EchoSpan 7.81 Release Notes

Version 7.81 of the EchoSpan platform will be released on September 16^th, 2023. This release includes new functionality for user-driven pulse surveys, enhancements to the participant experience and updates to the 360 reporting suite. As always, new features for the 360 tool are included at no additional cost in their respective EchoSpan editions.

Brief summaries of the new features and enhancements are below. You will notice that this release features several new additions to the tool that leverage advancements in generative AI. Since 2017, we've been integrating artificial intelligence logic into the EchoSpan platform where it makes sense. Our philosophy on AI-enhanced features is that they should complement the way our clients work and function unobtrusively within the platform.

7.81 Release Highlights
(P= Professional Edition, E = Enterprise Edition, A = All Editions)

Pulse Surveys: employees included in your user database can initiate surveys on recent projects or initiatives to collect actionable feedback in real-time. With each survey they can establish due dates, send invitations and reminders and view reports from their dashboard. Administrators will be able to see the surveys that are initiated by participants as well. (E)

Auto-Generate Surveys: administrators can generate fully-editable, custom surveys tailored toward specific review needs by entering a brief description of the role of the employees being surveyed, or the purpose of the survey they want to build. Our integrated, generative AI logic will then build a survey to your specifications using our proven competency library. (P, E)

Enhance Comments: the Enhance Comments feature makes writing constructive feedback quick and easy for participants. Our seamlessly-integrated AI technology analyzes your feedback with a click and offers thoughtful suggestions to enhance your writing, ensuring your feedback is balanced, specific, and actionable. (E)

Summarize Comments: participant comments can now be summarized by our generative AI logicin the report output. This can be helpful in identifying key themes and takeaways, especially when there is a high volume of comments. The comment summaries can be presented along with the original comments, or they can be shared in place of those comments to further protect rater anonymity. (E)

Overall Score Report Component: we've added a report component that will display the overall score for the survey independent of other scores at the competency and individual item level. (P, E)

Summary Dashboard: participants can access 360 feedback surveys, pulse surveys, employee engagement surveys and development planning from a centralized dashboard, making it easy to transition between assigned tasks seamlessly. (E)

Alternate Text for Self Evaluations Visible: you will now be able to see the alternate text entered for use in self-assessments on the Review Items page. (A)

One-Time Passcodes: we now offer a new login method which allows users to login with a unique passcode generated by the application and authenticated by an email sent to the user's email address. This is optional for clients using our companywide platform. (E)