Analytics Methodology

Through People Impact Analytics®, we have had the priviledge to discover and analyze tons of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) initiatives and other corporate journeys. We are looking at the change through the employee experience lens, using science, AI, and M&A and change process intelligence as a solid foundation for the insights.

Every journey is, of course, different, but they also share similar principles and trends. If you are interested, you can watch our webinar recording: Webinar recording: What Employees Really Experience in M&A

Here are a few selected trends that we have seen specifically in M&A integrations:

• M&A integrations are highly emotional experiences for the employees, with strong impacts to their professional behavior
• The strongest emotions are typically “interest” (a highly positive emotion creating commitment) and “fear” (it’s negative counterpart creating the “fight or flight” response)
• The amount of “interest” normally melts somewhat during the integration, transforming to other emotions which may be positive (such as “contentment” or “pride”) or negative (such as “disappointment”, “sadness”, or “anger”).
• Biggest negative root causes for emotional experiences are typically soft topics, such as “leadership”, “communication”, and “culture”.
• Biggest positive root causes are typically forward-looking, business- and career-related topics such as “career progress”, “competence development“, “customers”, “business growth”, and “future” in general.
• “Leadership” and “Communication” usually appear as negative root causes for experiences, if at all - when these matters work well, people rarely mention them
• Different people and different groups will experience the M&A integration very different way – also reflecting how they will proceed through the integration with varying pace
• A general trend is that after a relatively positive start, the employee experiences usually worsen in the first 2 to 5 months of the integration, as after high expectation-setting the reality kicks-in and daily challenges of the integration process cause polarizing experiences; you have the opportunity to smoothen this bump in the first place and also improve the situation later with good mitigations
• Even if you think your integration is complete after a few months and you are now business-as-usual, the integration will live long, likely years, in the minds of the people

We are sharing more benchmark insights like these during our analytics deployments.

People Impact Analytics® has a solid foundation in the emotion and behavior science – multi-cultural, multi-language theoretical and empirical research conducted in the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

The 20 emotions (ten positive and ten negative) available on our survey form are coming directly from this scientific research. They do not only represent “20 emotions” but 20 emotion families, each with available varying intensities. The emotion families are selected so that they nicely cover the full human emotion space. The emotion families have been curated by intensive scientific collaborative multi-cultural, multi-language process.

The scientifically measured properties of these emotions and the emotion strengths are directly driving the algorithms in our analytics, ultimately to build analysis components such as people risk levels, root cause analytics, and action recommendations.

Hence the list of available emotions is not up to discussion for each client case – it is an integral very carefully curated part of our core analytics.

People Impact Analytics® has a solid foundation in the emotion and behavior science – multi-cultural, multi-language theoretical and empirical research conducted in the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The analytics has other strong “legs” in strong use of the latest AI, and in leveraging specific Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and change process intelligence.

The approach to measuring employee experiences is completely opposite to how most conventional employee surveys work:

• The conventional employee surveys are usually top-down: the leadership decides what the important topics are, to be asked from the people
• Our analytics is bottom-up: the people decide what the important topics are for them to bring up

With conventional employee surveys, there’s a few fundamental problems:

• The surveys are essentially measuring “satisfaction” (related to various matters) - but it’s scientifically demonstrated that satisfaction is an emotion making people passive i.e. not willing to change
• The surveys don’t understand people’s emotions nor their impacts to behavior
• During business change, you usually don’t want to maximize satisfaction (indeed your transformation will likely, intentionally push many employees to their discomfort zone) – instead, you need to understand their experiences, the risks, and the potential
• The conventional surveys mostly show what the people responded instead of providing actionable observations, insights, and recommendations

Hence, some great reasons why you should consider People Impact Analytics® are

• The solid scientific foundation
• The M&A and change enablement specific process intelligence, making the outcomes relevant
• Rich application of relevant AI-driven insights
• The lightweight process to run the survey; you can focus on the business results
• The ease to respond to the survey – just three simple questions
• Proven, actionable insights (signal instead of noise)
• Combination of tactical and strategic insight
• Built-in security and anonymity (compared to in-house surveys)
• A fixed price (no hidden work or costs) with solid business case

Most of our clients use People Impact Analytics® for their M&A or other transformation initiatives together with their traditional employee surveys which are used for more business-as-usual use cases.

People Impact Analytics® fundamentally enables the client to reveal the employee experiences, how those experiences impact their behavior, how that translates into business risks and opportunities with concrete root causes, and recommended actions.

