By Amit Agrawal
The future of the workplace has been a long-speculated subject due to the infusion of technology in every aspect of our lives. Will we come to accept wearables as always-on trackers of our mood, well-being, and productivity? Will virtual reality switch the workplace on its head? Are robots our inevitable teammates, or even worse yet, our bosses?
Amid the seemingly endless flow of ‘what if’s’ and when’s’ it is certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be entirely embedded into the workplace. According to countless think pieces, trendscapes, and product announcements, AI is slowly changing the way we optimize our workstreams, automate processes, and make more effective decisions. Perhaps one of the most unexpected changes AI is bringing in is the way it is altering human resources (HR). It is helping us not only make better individuals decisions but also be human.
Manual work does not always point to “human touch”
In order to improve employee experience, leaders need constant feedback about what their employees want, and conventional procedures for understanding employee sentiment provide data that is neither very clear nor timely.
The normal strategy, utilized by the vast majority of the world’s large businesses, is based on long surveys painstakingly made to measure involvement. With 50-100 questions for workers to answer, these polls seek to capture data, which is examined manually and returned into organizational leaders months later. Even team-level information makes it supervisors late, if it will at all, diminishing the urgency to have targeted actions to improve, and stalling engagement-oriented talks until they have the chance to happen. The method is so broken that most companies only attempt to measure involvement once every one to two years.
Even with a stream of individual intervention, the typical process for understanding and improving employee engagement can often feel rote and chilly. Employees feel unheard, undervalued, and out-of-touch, making the traditional approach seem far from “human.”
Listen to the stories your employees want to share
Recent improvements have made the procedure of gathering and understanding employee opinions easier for team leaders and HR managers. Real-time investigation means managers can receive team-level scores and trends as data comes in, inspiring activity and spurring timely discussions.
AI takes these advancements a step further, bringing an unprecedented degree of personalization to the procedure, assisting leaders and managers glean meaningful information while connecting employee opinions with significant outcomes.
The most significant insights about employees’ experiences are qualitative coming in from around the organisations. Given the size of organisations, deciphering these invaluable remarks to infer context and subtext had been an impossible job. However, with AI and natural language processing (NLPs) and machine learning, it is possible to extract meaning from open-ended opinions, identify patterns and opinion to put workers thoughts and feelings into circumstance. By design themes, related subjects, and trends in concrete detail over multitudes of remarks, which would take days, AI can get done in minutes. AI can help bust long-held myths, affirm hunches, and direct managers down the path to creating more inclusive, effective team environments. Furthermore, it can also help to decrease background sound, inaccuracy, and bias helping leaders take timely action.
Moving to purposeful change
AI can also help leaders and managers obtain personalized, predictive insights that enable them to not only effectively respond to employee concerns but also preempt difficult scenarios as negative opinion starts to stir.
Harnessing millions of data points across surveys and business data, AI can pinpoint major problems on the horizon by assessing historical tendencies and connections that are generally hidden. This analysis surfaces predictions about turnover, functionality, quality, security, and much more, all according to the incoming stream of employee feedback. The machine learns more than from every business and staff, making personalized and accurate predictions, so teams may have more effective and pertinent conversations about the future at their respective companies.
Using AI to provide employee comments gives leaders and managers the ability to take timely and effective actions while removing the potential for human prejudice and error. When employed correctly, AI helps you join the dots between your employees say, the way they feel about it, and how it relates to their participation and other business outcomes.
This information encourages leaders to spend more time coaching, developing and strengthening relationships while also implementing creative and strategic applications that ultimately fuel the organization. This usually means a more real, people-centric, and ultimately, more humane workplace.
Amit Agrawal is the founder and COO of The Cyber Infrastructure