miatzSign in

Grouping free-text staff feedback into themes

Take the open-text answers from an engagement survey or a set of exit conversations, cluster them into recurring themes with the actual quotes kept underneath, and give managers the themes instead of a thousand comments nobody opens.

Effort
Days of work
Skill level
Comfortable with software
Organisation size
Mid-market
Value
Time saved, Quality

Tools named for this

  • A clustering or topic model over the free-text responses
  • A reviewer who reads the raw comments sitting behind each theme
  • A minimum group size below which no theme is reported at all

What to check before you ship it in India

  • Comments that identify an employee are personal data, and s.8(5) of the DPDP Act puts the duty of reasonable security safeguards on the employer including where a processor does the analysis. A survey sold internally as anonymous that turns out to be re-identifiable breaks that promise before it breaks anything legal.
  • EU-OSHA's discussion paper warns that collecting data on workers' attitudes enables profiling — detecting misalignment with management — and can produce discrimination against, for example, workers who are more pro-union across a whole career.
  • The UK regulator treats systematic observation of workers as monitoring with its own obligations, including a data protection impact assessment where the processing is likely to capture special category data. That framing travels even where the statute does not. That guidance carries a notice that it is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act and may change.
  • If the output is tied back to identifiable workers and used to evaluate them, and you employ people in the EU, Annex III point 4(b) covers systems used to monitor and evaluate the behaviour of people in work-related relationships, which Article 6(2) makes high-risk. Article 6(3) qualifies this: an Annex III system is not high-risk where it does not pose a significant risk of harm — including where it only improves the result of a completed human activity or performs a preparatory task — though any system that profiles natural persons stays high-risk regardless.

Sources

Every claim on this page traces to one of these, on the date it was read.