Crowdsource Overview

Crowdsource events enable organizations to align leaders and teams around meaningful action through real-time crowdsourced insight. Inviting employees to contribute their ideas on critical topics fosters a culture of inclusion, trust, and shared ownership in shaping the organization’s path forward.

This article walks through:

• How Crowdsourcing Works
• Voting and Scoring Method
• When to Use a Crowdsource Listening Event 
• Use Cases for a Crowdsource Listening Event

How Crowdsourcing Works

Employees are invited to leave responses to metric questions and encouraged to add ideas as open-ended responses. Then, employees vote on each others’ answers and watch the best ideas rise to the top of the leaderboard. Results can be available to everyone in real time, which helps build accountability and initiative buy-in.

Crowdsource events provide managers and leaders with real-time actionable insights to drive immediate improvements. Depending on how an organization sets up the listening event, HR and Business Partners can also have organization-wide visibility for focused coaching efforts. 

Voting and Scoring Method

Crowdsource events use Pairwise Comparison, a deeply-studied method of ranking a large dataset, to drive the mechanics of the voting experience. This voting methodology is a quick and effective way to rank a large collection of open-ended answers based on participant preference.

Pairwise Voting

After a participant leaves an answer to the open-ended question, they are prompted to vote on answers their peers have left. Participants are shown one pair of responses (A and B) and asked to choose their preference. They can vote as many or as few times as they like, but do not have the option to vote for the same answer repeatedly. Showing the voter several different responses prevents them from unduly influencing results. 

Voting Pairs

Initially, pairs are displayed randomly. Once a certain number of responses are received, pairs are generated so as to give the system the best information to prioritize them. While there is a random component, the system also corrects to ensure that (1) no voter sees the same answer repeatedly, thus unduly influencing the leaderboard and (2) earlier submissions do not have an unfair advantage over responses entered later. This approach of introducing constraints on the random process ensures proper ranking while maintaining an equal playing field. 

Open-Ended Response Ranking

To ensure every open-ended response has a fair chance of being top-ranked, we use a proprietary algorithm that guarantees each submission is viewed by numerous people and rated against other submissions for accurate rankings. Additionally, it corrects for the time of submission, ensuring all responses have an equal opportunity to be the top choice.

When to Use a Crowdsource Listening Event 

The key differentiators between Crowdsource events and other listening event types are the voting experience and the ability to provide employees with real-time access to the results. Think of Crowdsource listening events as “feed-forward” instead of feedback. Crowdsourcing is most effective when an organization needs to inform the future, not measure the past.

Crowdsource events are optimal for:

• Pulsing on one key topic of interest

• Sourcing employees’ own words

• Aligning on great ideas through crowdsourcing

• Making results available and transparent in real time

• Gaining further insight into a particular area of concern

• Transforming insight into action

Use Cases for a Crowdsource Listening Event

There are three common use cases for a Crowdsource listening event: 

1. Act on employee experience listening event results

Drive meaningful change in a collaborative manner:

• Use a Crowdsource event as a follow-up to a Point-In-Time event to drive even greater action from your employee experience results. This can be complementary to existing action planning tools or processes. 

• The Crowdsource event enables your organization to draw on the collective wisdom of your employees to address priorities together and align on the best actions to take.

2. Co-create solutions 

Solve known problems or improve focus areas by tapping into the insights of those closest to the problem:

• Engage employees on key challenges or focus areas within the organization. These could be local or organization-wide, emerging or longstanding topics.

• Best used in situations where it’s extremely important to tap into the different perspectives and experiences of your employees who are closest to the problem. 

• Examples: Work simplification/process improvement; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; psychological safety; etc. 

3. Build change buy-in

Gain buy-in and include all voices in a change effort:

• Gather collective input on key organizational initiatives. 

• Best used in situations where organizational alignment and employee buy-in are critical for success, such as when launching a new initiative or going through transformation. 

• Examples: New leadership, hybrid workplace policies, mergers and acquisitions, etc.