Technology has advanced to the point where we don't really have to subject ourselves to the inflexibility of a number of traditional, conventional practices anymore, in human capital management. One of these is our approach to measuring employee engagement and collecting employee feedback. Technology has evolved. We can dive much deeper now and achieve several objectives at once. We have much more at our disposal now than just one-to-many surveys set to quarterly, twice-annual or yearly cadences.

"We're finding that a lot of the old ways, the conventional or traditional ways of doing things, just don't cut it," says Maurik Dippel, our guest for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. Annual employee engagement surveys and the like just aren't "up to the to the task. The employee survey is an inflexible instrument."

Innovations in driving employee engagement and gathering employee feedback outside the confines and limitations of the conventional employee engagement survey -- these are areas of expertise squarely in the wheelhouse of Netherlands-based CircleLytics, where Maurik is CEO and co-founder. The CircleLytics solution comprises artificial intelligence; natural language processing; well-thought-out, tailored, guided open questioning; facilitated follow-up interaction between parties, who see and react to each other's responses; and additional activity to make the gathering of employee feedback highly interactive, dynamic, meaningful and... engaging. It's an approach that in fact promotes employee engagement as a part of the process. This is far more insightful and helpful than the administering of a survey to measure employee engagement, in my opinion.

Maurik agrees, of course, and notes that the model has a way of optimizing management-employee relations and helping these and related stakeholders reach consensus and accord internally on challenging issues. With its AI and NLP, CircleLytics' solution analyzes their answers and interactions to capture as broad of a spectrum of organizational sentiment as possible, to help employers reach consensus more readily and in ever better ways, over time. As a microcosm, it's not unlike the idea in the macro that we must inform algorithms right now with as broad of a spectrum of human sentiment as possible, to help ensure that AI evolves as humanly as we want over time -- the focus of another episode of #HRTechChat, from November 2021 with leaders from Cornerstone and AbilityMap.

But before you view that episode from last year, be sure to watch this one. Maurik does an excellent job of explaining how CircleLytics works. Plus, he and I covered lots of intriguing ground. Candidly, Maurik really made me think, and we think our chat will make you think deeply too on new possibilities in employee feedback and engagement.