Cultivate develops an enterprise platform for digital bias and engagement analytics that they say “helps by measuring your team’s digital engagement and analyzing ways to improve your communication bias.” Communication can have an immediate impact. One terrible email or Slack message can disengage an employee or ruin an employee experience for days. A habit of poor communication can erode trust and team culture with it.
Communication is where the “rubber meets the road” for leadership, management, engagement, and culture. And, as our world continues to get transformed digitally, it seems we have less time to engage one on one, yet we send and receive more messages than ever. Email, slack, chat, text, social platforms, etc. Do we take the time to think about how our messages are perceived across our teams? Do you have the capacity within ourselves to understand what communication biases we have? Are our messages having the intended results? And, what about the messages we receive? Do we really glean what they tell us in the aggregate about our relationships with our staff or co-workers?
Cultivate is helping employers with employee experience at a point of major impact – team communications, at the time that they are happening. Using AI and data science to monitor communications between teams on platforms like Gmail, Outlook 365 and Slack to provide analytics about work relationships coupled with insights and alerts to help better manage your communication bias and your team’s engagement. Cultivate runs seamlessly in the background. There are no surveys or assessments for employees to fill out. The future of the survey may just be “no survey.” It’s this approach that put them on the 2017 HRWins Top HR Companies To Watch List.
I was impressed with Cultivate’s sensitivity toward the way the data is both presented and used. Because, let’s face it, this kind of communication monitoring sounds creepy at first. However, It’s a tool that individuals can use to learn a lot about their own communication biases. From a management perspective, it actually came off a lot less creepy than the now common practice of tagging employees as a “flight risk” in the HR platform. Cultivate has a constructive quality about it that I think is worth looking into and considering for any enterprise with a commitment to reducing bias and implementing a communications strategy as a core element to their overall employee experience.
