Employee engagement is a dynamic and fluid metric. It has a direct bearing on productivity and business goals; that’s why it is on every business agenda today. In truth, annual surveys do not match up to the real result, because what an employee feels during the annual survey is not the same as, say, after the most recent direct manager interaction. That’s why business leaders need real-time data and insights on employee engagement to achieve business goals.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways HR can help give the business a more real-time insight into the state of the workforce through use of current artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology.
Algorithms that measure your smile
Understanding an employee’s state of mind is now a reality, thanks to various sophisticated face recognition technologies. Such technologies, some of which are even available as public cloud services, analyze headshot photos of employees as they enter, leave, and walk around in the workplace, identifying gender, age group, and most importantly, using machine learning (ML) to rate the emotional state of individuals on a scale of very unhappy to very happy.
“Email sentiment analysis” using ML can mathematically calculate the emotional attachment of an employee to his/her organization based on his/her emails. Deducing who is highly engaged with the company’s strategy to who is most likely to resign in the near future allows the organization to initiate preventive interventions.
In another example, Unilever is experimenting with using algorithm-based evaluations—video techniques as well as automatic data gathering—for the hiring process. If successful, this will help to free up a significant portion of the recruitment team capacity and re-deploy them to advisory tasks, leaving only the final interviews to human recruiters.
SAP is using ML technologies in its SuccessFactors solutions to identify any unconscious bias in developing job postings and in calibrating team performance, and chatbots to automate service request processes. The company is also evolving traditional system user interfaces to use written and even spoken natural language.
Robots: Moving from shop floor to service desk
No longer limited to repetitive tasks on the shop floor, robots are now performing tasks that so far have been done by knowledge workers in the services industries. From tax accounting and auditing to drug research, the contribution is significant. One of India’s leading banks uses robots to service branch customers. Chatbots are already able to handle the majority of HR service requests in a shared service center, and they can even do recruiting interviews.
Robot teachers for 1-to-1 learning
Improving engagement scores doesn’t stop with gathering analytics; at the root of the matter are innovative learning methods that boost employee productivity. Likewise, recommendations are no longer associated primarily with online shopping; they now empower HR and other business leaders to identify the best matching training requirement for an individual, while robots monitor learners, adjust content, recommend repetitions, and draw conclusions about the learner’s effectiveness.
Gamification and virtual reality for the Pokemon-era employee
Employee engagement scores soar when learning is fun, engaging, multi-sensory, and goal-oriented. This is where gamification plays a crucial role. It makes the whole experience holistic, and the competition boosts learners’ motivation. Similarly, there are virtual reality technologies that offer seamless experience on the training task outcome during the training sessions. Social learning and video-based learning makes learning community-driven and continuous—a part of the daily job rather than a separate activity.
The road ahead for HR with AI
The examples described above are no longer science fiction. They are available today or coming soon, most likely even in a disruptive way. But what exactly this change will look like is up to us, as business leaders, to define and to design. Hence, we need to understand those technologies, evaluate their capabilities as well as their risks, and then make a conscious decision how to use them. As always, they are just tools, and tools are there to support and serve a business purpose. It is up to us to stay in command of this process and decide how we want to leverage those technologies for the benefit of our people and our businesses.
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