How AI Can Help Employers Address and Prevent Rage Applying
How AI and digital tools can help employers tackle “rage applying” and address employee frustration effectively.
Rage applying is when frustrated employees apply to many jobs to speed up the process of landing a new role. AI and other digital tools can help employers figure out why this is happening and intervene while there’s still time.
Employees often feel frustrated when they don’t feel like they’re in control and when they feel like things are happening to them rather than for them or with them. When they feel like they’re not part of the solution, they may act on that frustration by participating in an emerging trend known as “rage applying” that’s gained momentum thanks to TikTok. That is, when unhappy employees put themselves in the running for as many jobs as possible, they can speed up the timeline to quitting.
Rage applying may be a new buzzword to describe what can happen when employees don’t feel valued at work. Still, the underlying problems, feeling frustrated or overworked, is anything but new. These are the kinds of circumstances that have long led to turnover, a costly challenge for employers. However, thanks to technology, there’s plenty that leaders can do to pinpoint the top drivers of employee discontent, empower dissatisfied employees to implement solutions to address their biggest pain points, predict employees at risk of churn and take swift action to intervene while there’s still time.
Detecting Warning Signs of Employee Frustration
More likely than not, employees who are frustrated with their role or the overall company are expressing that emotion while on the job, and it’s up to leaders to invest in the right tools to detect early signals of discontent.
For instance, team members may indicate they’re breaking down when contacting the company’s internal helpdesk, interacting with customers, or responding to internal employee feedback surveys. They may show signs of disengaging by declining more meeting invites, participating in fewer company events or activities, or using up PTO as they earn it.
Companies can uncover these key indicators using traditional employee feedback surveys and leveraging text and speech analytics tools backed by artificial intelligence.
1. How employee feedback surveys can help
Existing employee feedback surveys can be analyzed to assess the emotions and circumstances workers convey in their answers to open-ended questions — whether that’s frustration or experiencing situations that lead to high levels of frustration, such as having an unwieldy workload or struggling with insufficient resources. Employers can also launch short, focused surveys to gauge employee frustration levels, asking questions about the obstacles employees may encounter at work or asking individuals to self-rate their frustration.
Employers must streamline the survey process to avoid further exacerbating underlying issues. Some best practices to improve engagement include:
- Keeping surveys short: asking no more than three to five focused questions.
- Feedback via tools: Making it easy for team members to give feedback directly via the tools they use daily, whether via the company’s app, homepage, or newsletter or via the station where employees clock in and clock out.
- Only allow the number of characters employees can use to answer questions: They should have as much space as needed to express themselves.
- Video as an alternative to traditional surveys: Using video makes it easier and faster for more employees to participate.
- Being transparent about the feedback that the company receives: Share the top trending themes employees discuss and what actions are being taken to address these concerns so team members know their voices are being heard.
See More: How AI-powered Surveys Can Boost HR Insights
2. How AI-powered speech and text analytics can help
Text and speech analytics backed by machine learning and AI can take the manual legwork out of analyzing the open-ended responses to video-based and text-based employee feedback. These tools can be used to instantly draw insight from these sources, as well as from other sources, such as from calls to the HR or IT helpdesk or customer-facing interactions, detecting when employees use extreme language such as “impossible” or “I give up,” are being rude to customers or colleagues, or are describing frustrating circumstances, such as experiencing delays, juggling too much work, or being expected to meet unreasonable goals.
AI analytics can synthesize these insights along with employee experience signals that may reveal an employee’s sentiment towards and level of engagement with their company, such as changes in managers, schedules, or departments; PTO usage; performance reviews; meeting declines; and participation in company groups and celebrations.
See More: Why Speech Analytics Will Become the Go-To Technology
Best practices for using AI-powered text and speech analytics include:
Empowering Employees to Solve Their Biggest Challenges
- Ensuring the technology is not replacing human intervention: Any insights uncovered should empower team members to take action.
- Setting up workflows so the right individuals are alerted: When warning signs of employee frustration are detected. For instance, HR or IT team members could be empowered to flag interactions that indicate an individual needs follow-up.
As organizations collect and analyze employee feedback and insights that indicate key areas of employee frustration, it’s critical to take action. Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool that helps employees be part of the solution. Companies can use internal-only crowdsourcing tools to facilitate challenges in which employees knowledgeable about a topic are given a platform to propose their ideas for addressing known issues.
To ensure success with crowdsourcing, businesses should:
- Avoid treating crowdsourcing platforms as electronic suggestion boxes in which ideas get submitted, but employers need to implement real and meaningful change.
- Create challenges focused around a specific known issue, not simply use crowdsourcing as a platform for employees to vent.
- Have a dedicated administrator or champion who oversees the challenge.
- Recognize and thank employees for their contributions — this can be particularly impactful if that recognition comes from senior management.
- Make the challenge relevant to real problems employees face that impact their ability to do their job.
Creating Predictive Models to Intervene and Reduce Employee Frustration
Once organizations have enough data about sources of employee frustration, they can use these insights to establish predictive models that alert the right team members to intervene proactively when employees may be in similar situations. For instance, a predictive model may indicate that employees are more likely to experience higher frustration and turnover when they have a manager or schedule change, have too much work and too few resources, or work with tedious systems involving manual workarounds.
Once companies have this kind of flight risk model set up, best practices include:
- Assigning owners or champions to receive real-time alerts to be notified when employees are at risk of high frustration. As with other applications of AI, the warning system mustn’t replace human interaction. This type of system should be used to uncover potential problems and immediately route this information to a human.
- Holding these owners or champions accountable for taking action and reporting on the steps being taken.
Shaping a Thriving Workplace Culture
It only takes one person for a trend to take hold. When one employee engages in a phenomenon like rage applying, their outlook becomes more negative, impacting those around them. That’s why employers must intervene at the moment. There’s a real opportunity to harness that energy into something positive towards solving current problems and empowering employees to make the workplace somewhere they want to work instead of one where the only way things get better is by leaving.
Have you considered using AI to enhance employee experience and create a thriving workplace culture? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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