Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of almost every sector. Be it finance, marketing, technical support or customer service, AI is redefining every aspect of the business areas. Similarly, employee satisfaction is another vital aspect of every business as employees are the most valuable asset any company has. And in order to ensure steady and successful corporate growth and high productivity, any company needs to listen to its employees and provide continuous actionable feedback to employees. Based on this consideration a Menlo Park, CA based company, Yva developed Yva.ai, the AI-driven People Analytics and performance management system. Yva allows businesses to increase their performance and sell more. It helps them understand, motivate, and develop their employees. The company identifies the successful behaviors and skills, using communication and survey data. It predicts resignations and offers tools to lower unwanted attrition.
Intelligent Corporate Health Tracker
Yva.ai uses the power of neural networks to boost corporate health and performance while ensuring the individual happiness of employees. It is an intelligent “corporate health tracker” that maintains and bolsters the good health of an organization by providing real-time insights and recommendations to the company managers, employees, and HR. Yva is unique in how it combines communication data analytics with short weekly employee surveys, ensuring constant feedback directly from company employees while also generating objective and reliable insights from the digital footprint of these employees. This one-of-a-kind combination of hard and soft data allows the continuously monitoring the happiness and productivity of the employees with the unbiased support of artificial intelligence while enriching the AI-generated results with the personal voices of the employees.
Proven Leadership
An elite team of Yva.ai is led by its CEO, President and Co-Founder, Gary A. Fowler. Gary is an award winning marketing guru, serial entrepreneur, business coach, mentor, TEDX presenter and has a long history globally with 10 startups under his belt as well as a successful IPO (CKSW). His background has centered on leadership in high tech, services and consulting companies as well as his own companies in technology, development and consulting. He is also the Founder of Fowler International, GVA LaunchGurus, DY Investments, Broadiant, etc. In addition, he has also held different executive level positions in top tier companies like Hewlett Packard, Modcomp, and Siemens attaining numerous sales and marketing awards.
Filling the Gap
According to Yva.AI, the annual survey has been the traditional method of measuring employee engagement and corporate health for years. In times, when the pace of changes and growth in businesses across industries is increasing, the annual surveys have become extremely insufficient. Imagine a scenario where once a year, businesses would encourage the employees of their company to take long surveys with questions recapping the prior year. Businesses intend to use this information to plan their business strategy and the subsequent changes in the organization for the following year.
But for one, these annual surveys are incapable of offering real-time information that reflects the real and true state of their organization. A lot of things can change over a year. And, while the survey allows gaining insights into what the employees think, they are retrospective and cannot offer in-depth information about past issues from the previous year, and let alone the on-going issues the company might be experiencing at the given moment. To be realistic, employees can hardly recall the details from an entire year that has passed. While they can get lengthy and tedious, annual employee surveys also leave room for bias and survey fatigue for the employees who are caught up in their daily workflow and are unwilling to spend extra time answering questions that seem unimportant and ineffectual. According to Harvard Business Review, a few ways employees can distort the survey results include the social desirability bias, when they tend to give answers that they believe would make them look more desirable in the eyes of the management. And, when the acquiescence bias tends to state agreement as a default response to questions, they don’t have enough information to answer.
So, today of all times when actionable information is valued highly in the fast-paced business environment; and this is exactly where the traditional survey method fails to deliver the value companies demand. Yva.AI developed Yva to fill in this gap between the expectations, which companies expect and the lack of actionable insights that annual surveys don’t provide by calibrating personalized employee surveys with the AI analysis of communication data. Yva generates real-time dashboards, predictions, and recommendations that allow managers to make evidence-based decisions on one hand, and ensure employees receive continuous and actionable feedback on the other. Businesses can achieve a lot with such powerful information at their disposal. At the very core, Yva’s core functions can be broken down into three main categories: the Resignation Predictor, Organizational Network Analysis, and Continuous Engagement and Performance.
Where a Human Eye Fails, AI thrives
Yva believes in a saying that states ’employees do not leave their companies; they leave their bosses’. And in the opinion of the company, yet, lot of organizations don’t do a good job at retaining their top performers. Losing a key employee who is highly integrated within the company can cost up to twice their annual salary, as replacing a valuable employee takes extra months of recruiting, interviewing, and training of new candidates. Losing employees isn’t just costly; it’s time- and resource consuming, with the potential of hindering overall company growth and the integrity of the corporate culture.
When employees make the decision to leave the company, their communication patterns undergo slight changes that are undetectable to a human eye. But where a human eye fails, artificial intelligence thrives. Yva’s neural network can catch these minute changes and predict resignations 12 months in advance with 86% accuracy, allowing managers and executives to take action before the employees take the step to leave the company. The system is trained on “blind tests” using the historical data of employees who have previously resigned. By avoiding unwanted attrition, companies can save significant resources, continue steady corporate growth, and ensure uninterrupted workflow.
Taking it a step further, Yva.ai can also identify the Toxic Managers and the Opinion Leaders within the company, revealing the “silent killers” and the true leaders of the company. Toxic managers constantly demotivate and disengage other employees; very often, toxic managers can become a major contributing factor to the employees’ decision to leave. Through objective Organizational Network Analytics (ONA) based on communication data, Yva’s AI brain identifies these sources of toxicity within organizations and allows the leadership to take measures before major conflicts arise. Following the same logic, the system recognizes the most integrated, well-connected and highly communicable employees who act like communication hubs, bringing all other employees together, motivating and engaging them. They are the real agents of change who have the potential to successfully lead corporate transformation.
The system doesn’t just provide actionable insights to managers and executives; it also ensures constant feedback for all employees through real-time dynamic scanning and 360-degree surveys. A few times a week, employees in the company receive an invitation to participate in a survey and share their feedback about their co-workers. Based on the anonymized feedback provided by co-workers, each employee receives a report that highlights their strengths and points out the skills that need further improvement. Through such evaluations, the employees constantly get motivating updates and recommendations on self-growth and self-improvement.
Envisions Becoming Personal Virtual Assistant
As artificial intelligence solutions get more integrated into the process of boosting company growth and health, the future of successful employee engagement and corporate success is “continuous sensing.” Yva.ai is one such AI technology of and from the future that constantly listens to the employees, monitors small changes, and provides real-time insights for managers and employees to make evidence-based decisions. The company aims to become a personal virtual assistant to each employee or manager in the company, helping them understand their performance, measure their impact on the overall company environment, and make informed decisions day-to-day to work on areas that need more improvement.
