In this COVID-19-induced disruption to our working lives, it’s common to hear the enquiry; “How are you going?” from friends, family, work colleagues and maybe even your senior executive. We thought we’d explore how organisations are really going using our SWOOP sentiment analysis data from the past three months; covering the period of “pre-COVID-19”, “Transition to Working From Home” and now “Working From Home (WFH)”.

We chose 14 of our benchmark organisations using an Enterprise Social Network (Yammer or Workplace from Facebook), representing a broad range of industries, geographies and sizes; from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of staff and messages.

We firstly looked at their activity levels over the period, and as reported in a previous article, we saw a clear uplift in activity in the March period as organisations started to grapple with the timing of their responses to COVID-19. This elevated level of activity varied between organisations, from as little as a few days through to several weeks. These elevated levels were not sustained, however, and activity levels have now dropped back. The following chart is illustrative of what we have seen regarding activity levels:

We then looked at the cross-enterprise sentiment levels over time and matched them to the COVID-19 phases as indicated by the changing activity levels:

We can see there were no dramatic moves in sentiment during the transition to WFH. In the majority of cases, the sentiment levels did not change despite the obvious disruption staff were experiencing. For some, as is the case in the example above, there is actually an increase in positivity and slight decrease in negativity, as staff moved into a WFH norm.

We should not take this positive sentiment for granted. There were a few organisations where the sentiment moved towards the negative:

No doubt every organisation has its own unique context in navigating a COVID-19 recovery, with some more challenged than others by our changed working environments.

A Way Forward with SWOOP

We would re-iterate the changes in sentiment during this COVID-19 period have not been dramatic. For the large part, staff are doing well despite the challenges and on balance, people are more positively disposed by working from home.

However, for those organisations that may be seeing a movement in the wrong direction, use the Sentiment Analysis widget to explore some of the specific messages associated with your negative sentiment scores. Can you see a negative theme running? Are there issues that leadership could easily address to reverse the staff sentiment?

Have a look at your “Most Engaging Posts”. What are staff talking positively about? As well as addressing negative issues it is just as effective to amplify the positive? Having your leaders join, or better still create, discussions can positively impact staff morale.

Why not simply ask your CEO to post a “How are you going?” question on your ESN; and then use the opportunity created to actively engage with staff responses at a personal level. Nothing like a bit of positivity to help us navigate this difficult period.