Your employees fuels growth of your org. So, business must offer an enhanced employee experience so that they can continue contributing positively to your business.
Today, low employee engagement, a precursor to negative employee experience, has led to turnover rates shooting through the roof. In this scenario, businesses are desperately looking for a solution to keep their employees engaged with their brand and offer a pleasant employee experience.
Many businesses have turned to machine learning and artificial intelligence to revolutionize their work culture for good and nearly 65% of orgnizations believe AI helps in better decision making process, like it has made waves in all other areas of modern human life, AI is revolutionizing the corporate work culture.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of positive employee experience (EX) and how businesses can use AI to reshape their EX for the better.
Role of AI in the Corporate Sector
Artificial intelligence uses algorithms and encompasses hardware and software technologies to train computers to learn normal human behavior and make “intelligent” decisions.
It simply deploys computer programs often refered as machine learning algorithms. The robots then adapt to these algorithms and intelligently execute many human-like tasks – like predicting behavior, making suggestions, etc.
For long, organizations have focused on increasing employee productivity, believing as it as key ingredient to their success. However, the paradigm has already shifed towards technology and HR managers are exploring innovative ways in keeping the employees productive and contributing to the business’s growth.
Artificial intelligence helps business leadership enhance the experience they offer to their employees, resulting in increased productivity and better performance. And it does so in a number of ways, as we will see in a while.
Employee Experience – Definition and Significance
Employee experience is a term used to refer the entire journey that an employee has with an organization. This journey begins when the employee first engages with the company by sending in a job application and ends on day they submit their resignation letter or retire. And every single thing, event, or interaction that takes place during this journey shapes the employee experience.
Here are three of the many reasons you should be focusing on improving your employee experience:
Bad Employee Experience Decreases Engagement, Increases Turnover
The chances of an employee leaving a company decrease by 87% when they are highly engaged with the brand. Since employee engagement is a function of employee experience, this statistic explicitly states that your employees will leave if you don’t offer a good experience.
Employee turnover is an epidemic that organizations all over the world are failing to cure. Each resignation costs a company a third of the employee’s salary. And US companies lose $450-550 billion due to employee turnover every year.
These statistics are sufficient to emphasize the importance of employee experience from the engagement and retention viewpoint.
Bad Employee Experience – Low Employee Performance
When you don’t improve employee experience, you lose employee engagement and your workforce that does not care about your organization and making them feel they in orgnization, for the sake of earning a living. This workforce does the bare minimum and merely contributes to your business’s growth and progress.
Bad Employee Experience – No Talent Acquisition
We talked about talent retention and how it goes down with employee experience. But you know, poor employee experience could lead to difficulty in talent acquisition. And without a stream of new talents coming in every year, a business cannot maintain sustained growth in the modern competitive market.
Now that you know all about the importance of employee experience, let’s talk about how AI can help businesses improve their employee experience.
How AI Can Bring a Positive Change in Employee Experience
Good employee experience requires organizational leadership to be proactive. It needs them to listen to their employees and adapt the work culture for their betterment.
AI helps business leadership listen to their employees and offer them help, resources, and opportunities that they want, without annoying them with mundane and frustrating surveys.
Unilever experimented with the impact of AI incorporation in workplace resources on employee experience. They designed and developed an AI-powered robot, Una, which uses advanced machine learning algorithm, offered human-like support to their employees and became their assistant.
During its test run, Una acquired a 4.6/5 star rating from the employees who used it and earned an 85% employee satisfaction.
Your business can benefit from AI in many ways. Let’s see how.
AI and Employee Recruitment
An employee’s experience begins with the recruitment process. The experience of the hiring phase sets the tone for the employee’s entire journey with the organization.
For example, an interview panel canceling an interview meeting last minute without informing the candidate beforehand would leave a terrible impression on the applicant.
83% of job seekers report that a negative experience during the recruitment process can compel them to give up the role at that company.
So, if you want to attract top talent and want them to stick with you, you have to optimize your hiring process.
AI has revolutionized the modern-day hiring process in many ways than past. It empowers the applicant tracking system (ATS) and enables it to sort, assess, and match each applicant’s profile to the job description and rank them according to their suitability for the job.
Additionally, AI-driven tools have automated mundane and repetitive administrative tasks, like employee background checks, which has freed up the time for the hiring teams to focus on engaging with the candidates and hiring the best one.
Additionally, with smart decisions and data-backed insights, AI-driven hiring tools enhance the quality of hiring, which reflects enhanced business growth down the road.
AI and Employee Engagement
HR bots are improving employee experience in numerous ways, like enhancing employee engagement.
With around 85% of the workforce feel disengaged with their brand, businesses must take intelligent steps in engaging their employees if they want sustained growth.
The majority of the workforce struggles with happiness at the workplace. They are worried about their wellbeing, feel as if they are stuck at a purpose-less job, and have no human connection. However, they may not always be open about it.
AI and its human-contextual-conversation approach compensate for the lack of human touch in the employee’s life.
For example, modern employee-support bots, like Una, are taught advanced machine learning techniques to offer whatever help the employees need in a human-like conversation style and tone, which makes up for the fleeting human touch.
Additionally, AI uses predictive sentiment analysis, which helps leadership predict employee burnout and take action before reflecting on their employee engagement.
AI robots deploying sentiment analysis techniques can pick up conversations, understand tone from text, and predict the sentiment behind the message.
For example, an AI bot monitoring employee email or communication platforms will alert the managers of employee disengagement when they are stressed about increased workload and subtly mention it to another coworker over these media.
AI and Teamwork
Many organizations thrive with collaborations and teamwork. However, when employees are bundled together in mismatched teams, the organization fails to leverage the true potential of collaborative efforts.
For example, a reward-motivated person put in a team of people who have competition as their biggest motivation driver won’t be able to blend in and work to the best of his capabilities.
37% of employees associate their prolonged stay at an organization with good teams.
AI helps eliminate the trial and error in team formation and collaboration, streamlining team collaborations and increased efficiency.
AI-driven tools can empower department managers and leaders with employee data and insights helping them to organize teams in better way by grouping people with complementing abilities. These tools can generate motivation driving factors of each employee, helping managers to form more efficient work teams for better collaboration.
AI and Learning
No matter how much we hate it, humans thrive when they learn new things and evolve. That’s why research shows, 40% of employees who don’t receive sufficient job training leave within a year of getting hired.
AI learning is the most significant investment that businesses could make in the modern day. The reason? They want to keep their employees engaged, offer good experiences and opportunities.
AI-driven learning management systems offer personalized and targeted recommendations to the employees based on their skills and interests.
These tools help the organization leaders pinpoint each employee’s exact skill so that they can focus their efforts and resources on polishing that skill and prepare the employee for better internal opportunities.
For example, AI tools can highlight the solid administrative skills of a worker hired to a small clerical position. Now, the leaders can help this worker build on her inherent strong skills and turn her into a strong organizational asset.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence has immense potential for shaping how businesses approach employee experience and work to enhance it.
AI-driven hiring tools can optimize the recruitment process, eliminate bias, and set the right tone for the entire employee journey. An AI algorithm developed to understand employee behavior and mindset can help businesses enhance their employee happiness ratio. Furthermore, tools powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence can enable organizations to offer better collaboration and targeted learning opportunities.
Employee experience is just one of the many business avenues that AI has revolutionized. Every business needs to understand the potential of AI and leverage it to progress into the future and tackle modern-day challenges.