How AI is affecting the future of Employee Engagement?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to significantly affect the future of work, enhance employee productivity, and create a competing edge in the market. According to a study by IBM, 35% of organisations claimed they are using AI in their business, which is 4% higher than the previous year.?

Another research conducted by Snaplogic reported that 61% of employees state that adopting AI at the workplace has enhanced their productivity. It implies that AI is slowly disrupting the nature of work and the workplace, with machines being able to execute the tasks carried out by humans and outperforming them to a great extent.?

But the other side of the coin is that while AI can improve employee productivity, it has placed most of them at risk of losing their jobs. AI is a double-edged sword. However, it is a relief that AI cannot completely replace employees but rather drive innovation and create scope for development leading to new jobs and revolutionising employee experience(EX).?

In this article, HRmatters embarks on the journey of embracing the power of AI in employee experience. ??It also guides you regarding the best practices for integrating AI into HR processes to enhance employee satisfaction and reduce attrition rates.?

For more information, also read: 10 Best Employee onboarding Strategies for Improving Representative Experience in 2023

Adopting AI Tools for Enhancing Employee Experience

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A study by PWC states that AI can contribute up to $15.7 Trillion to the global economy by 2030. This can be attributed to increased demand for AI-enabled solutions in organisations across various industries.

?In this regard, there are several ways in which organisations can improve awareness about AI among employees. Some of them are as follows:

• Employee Training: Training and employee engagement are highly connected. AI can help companies to assess the skill gap, define learning objectives and develop curricula for training employees. Furthermore, AI-enabled chatbots and virtual can offer real-time assistants to employees during their training period.?
• AI-Powered Onboarding: AI can ease the onboarding process by automating administrative tasks, offering interactive onboarding material and delivering customised training materials according to the preferences and roles of every employee. This ensures an engaging experience for the new employees.
• Performance Management and Feedback: AI and employee experience go hand in hand. It can assess employee performance data, set objectives and provide real-time feedback to the company. AI-enabled tools can assist managers in monitoring the progress and assessing the scope for improvement for the employees.?
• Using Predictive Analytics for Retaining Employees: AI can identify the indicators and patterns of disengaged employees. It can enable the companies to take proactive measures for retaining them by assessing factors like performance data, historical patterns and employee sentiments.?
• AI-Enabled Collaborative Tools: These tools can enhance team communication, facilitate project management and enhance knowledge sharing. These can even automate everyday tasks, offer relevant data and enable seamless collaboration, thereby boosting productivity and group dynamics.?
• Customised Employee Benefits: AI can offer tailored employee benefits packages by assessing their demographics and preferences. This facilitates the organisations to offer customised benefits fulfilling individual requirements, boosting employee well-being and satisfaction.
• Employee Surveys: AI can assess employee survey responses to evaluate sentiments, trends and issues. In this way, Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can assess open-ended responses, facilitating the organisation to provide valuable insights into their sentiments and opinions.?

AI Technologies for Enhancing Employee Experience?

Some of the techniques of AI for employee engagement are :?

• Predictive Analytics: Machine learning algorithms and historical data are used for predicting future outcomes. These can identify potential issues and trends by assessing employee data such as engagement, performance and attrition rates. This would help take proactive measures to address concerns, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce turnover.?
• Sentimental Analytics: It uses natural language processing(NLP) techniques for assessing data and determining the emotions behind it. Organisations can derive insights from employee emotions and satisfaction levels by analysing surveys, feedback and social media posts.?
• Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: AI-enabled collaboration techniques can facilitate knowledge sharing, effective communication and cooperation among employees. Features such as smart search, summarising documents, language translation and automated transcription can make it easy for employees to access and share data across cross-cultural teams and locations.?
• Performance Management: The performance management process can be facilitated by AI through real-time performance insights and feedback. Various data sources, such as consumer feedback, project outcomes and employee targets, can be analysed for generating performance reports.?
• Virtual Assistants: Assistants such as chatbots can offer instant information and support to employees, especially new hires. These can assist the latter with the execution of routine tasks, respond to frequently asked questions and guide the employees to execute various processes. These can be integrated into intranets to offer personalised support.?

Best Practices to Incorporate AI for Enhancing Employee Experience

Incorporating AI into employee experience demands prudent planning and implementation to ensure effectiveness. Here are some of the best practices to be considered in this regard:

• Well-defined objectives: You should initiate by assessing goals and outcomes to be achieved by incorporating AI into employee experience . For example, streamlining customised training processes for new hires with clarity in objectives would assist in implementing AI strategies.?
• Engaging employees: The employees should be included in the decision-making process to understand their concerns, requirements and expectations. Surveys should be conducted, and their feedback should be solicited and included in the pilot programs to ensure the alignment of AI initiatives with the organisational objectives and enhancement of EX.?
• Initiate with small-scale pilot project: The organisations should start with small-scale projects implementing AI into employee processes. This would allow them to test and evaluate the efficiency of AI in real-world scenarios and identify the issues or scope of improvement for making relevant adjustments before scaling them further.?
• Focusing on transparency and explainability: The transparency and explainability of the AI systems would build trust amongst the workforce. The employees should be guided regarding the usage and collection of data, decision-making and benefits of AI. In this manner, transparency in communication would address resolving doubts and concerns and foster a positive perception of AI.
• Providing data security: It is important to safeguard employee data to implement AI successfully. Compliance would be ensured with privacy regulations with the implementation of robust security measures along with their communication to employees for safeguarding their data.?
• Consistent monitoring and evaluation: Consistent monitoring and evaluation of the effect of AI on employee experience through KPIs such as employee satisfaction levels, employee net promoter score and employee productivity levels. Afterwards, their feedback should be collected, followed by data analysis to assess AI initiatives' impact.?
• Repeat and Improve: Lastly, integrating AI into organisational processes is repetitive. Adapting an AI system based on employee input enables the organisation to improve its processes consistently. Additionally, a culture of innovation and agility should be embraced for enhancements and adjustments.

Summing Up

?To summarise, it can be said that adopting AI for employee engagement, ?onboarding, performance management, employee surveys and benefits can enhance satisfaction rates and reduce attrition rates. In this regard, some AI techniques are predictive analytics, sentimental analytics, collaboration and knowledge sharing, virtual assistants and performance management. Additionally, by following best AI practices such as well-defined objectives, engaging employees in initiating with small scale projects, providing data and security, focusing on transparency and explainability, monitoring and evaluation and repeating and improvement, organisations can effectively integrate AI into employee experience, drive positive outcomes and create an organisational environment that supports and empowers employees.?

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Also read: Best 6 Advantages of Chatting software for Employee Engagement