SOLUTIONS

For IT & Collaboration Owners
Deliver safe, secure collaboration while satisfying the needs of stakeholders across the business

For Security
Improve your risk posture with a purpose-built solution for collaboration

For Legal
Scale, orchestrate and streamline your eDiscovery process for employee collaboration
For Compliance
Establish a proactive approach to collaboration compliance and information governance


For Employee Experience
Harness insights from surveys and collaboration data to transform the employee experience

AWR-2023_human-behavior-risk-analysis-report_cover art_small
Download the Resource

The Human Behavior Risk Analysis

Learn More →

Integrations

Connect Aware to the tools you already use to have all your company messaging in one place.

LEARN MORE →
Our Platform

Contextual Intelligence Platform

Aware is a contextual intelligence platform that identifies and reduces risk, strengthens security and compliance, and uncovers real-time business insights from digital conversations at scale.

LEARN MORE → Learn About our AI →
Our Applications
Flashlight

Signal

Protect your data and your people with complete, real-time visibility and centralized control of collaboration.

Learn More →
Chat_Search

Data Management

Take centralized control and make smarter decisions about what to keep and what to purge.

Learn More →
file_lock

Search & Discover

AI-powered universal search purpose-built for collaboration. Find information and surfaces the full story—faster.

Learn More →
Growth

Spotlight

Automatically capture authentic human signals from modern collaboration to support your most valuable asset.

Learn More →
AWR-2022-HBRA-LandingPage-Visual

What's in your data?

Calculate my results →

Company

About Aware

Our leadership, our company

Careers

Explore open roles with our remote-friendly, global team

Partners

Driving customer value, together

Press Releases

Digital workplace news and insights

Customers

How Aware customers streamline operations, reduce risk, and boost productivity

Security

Data security partners & certifications

Contact

Get in touch with us

Aware-BPW-Company-Nav

10 Reasons Why Aware is a Top Place to Work

Learn more →

Resources

Access reports, webinars, checklists and more.

Explore →

Blog

Explore articles devoted to enterprise collaboration, employee engagement, research & more

Explore →
Case Study Promo_2023

How Aware customers streamline operations, reduce risk, and boost productivity

Read More →
Menu

Aware Unveils The Real Reasons Why Retail Employees Quit

by Aware

Over 150,000 Anonymous Employee Conversations Analyzed Revealing the Impact of Customer Clashes and the Undervalued Voice of the Frontline Worker.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 17, 2023—Aware, the AI Data Platform powering Experience Management, today released its latest research on workplace trends directly from the voices of retail employees. Utilizing its state-of-the-art AI-powered platform, which recently outperformed Meta's Llama-2 in a direct competition, Aware ingested, normalized, enriched, and analyzed over 150,000 anonymized workplace conversations across eight major retail brands on social media platforms such as Reddit and other sources. 

In today's dynamic business landscape, relying solely on annual or pulse surveys can yield outdated and unreliable data. Aware's continuous listening capabilities provide managers and the C-suite with actionable intelligence into the employee and customer experience. This intelligence sheds light into the contributing factors to the alarming 60% retail turnover rate, which McKinsey Consulting calls the "Great Attrition".

Aware's purpose-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) models painted a vivid picture of employees caught in the crossfire of a cultural clash with customers. A startling 70% of frontline workers face angry customers weekly, giving rise to the colloquially known term "Karen." Encounters with such customers drive employees to quit, cause negativity to spike by 36%, double the chances of toxic experiences, and measurably decrease overall workplace sentiment for those workers that remain.

Jeff Schumann, CEO of Aware, emphasizes, "The voice of the front-line worker has never been more important, yet that voice is often underrepresented. Frontline workers who do not have an approved collaboration platform rely on social sites like Reddit, Glassdoor, and Fishbowl to share their feedback and collaborate with co-workers. The C-suite needs to recognize that these forums provide an authentic view of the employee experience and valuable insights about the daily business operations. Aware truly connects the breakroom to the boardroom to drive shared success."

The five main highlights from the study include:

  1. The "Customer Is Always Right" mantra means the employee is always wrong. Toxic "Karen" interactions have a detrimental effect on employee morale.
  2. Co-workers have a bigger impact on negativity than their managers. Messages about coworkers show higher negativity than those about bosses or CEOs, who are typical targets for negative banter.
  3. Day-of-the week matters. Sundays saw the highest number of posts, while Thursdays had the least. Thursdays boasted the healthiest conversations, whereas Fridays were marked by the most negative or toxic conversations. Toxicity on weekends is a consistent theme not limited to the social media dataset examined by Aware. In general, Aware has found that workplace toxicity increases by 7.5% on weekends compared to the rest of the week. 
  4. The "work-life balance" topic was a beacon of positivity, especially conversations around Paid Time Off (PTO).
  5. LMAO is funnier than LOL or Haha. When it comes to expressing laughter, LMAO dominated over other popular terms such as LOL and haha.

"Our platform is both extensible and versatile, capable of ingesting high volumes of unstructured data from any location where workplace conversations occur. That data is run through our NLP models to deliver valuable insights into the life of a frontline worker, said Debasish Biswas, Chief Technology Officer at Aware. "The platform has been purpose built efficiently normalize and process that data through our ML/Data pipelines before storing it in our Data Lake for close to real time access on customer dashboards. Our targeted models, trained on over 6 years of customer data, boast market leading accuracy. This enables the platform to deliver continuous business intelligence and timely alerts on critical events for business leaders to stay on top of their departmental workflows." 

For a comprehensive look at Aware's Retail Workplace Trends Report and to delve into these insights, click here

About Aware:

Conversations are at the heart of every enterprise. Aware's AI-Powered Data Platform connects workplace conversations across the enterprise and transforms daily conversations into the contextual intelligence leaders need to shape the trajectory of any business. Aware's natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) models are purpose-built to understand the unique human context of workplace conversations taking place on Slack, Teams, WebEx by Cisco, Zoom, and WorkJam. Aware equips the world's most iconic brands to apply that contextual intelligence to solve a broad set of use cases, from Experience Management and Cybersecurity to eDiscovery, supported by platform APIs that connect these insights into existing workflows for over 2,500 different applications. Using Aware, companies can finally combine a meaningful employee experience and enhanced customer experience with the operational rigor needed to thrive in the future of work. Aware was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. 

Topics:Employee ExperiencePress ReleaseEnterprise Collaboration