How employee training can become fun with AI

Hello, and welcome to?New Scientist’s Business Insights newsletter. I’m Chris Stokel-Walker, uncovering the latest scientific research affecting business that you ought to know about.

Make staff training engaging with artificial intelligence

Employee training is a must-do, but it can also be a drudge to go through. Workers will often do anything to dodge required e-learning, while organisations have to repeatedly nag their staff to carve out time to complete it.

Now, help may be at hand from an unusual source - deepfakes that replace one person’s face for another. This AI-powered technology has?been highlighted ?as a threat to truth, but it turns out to be a potential boon to help staff feel motivated to undertake workplace educational tasks, according to?Christof Lutteroth ?at the University of Bath, UK, and his colleagues.

The researchers deployed deepfake technology to?insert people’s faces into training videos , letting them see themselves doing the tasks in question. They then had to perform the tasks – which involved learning how to exercise and undertake public speaking – for real.

One participant told the researchers that “the deepfake video makes me feel that speaking is actually not that scary”.

“It’s clear that deepfake has the potential to be really exciting for people,” says Lutteroth. “By following a tutorial where they act as their own tutor, people can immediately get better at a task – it’s like magic.”

High praise

Managers have to carefully juggle the differing needs of their employees, and the often contradictory personalities in their teams. Failure to do so could mean even the simple action of giving praise backfires, researchers have found.

“Employees who receive better treatment from their supervisor often display arrogant behaviour towards their colleagues,” says Benjamin Korman at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Korman and his colleagues have?conducted three separate studies ?to see how people responded to praise by bosses and how their relationship with their co-workers changed.

The researchers found that those who were praised were more likely to fall foul of hubris that soured their interactions with colleagues. This is a particular problem when people with already dominating personalities within a team are singled out for praise. “Some are even willing to undermine their co-workers,” says Korman.

The researchers warn that “managers need to bear in mind that how they treat their employees has an impact on how the employees treat each other”. How to praise without causing internal issues is tricky. The team suggests that it is best to praise the work or contribution to it, rather than the person themselves. Doing so can help puncture egos – and in some instances, protect others.

Being inclusive

Managing the interactions between staff members is one of the trickiest tasks bosses face, no matter the size of the organisation. Even more so in a world that is increasingly polarised when it comes to opinions, both in politics and society.

People who have so-called “value minorities”, such as being adherents of a religion or political belief not widely shared by others, are less likely to be engaged at work because they?receive less respect from their colleagues , according to Tracy Dumas at Ohio State University and her colleagues. “It is a real issue that organisations face,” she says.

Her team quizzed 389 people about how they felt at work – and how they were perceived by others. “We found that others on the team noticed that people whose values clashed with the majority didn’t engage as much in the work of the group,” says Dumas. “But that negative effect was lessened if the value minorities talked about themselves in the group.”

The researchers say that the key to making such people feel more involved, and therefore more respected, is to not hide these values from others, but to encourage them to disclose how their beliefs or interests differ in order to make them seem more human – important at a time when social media can make it seem like “the other side” is far from it.

“When you talk about your family or the movies you like or what you did this week, it shows you’re a whole person, you’re not just defined by the difficult areas where you disagree,” says Dumas.?

Of course, that’s easier said than done, as asking people to put their head above the parapet is difficult at the best of times. But it is important to ask, to ensure that all your employees, no matter what they believe in, feel included – after all, if they aren’t being productive, it will impact your business’s bottom line.

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Chris Stokel-Walker