This provides significant business benefits, the details of course strongly depending on the use case and conditions. In general, the benefits can be grouped into the following themes:

Understanding the people experiences

• Reveal the employee risk landscape across the organization - where are your “pockets of risk”
• Understand the root causes of the experiences and, on more granular level, practical risk and opportunity drivers - what should you focus on
• Have a view across your portfolio (such as Mergers and Acquisitions, or M&A, deals/integrations) to compare the initiatives to each other and improve your process strategically
• For M&A people due diligence specifically, assess the employee risk to validate your deal thesis and identify mitigating actions before and after Day 1

Drive actions for more successful business outcomes

• Provide the leadership a data-driven method for focusing and prioritizing their actions
• Mitigate employee risks (such as people turnover and productivity loss) – for example, in the M&A context, to protect the deal value before and/or after closing the deal
• Leverage opportunities for a more engaging transformation, driving the change with the people and turning people from a risk to a driving force of change

Build competitive edge

• Promote innovation and use AI for a practical business purpose to drive positive business outcomes
• Differentiate in the market as a caring employee and (in the context of M&A) a responsible buyer or seller

One of the key features of People Impact Analytics® is that with seemingly very simple inputs, the analytics creates an astonishingly rich and accurate set of observations, insights, and action recommendations.

The “inputs” are simply three questions that we pose to the employees:

1. Emotions: “How do you feel about the [integration/transformation/change/employer]” (the context depending on the use case, the person being provided a list of 20 emotions from which they can select one or two, or “no emotion”)
2. Strengths: “How would you rate the strength of the emotion(s)?” (a selection from three options: strong, moderate, mild)
3. Reasons: “Please name the reasons behind the emotion(s)” (freeform text)

The research method is based on the emotion and behavior science, developed in the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

It is from these simple ingredients that our analytics does its magic, by combining knowledge and algorithms from different sources:

• Science: Understanding of human emotions and impacted behaviors, and how we can impact those, based on the emotion and behavior research in the University of Geneva, and further developed by NayaDaya Analytics as data models and algorithms
• Process intelligence: Experience, typical issues, and best practices about Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) (in specific) and change enablement (more generally); collected in our client cases and received from our partner Deloitte
• AI: All the latest knowledge and processing power of AI helping to review data, recognize patterns and anomalies, categorize and summarize information, draw conclusions, and make recommendations

All this enables the analytics to produce highly relevant, rich insights which continuously exceed what the client was expecting.

People Impact Analytics® is fundamentally designed and implemented to manage multi-geo, multi-language, multi-cultural setups and can be deployed essentially anywhere in the world.

The underlaying emotion and behaviorl science has been developed in international collaboration, led by University of Geneva, including a wide diverse set of cultures around the world.

The survey supports multiple languages and more can be easily added. It is indeed recommended to enable people to respond to the survey with their native language.

There are indeed differences how people from different backgrounds typically respond, and those differences are nicely revealed by the analysis results.

People Impact Analytics® has a strong foundation in the emotion and behavior science – multi-cultural, multi-language theoretical and empirical research conducted in the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The relevant methodology is called the “Geneva Emotion Wheel” (https://www.unige.ch/cisa/gew/).

Link to the actual related research:

• Johnny R.J. Fontaine, Klaus R. Scherer & C. Soriano (2013), Components of Emotional Meaning: A sourcebook. Oxford University Press. You can find the book at https://www.amazon.com/Components-emotional-meaning-sourcebook-Affective/dp/0199592748

A Whitepaper is available upon request, on how People Impact Analytics® leverages this scientific foundation. Contact info@nayadaya.com for requests.

Deploying People Impact Analytics® is very easy for the client. It constitutes a single task, rather than a separate project, in the client’s wider ongoing program (their M&A integration, for example). As a client you don’t need to assign a project manager - you can focus on the business results.

The stages in the analytics deployment are

1. Survey: The targeted people respond to a simple online form with only three questions. Someone in the client’s organization first sends them the invitation to the survey including the link (URL) to the form – we provide the link and the email template.
2. Analytics: We analyze the data on our analytics platform
3. Review and actions: We present the observations, insights, and action recommendations to the client stakeholders in an online call – they will then take the actions to mitigate the risks and leverage opportunities

No installations or trainings are needed on client end.

We assign a human Service Deliver Manager who helps the client to deploy the analytics easily and successfully.

People Impact Analytics® starts by us posing three simple questions to the employees, usually through our proprietary cloud survey form:

1. Emotions: “How do you feel about the integration/transformation/employer” (the context depending on the use case). A list of 20 emotions is provided to the respondent and they can select one or two emotions, or “no emotion”.
2. Strengths: “How would you rate the strength of the emotion(s)?” – a selection of strong, moderate, or mild.
3. Reasons: “Please name the reasons behind the emotion(s)” – freeform text.

The research method is based on the emotion and behavior science, developed in the University of Geneva in Switzerland.