We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Sarah Mulvey and Mark Reinke from The Predictive Index (PI) to discuss the transformative power of PI Diagnose. Sarah has been at PI for over ten years in a number of different roles and is currently the Senior Project Manager focused on the Diagnose module. Mark has been at PI for almost seven years and is the Strategic Renewals and Expansion Manager, where he prides himself on being responsible for helping organizations extract the maximum that they can from the PI platform.
Mark Reinke and Sarah Mulvey of The Predictive Index
The inception of "Diagnose" stems from a profound and deliberate consideration, extending beyond its immediate functionality to encompass the broader concept of "talent optimization."
For those already acquainted with talent optimization, its significance as an iterative discipline is well-understood. It is not a singular event but rather an ongoing practice that organizations integrate to cultivate a sustained competitive advantage. This advantage can manifest against direct market competitors or more generally, through the strategic alignment of various talent-related facets. Specifically, talent optimization orchestrates talent acquisition, position management, talent development, and individual selection in harmonious conjunction with overarching business goals and strategic objectives.
PI Diagnose is meant to provide organizations with a data-driven way to understand and improve employee engagement. Traditional engagement surveys often lack depth and actionable insights. PI Diagnose aims to go beyond simple scores and surface the underlying reasons behind engagement levels.
"The basic idea is that we can't know that we're making an impact where it needs to be made without at least occasionally assessing the people at the organization," Mark said.
"At its core, Diagnose is an interactive science-based tool. It exists within PI's Talent Optimization Suite, among other great tools that we offer," Sarah shared. It's a platform and methodology designed to diagnose the root causes of employee disengagement. It moves beyond simple survey scores to identify specific issues hindering engagement and be a guided process, not just a piece of software.
The product offers two main types of surveys: a comprehensive employee experience survey and smaller, more frequent "pulse" surveys. The full employee experience survey is built around a proprietary framework that measures key areas like job fit, manager effectiveness, team dynamics, and organizational alignment. The pulse surveys are designed for a quicker check-in on specific themes between the larger, more in-depth survey events.
A major pain point for many organizations is the lack of validated survey questions that actually measure employee engagement effectively. PI addresses this by providing scientifically-backed questions developed and validated by its science team. The tool also helps solve the problem of "data overload," which can lead to inaction. Instead of just presenting raw data, PI Diagnose highlights specific "caution areas" and provides recommended actions, giving customers a clear and simple path forward.
What truly sets PI Diagnose apart from other solutions is its scientific rigor and focus on tangible action. Many companies do nothing at all to measure engagement, and those that do often use unvalidated surveys. PI Diagnose stands out because its methodology is validated to measure what it claims to measure, giving users confidence in their data.
Beyond just the questions, PI's tool uses a proprietary algorithm to identify which specific actions will have the greatest impact on employee engagement within an organization. While other solutions might identify problems, PI provides a roadmap for solving them. This is democratized information—the results and the action plan are made available directly to the customer, empowering them to take charge of their own employee engagement strategy without the need for an external consultant.
The ideal user for PI Diagnose is a collaborative team within an organization, such as people operations or HR. The process typically involves a group of two to five people who are responsible for all stages of the journey, from identifying the need for an engagement tool to analyzing the data and implementing an action plan. The best results are seen when someone has identified a clear financial or operational problem, like high attrition rates, and recognizes that measuring employee engagement is a necessary step to find the root cause.
The implementation process can differ for new and existing PI customers. For an existing customer, the process often starts with a specific, identified problem and a targeted pulse survey to see if current interventions are working. For a new customer, the ideal start is with a full employee experience survey. This allows the organization to establish a baseline and gain a comprehensive understanding of where they stand. The data from this initial survey then guides their entire talent optimization journey.
Looking ahead, PI Diagnose’s roadmap includes some very exciting advancements. A significant upcoming feature is the integration of AI to help users quickly distill feedback from open-ended survey questions. Companies often receive hundreds or thousands of comments, and sifting through all of them to find key themes can be a daunting and time-consuming task. The new AI model will be fine-tuned to analyze these comments and present the core themes directly within the software, dramatically improving efficiency and allowing users to plan actions much faster. A model like this will be much faster than using a service like ChatGPT to do it.
"ChatGPT is not fine-tuned for a use case such as this, and it's also heavy to try to get all your comments, paste them in there, process them correctly, draw out themes specific to your company. " Sarah says, "So this is going to save people a lot of time and improve efficiency."
For any organization looking to modernize its approach to employee engagement, the first piece of advice is to not be intimidated and simply start the process. Engaged employees put in more discretionary effort and are more productive, which is a clear competitive advantage. Even if a company isn't ready for a full-scale survey, beginning with smaller pulse surveys is a great way to measure components of the employee experience and take a first step.
The key to a successful engagement strategy is taking tangible action after an assessment is completed. Companies that simply survey their employees and then do nothing with the results will find that their employees become apathetic to the process. PI Diagnose simplifies this journey by providing not just the data, but the scientific rigor and actionable recommendations needed to make a real impact on the employee experience.
For organizations without an immediate deadline for an employee engagement survey or those that are just getting started, a great starting point is to book a session with a talent strategy consultant. Beyond implementation of employee engagement software like PI Diagnose, there are many strategies for maximizing the impact of employee engagement survey results and doing action planning across an organization. Lever Talent provides support in the form of strategic talent advisory, helping you deploy engagement campaigns all the way through the action planning process.
As a PI Master Training Center, Lever Talent is also happy to provide Boost Employee Engagement with PI Diagnose training.