Hear Me Out translates qualitative data into quantitative insights with Dovetail
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This New York-based consultancy uses Dovetail to help its clients make sense of employee feedback and build more sustainable cultures.
Hear Me Out talks to employees one-on-one, confidentially, about their experiences at work. The interviews are structured to give employees a safe space to share detailed, nuanced, and candid feedback. The team uses Dovetail to find patterns that recur across interviews, and with insights from the research, partners with the leadership to design programs that make work more rewarding for everybody.
Ben Jackson, the founder, has been in tech for over two decades. He’s done everything from co-running an agency in Brazil, to working on the iOS team at the New York Times, to running mobile at Vice Media.
I can capture a highlight, find an existing tag, and then do that three more times in the space of five seconds. It makes a huge difference.
Benjamin Jackson
Founder
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Employee feedback
There’s currently a problem in how organizations manage their employee feedback: Few practitioners tasked with making sense of the feedback have experience capturing, storing, and finding patterns in qualitative data. This less structured approach to research causes all kinds of issues. To start, employees rarely know what they’re getting into: without an informed consent process, as far as they know, their data could end up anywhere. Some (or many) may not feel comfortable participating. Adding to that, interviewers rarely record or transcribe conversation, and often rely on notes or broad takeaways. Because of this, the insights often lack the necessary depth and context to make a real impact when presented to leaders.
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The leadership challenge
Often when leadership teams get critical feedback about their team, it’s one or two comments from a survey or a second-hand recount of a manager’s check-in with their report. It’s difficult not to take that feedback personally. If you are a company’s founder and people complain about the company, aren’t they complaining about you?
Because of this, when many executives hear one piece of critical feedback about their organization out of context, their first instinct is to delegitimize it. They might litigate specific language choices, guess the source of anonymous comments and dismiss them, or question the frequency or the severity of the issues raised in the feedback.
With Dovetail, I can credibly say to the leadership team that 80% of your employees indicated this and 45% of your managers aren’t confident of that. When they hear that, the information takes on a different tone.
Benjamin Jackson
Founder
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Qualitative analysis
When analyzing qualitative data, bringing structure to unstructured data through coding is essential. Traditionally, researchers relied on large, unwieldy spreadsheets, which are difficult to scale, collaborate on, and manage. Ben emphasized the efficiency of using Dovetail, a platform designed for this purpose. Hear Me Out typically records employee interviews on Zoom, transcribes the audio in Dovetail, and redacts all identifiable information, such as names, office locations, project titles, team names, and department names, to maintain confidentiality and focus on the analysis.
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