In this article for Forbes Human Resources Council, Yvette Kennedy, Vice President of Consulting at Explorance, argues that although collecting data in the moment through event-driven survey has increased, there is still an area of analysis that is lacking – comments.

Comments can help uncover additional insights if measured for consistency in themes in ways quantitative results can’t. Machine learning (ML) functionalities can be used to perform sentiment analysis to aid with interpreting large amounts of text, such as comments, to uncover organizational strengths and weaknesses. With ML, an organization can detect positive and negative sentiments around a change in benefits, management practices, workplace culture, etc.