Quartz – “Some corporations have always cared how their employees feel—if only because happier workers are more productive than those who are miserable. Others have only recently begun to wake up to the fact that they need to address wellbeing in meaningful ways. This focus raises a question: How can a company tell whether the people who work there are happy? A small Toronto-based company called Receptiviti is suggesting a tech solution. Unlike more traditional methods, like employee surveys, its method hinges entirely on analyzing the language used in employees’ everyday workplace communications, be that emails, Slack messages, or even voice. But what makes Receptiviti’s method interesting is that while it uses natural language processing, a branch of machine learning, to analyze language, it’s not sifting communications for sentiment. Rather, the company employs a branch of linguistic research that suggests passive parts of speech—the bits we use without thinking, like prepositions and pronouns—hold the key to how happy we are. Rather than looking at what people are saying to one another, it examines how they’re saying it…”