- Plaetos Group, a leading provider of Employee Listening solutions, today announced that it has been included in Gartner’s 2021 “Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions” report.
Voice of the Employee is a segment of the $300B Employee Experience market, driving the current boom in HR Tech acquisitions as large enterprises struggle to understand the very people who deliver on business strategy – their employees.
Plaetos Group CEO and co-founder, Barbara Sharp, said Plaetos had worked closely with Gartner to establish Plaetos’ uniqueness and competitive position in a market accelerated by COVID.
Naming Plaetos as a representative vendor in the emerging sub-segment of qualitative feedback was a shot in the arm for Plaetos and their customers, she said.
“The real value as a vendor in this emerging qualitative insight market is in Gartner’s fierce independence. We stand tall knowing that Gartner has taken a steely, objective look at our technology, as they do with our competitors, and seen fit to place us in the Voice of Employee solutions landscape,” Ms Sharp said.
What Gartner said of the Voice of Employee market:
“… it’s clear that most organizations believe that accurately understanding employee feedback is more important than ever (since COVID-19) … Organizations now want to use VoE as a means to communicate care, listen to employee concerns, prioritize investments and quickly take action where necessary”.
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Gartner named Plaetos Group as a representative vendor in the Focus Group/ Conversational category within the Voice of the Employee (VoE) landscape:
“These providers entered VoE from the user and market research sector, where tracking in-depth feedback in a guided “town hall/forum” style delivered positive outcomes for early adopters. These solutions have now been applied to VoE by enabling users to set up forums on a particular topic and invite a subset of employees. Forum attendance can either be synchronous or asynchronous, depending on the provider’s capabilities. Key to this solution type’s effectiveness is the analysis of participant feedback to both questions or topics submitted by the moderator, and the anonymous responses of other participants. Feedback is categorized by major themes and the associated strength of sentiment, whether positive, negative or neutral. Customers of these solutions often use them to supplement either annual or pulse surveys, and therefore partnerships with other VoE category providers are quite common.”
“Focus groups give rich stories where surveys can’t. When you scale focus groups you put people at the centre of decisions and truly lead inclusively.” Ms Sharp said.
It is the second year running that Plaetos Group (previously Pax Republic) has been named as a representative vendor in the Gartner VoE market guide.
“Plaetos Group is excited to be at the forefront of VoE focus group/conversational solutions. We are thankful that our customers have the vision to be true inclusive leaders, and that they can perform better because Plaetos data means they understand their people’s needs better.
“There’s a long way for all of us to go to change the world, and leaders can do it one big discussion at a time with Plaetos,” Ms Sharp said.
Gartner says in the VoE Market Scan:
“Regardless of the uneven pace of economic recovery by geography and industry, VoE solutions will see increased market interest over the next five years, at a minimum. This is because VoE measures over the next three years are likely to change due to shifts in employment and changing relationships between workers and organizations.”
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In the Market Guide, Gartner predicts:
“By 2023, 80% of enterprises with 2,500+ employees will augment annual engagement surveys with pulse, focus-group-based or indirect methods to better understand worker sentiment.”
The market scan includes the full range of employee voice solutions ranging from workforce survey to the new technologies in the focus group / conversational category.
While the Plaetos large-scale discussion platform is in market and well advanced, Plaetos Group is currently in customer trials with the PlaetosEQ advanced human analytics platform. PlaetosEQ gives large enterprises deep insights into employee emotion, sentiment and meaning from existing data sources such as social channels, live-chat, survey free-text and collaboration platform feeds.
“We see Plaetos technologies as benefiting both employees and employers, simply by elevating human insights that are inaccessible now, either because people are effectively locked away in their homes and unable to connect, or because there’s no purpose-built engine to explore human emotion like we do,” Ms Sharp said.
Customer use cases for the Plaetos solutions include talent retention, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, wellbeing and mental health, culture and conduct risk, Future of Work (hybrid work models), M&A and strategy.
“These are topics and business strategies that – done well – can transform an enterprise and protect them from reputational harm. Our fast, easy to deploy solutions mean there’s no need to wait to see if a strategy is working or not. All without surveillance while protecting employees’ privacy.”
Plaetos Group predicts that, in the same way that Voice of the Employee (VoE) emerged from Voice of the Customer, VoE will progressively shift to Voice of Society, as the same technologies enable large-scale discussion of very many topics with very many types of stakeholders.
Gartner said this in its Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2021 and Beyond:
“By 2024, 30% of major organizations will use a new Voice of Society metric to act on societal issues and assess the impacts to their business performance”.
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