500 people are authorized to run Qualtrics surveys themselves, Smith says.
Asking employees how they like their jobs isn’t just a way to keep the human-relations department busy. As Smith sees it, such data becomes a powerful tool for top level executives to track morale within different clusters of employees — and to figure out which front-line managers are making things hum, and which ones are barely keeping a mutiny under control. Gather those “insights,” and suddenly it’s a lot easier to promote or reassign the right people.
Early customers for the employee-engagement product, dubbed Qualtrics 360, include Philip Morris International PM -1.13% and Crate & Barrel. Qualtrics is entering a crowded field; a study last year by Bersin & Co., now part of Deloitte, found that at least 30 vendors are competing to run companies’ employee-engagement studies.
Right now, most employee-engagement specialists compete by developing unique survey questions and scoring systems. But that isn’t Qualtrics’s plan. Instead, it will provide basic survey methodology — and let corporate users plug in whatever question sets they want. For those that want a ready-built package, Qualtrics has partnered with Development Dimension International of Bridgeville, Pa., and will offer DDI’s Leadership Mirror assessment system as one option. But Smith says he expects many corporate users to build their own surveys.
“We’re a technology company, not a consulting firm,” Smith says. He’s studiously neutral about the relative merits of long surveys (45 questions or more) versus short ones (10 questions or fewer.) Qualtrics technology will enable them all, he says. He does say that Qualtrics itself is surveying its own employees twice a year, rather than the traditional annual cycle. Change happens fast, he explains. In an era where an unhappy employee can go out to lunch and come back with a new job offer, letting a whole year pass between employee surveys may be too long.
via Why Qualtrics Wants To Track How You Feel About Your Job – Forbes.
Why Qualtrics Wants To Track How You Feel About Your Job
