This got me thinking. The way that the Government and the team of public health experts have communicated throughout the pandemic is not too dissimilar to the way that business leadership teams and are communicating with remote teams. It’s virtual, often down a camera lens and relies on someone asking for the ‘next slide please’.

But there is one massive difference.

The UK Prime Minister – and other leaders across the world – are in the incredibly unique situation where they can instantly read the room and take the temperature of their audience. You just have to take a look at Twitter after any announcement is made.

Social media acts as an instant feedback loop for the Government. Everyone has their soapbox, and they’re going to shout from it.

Now, I’m sure that Governments don’t always see the positive side of this. But they can see which messages have been well received, those that haven’t across various demographics from MPs to meme accounts.

For business leaders however, it’s a lot harder to read the pulse of their audience while working remotely. It’s still digital, it’s still at a distance but the instantaneous feedback loop of social media isn’t available.

Slack, Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams – alongside various other communication and collaboration tools feel like they close this distance, and are often harnessed for company-wide notices. Perhaps they get a couple of thumbs up reactions, a ‘Thanks’, or a couple of awkward smiling nods on a video call – but how well was the message really received?

Now that you can’t walk the floor it’s near impossible to really understand your organisation and map reactions to real-time events. The casual conversations that you would have in a physical workplace and their tone is simply lost through digital channels. Of course, there are many strategies that we’ve seen leadership teams employing to breed this human to human sense of connection and manufacture these feedback loops, but techniques like surveys will always give delayed responses that are often  unhonest and simply ignored.

At Temporall, this is one of the biggest issues that leaders come to us with. Remote-first means that they’re working blind, and leadership teams have no idea how communication is landing with their employees in real-time.

We work to help leadership teams understand how communications land across organisations in real-time. We gather continuous, unstructured data from tools like Slack, Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams and present insights, key themes and sentiment on a single intuitive platform. It resembles the Tweets that a nation’s leaders get to see everyday. The big difference is that Temporall is completely anonymous and protects employee privacy, which means that honesty is central to the data.

It helps you really understand what’s happening in your organisation – just by capturing the information that already exists in these tools. Our AI and data analytics platform Temporall uses a number of advanced techniques to assess this data including network mapping, topic, and sentiment analysis.