Over 20 lakh staff work from home amid Covid-19 pandemic: Sentiment analysis

A sentiment analysis following Covid-19 pandemic has indicated that over 20 lakh employees across sectors are following the work from home (WFH) policy, as majority of corporate groups showed constructive approach in business continuity.

The US-headquartered IT consulting and digital analytics solutions provider ATCS has conducted an analysis using social listening tools and big data processing to reveal the sentiments around Covid-19 among corporate and employees.

Social listening

Social listening involves studying numerous social media posts relating to a topic posted by individuals or groups across platforms and analysing them using advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence.

ATCS India, Jaipur, studies the social conversations around coronavirus, including the government advisories, and practices implemented by other industry peers.

Based on the global sentiment analysis, ATCS revealed that WFH is mandated across sectors by conglomerates, with over 20 lakh employees expected to follow the WFH policy amid this pandemic. Also, the global players in the sectors of technology, hospitality, auto, food and beverages, pharma, BFSI, tourism, e-commerce and manufacturing have “categorically implemented WFH policy, special leave policy, premises safety measures to ensure employee safety.”

“Initially, we started to understand the volume of conversation and the sentiment about the current virus within specific markets. Are people scared? Are people fearful of what the future is going to look like? How are people positively looking at working from home and having the flexibility. We’re also looking at industry impact. So all of the different industries that are impacted by a disruption in work schedule or have disrupted plans. We look at what type of conversation is happening around all of those industries, a global view, and then we focus on the markets,” Rucha Pandit, Principal Consultant from ATCS, told Businessline over a phone call.

Social conversations

As against the normal circumstances, where it studies between 1,000 and 10,000 pieces of conversations in a month, ATCS has seen unprecedented high volumes in the conversations around Covid-19 outbreak. Pandit informed that they are looking at “accidental high volumes of data” for coronavirus. “For the pharma industry, for example, we’re seeing 164,000 conversations in the US, pertaining to the outbreak in the time span of two weeks,” she added.

ATCS tracks global conversations such as donations of N95 masks or hydroxichloroquine tablets and then suggests clients in the respective sectors to take actions based on such conversations.

“When it comes to sentiment analysis, it is really at the forefront of how we jump into analysing our data, because, depending on the topic of conversation we’ll look at positive, negative or neutral sentiment and deep dive into specific areas of conversation within that piece of a sentiment,” she added.

Overall, there is a kind of split between positive and negative sentiment when it comes to this specific outbreak.

At least in India, the analysis revealed that there is a lot of positive conversation in terms of the level of confidence that the communities have when they talk about government’s responsiveness.

“We’re seeing there’s about 49 per cent positive consumer conversation because of the way the government is handling the situation,” Pandit said, adding that there is also positive sentiment due to companies encouragement to their employees to work from home and proactive health and safety measures for employees.