Employee Sentiment and its Potential
Beyond Metrics: Capturing Employee Sentiment in the Digital Experience
In the modern enterprise, digital employee experience (DEX) is no longer a luxury - it's a strategic necessity. Yet despite the dashboards, KPIs, and alerts we build into our monitoring systems, one critical dimension is often missing:
how employees feel about their digital work environment
Too often, IT deems everything "green," while employees quietly struggle with latency, poor app performance, or clunky workflows.
This disconnect is what makes employee sentiment data so powerful - and so underutilized.
Controlup Webinar: Enhanced Employee Sentiment Surveys:
Device metrics only tell half the story of an employee's digital experience.
ControlUp helps IT understand the employee's perspective of IT and the technologies they deliver through qualitative sentiment surveys.
Why Traditional Feedback Fails
Historically, feedback mechanisms have been reactive and infrequent: a helpdesk ticket survey here, an annual HR engagement poll there. These methods are often disconnected from the actual user experience, and worse, from timing that matters. When the feedback loop is broken or ignored, employees disengage further. They stop reporting issues, and IT continues to fly blind. That's where real-time sentiment tools come in - especially those that sit inside the digital workspace itself.
Today, the landscape of user feedback has evolved dramatically. We now have in-app feedback tools, user analytics, sentiment analysis, and a range of technologies that offer a real-time, data-driven understanding of the user experience. These advancements have made IT more responsive and proactive, but they still don't fully bridge the gap.
This is where Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions come in. Over the past six years, DEX has shown immense potential to connect IT with end-users more effectively. By linking digital experience data (hard metrics from devices and applications) with user experience insights (soft data from real-world interactions), IT teams gain comprehensive visibility. This holistic approach not only validates what the data suggests but also ensures IT decisions align with actual user needs finally closing the gap between IT and the people it serves.
Controlup offers a powerful feature called Employee Engagement as part of its Controlup for Desktop platform, designed for physical endpoint management. Through the Controlup for Desktop agent, deployed directly on user devices.
IT teams can access a range of remote interaction capabilities. One of the most valuable is the ability to send surveys via toast notifications, enabling real-time user feedback collection. This approach allows IT to proactively gauge employee sentiment, helping bridge the gap between digital experience metrics and actual user satisfaction.
Bridging the Quantitative and Qualitative Gap
ControlUp already collects deep telemetry - latency, logon times, resource usage - but sentiment surveys provide the "why" behind the numbers.
For example: if a user logs in slowly but doesn't report dissatisfaction, the issue might not be as disruptive. Conversely, good metrics with poor sentiment indicate invisible friction - poor user experience, lack of clarity, or inadequate support.
"Metrics tell you what's happening. Sentiment tells you how it feels."
Event-Triggered Feedback Loops
ControlUp allows IT teams to trigger short, contextual surveys based on user behavior or events - such as after a slow logon, the resolution of an IT issue, or a change in digital conditions. These surveys are brief, well-timed, and contextual, improving both response rates and insight quality.
Imagine asking, "How was your experience today?" immediately after a system delay - while the frustration is still fresh. That data is infinitely more valuable than a generic survey weeks later.
ControlUp's sentiment insights reports focus on capturing and analyzing employee feedback gathered through in-product surveys. These reports highlight response rates, satisfaction trends over time, and keyword analysis from open-text responses.
They help IT and HR teams identify experience gaps, measure the impact of support interventions, and track sentiment across departments or time periods -providing a human-centered layer to digital experience analytics.
Toward a Humanized Employee Experience
Closing the Loop: Empathy in Action
Humanized experience isn't just collecting data it's responding to it. ControlUp can integrate feedback loops
IT can automate follow-ups if sentiment drops below a threshold. Managers can be alerted if a team consistently reports low experience. Surveys can include open-text input, allowing employees to voice concerns more personally.
Sentiment as a Culture Driver
When employees see their feedback leads to change, it fosters trust and shows that IT cares transforming "Help Desk" into an "Employee Experience Desk" a partner in productivity. This reframes digital experience from being tool-centric to people-centric.
"Digital experience isn't just about devices. It's about dignity."