This is the first part of a series about the future of employee experience (EX). For the full picture, get your free copy of Next in EX: Trends shaping employee experience.
There’s a lot of hype, fear and skepticism surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on work. AI technology itself is not inherently good or bad; it’s about how organizations and individuals choose to use it. When used responsibly and ethically in organizations, AI has the power to transform EX.
Forward-thinking HR leaders are embracing responsible AI to increase productivity and elevate the employee experience. Here’s how.
Investing in ‘AI for good’ to transform EX
- Using AI to amp up productivity
- Using AI to target communications
- Using AI to expand leaders’ impact
- Simpplr AI — Purpose-built for EX
Using AI to amp up productivity
“Ultimately, AI is about improving the productivity of the humans that you have. Not only does it offer productivity gains, but it can lead to refocusing people onto other things of value, and be part of how we solve the talent shortage.” ~ Miriam Connaughton, Simpplr’s Chief People & Experience Officer
As you strengthen EX at your organization, part of your strategy must include looking for ways to enhance productivity.
You can integrate generative AI into workplace strategies to achieve this outcome. “Generative AI lets us find information more quickly, understand trends and outliers, train ourselves and learn, and clean up the mess of documents, workflows, portals and back office compliance and administration systems we carry around like burdens,” writes Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company.
‘The productivity advantage’
AI is a pivotal player in a strategy Josh dubs “the productivity advantage” — helping your company move faster so you can reinvent yourself faster than the competition. Kathi Enderes, global analyst at The Josh Bersin Company, outlines a few ways AI can significantly enhance productivity and the employee experience:
Streamlining HR processes: AI can automate routine tasks, reducing the administrative burden on HR teams and allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives — increasing efficiency and improving EX by providing quicker responses and resolutions.
Personalized learning and development: AI can offer personalized learning experiences, matching employees with the most relevant training resources based on their skills, career aspirations and learning styles. This enhances EX by making learning more relevant and engaging and boosts productivity by ensuring employees develop the skills they need to perform their roles effectively.
Enhancing employee engagement: AI can help tap into the often underused voice of the employee to improve culture, leadership and the organization.
Listen to this podcast with Josh Bersin to learn more about evolving HR practices in the age of AI
AI should augment human intelligence, not replace It
Of course, there’s hesitation and concern about AI. Is it safe? Is it ethical? “We have to ask, ‘How do we use AI for good?’ I think the positives are going to outweigh the negatives, but it’s going to take work from us to channel it down that right path,” Miriam says. “It’s less about using what’s freely available and more about solutions applications like Simpplr that are using generative AI for really secure applications.”
Investing in the right AI tools can increase both productivity and employee retention.
“If employees feel supported in how they do their work, and it’s easy, and you’re enabling them to be productive so they can focus on more interesting work, then that’s all going to help in retention,” Miriam adds.“ That kind of AI deployment in a thoughtful way, that really enhances productivity, is part of the retention story.”
Using AI to increase productivity and enhance the employee experience is a balancing act. “While AI can automate many HR tasks, it’s important not to lose the human touch,” Kathi notes. “HR is, after all, about people, and there are some areas where human intelligence and empathy are irreplaceable.”
Check out this comprehensive guide to boosting employee productivity
Using AI to target communications
“I truly believe if we can start to personalize the way we communicate, if we can authentically give people things in the way they need to learn it, they’re going to consume it more.” ~ Carolyn Clark, VP of Corporate Marketing & Communications at Simpplr
When purposefully integrated throughout an employee experience platform, AI can personalize employee communications to resonate more with individuals. “AI is set to transform the workplace by creating a world where learning styles are more effectively catered to, enhancing personalization and efficiency in organizational alignment,” Carolyn says.
Imagine a future where each employee’s learning style is recognized and defined. In this world, AI has the capability to adapt content into the format best suited for each individual.
This advancement holds immense significance for creating communications that deeply resonate.
Carolyn draws a clear connection between personalized content, employee engagement and organizational performance. “Deeper understanding and saturation of knowledge equals more connected and engaged employees, which equals a more unified and vibrant culture, which equals a more profitable organization.”
Using AI to expand leaders’ impact
When harnessed to support people leaders, AI can easily become a force multiplier. That’s because managers exert strong influence within their teams and organizations. In fact, Gallup estimates that 70% of the variance in team engagement scores is determined by the manager alone.
“When you have a manager that gets it — not just gets you — but gets the big picture, can articulate it, and knows how to check in at the right times with the right cues, that impact is tremendous on the overall business and organization,” Carolyn says.
Today, developing more effective managers is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a business imperative.
Carolyn dubs 2024 the start of an era of groundbreaking advancements in organizational support for managers. For example, AI can help develop stronger managers through automation and personalization, including nudging people leaders to check in on their teams, surfacing and analyzing employee sentiment data, and giving managers recommendations to better support their people.
Simpplr AI — Purpose-built for EX
Simpplr’s Employee Experience AI (EX·AI) understands your company and culture to deliver amazing experiences for every employee.
Advanced AI for personalization
The most transformative AI-powered EX platforms automate and recommend personalized content, allowing employees to interact with content in a more meaningful and individualized way. Simpplr’s EX·AI analyzes user behavior, preferences and historical data to deliver tailor-made content recommendations and serve up relevant information automatically — ensuring that employees receive the information that matters most to them.
Ensuring relevant news and information finds its way to the right person at the right time enhances productivity and cultivates a sense of value and belonging.
Unlike traditional rules-based systems, Simpplr’s personalization adapts to user preferences over time and fine-tunes their employee experience. Simpplr AI is the only AI built for EX, moving beyond generic off-the-shelf solutions that integrates seamlessly with your company’s structure, policies, knowledge and vernacular to deeply engage employees, improve productivity, surface helpful insights, and service delivery more effectively.
Advanced AI to support people leaders
Simpplr’s approach to augmented intelligence shines through in features designed to empower people leaders, including supporting employee listening strategies with Surveys, My Team dashboard, and consolidated Insights & Analytics. Gartner® gave top ratings to the technology, calling Simpplr’s AI-powered analytics “rich, well-aligned with intranet goals, and capable of capturing in-the-moment employee sentiment.”
Simpplr Surveys capture rich feedback with built-in pulse, engagement, and ad hoc surveys, and prompt action on the insights to improve the employee experience. Surveys help leaders understand employee needs through passive listening that continuously gathers millions of data points across the platform to detect emotions, sentiment and platform usage patterns.
These insights are then surfaced into dashboards, allowing employers to proactively address potential issues, opportunities and trends — ultimately leading to improved engagement, retention and productivity among employees.
“You don’t just want to see when people log in, what they’ve read, or when they’ve been recognized,” Carolyn says. “You want to know the whole vibe, their sentiment, the mood within the organization. And you need to take the right action based on what you learn. This is what investing in AI can help you accomplish.”
Embrace AI to elevate EX
By embracing responsible artificial intelligence, you can see meaningful and measurable outcomes related to engagement, retention and productivity. The right technology can shorten the path to these outcomes by transforming how you create and deliver exceptional EX.
Simpplr is AI-powered to deliver seamless and personalized employee experiences at scale and is the only solution to unify employee engagement, enablement and services in one platform.
Simpplr puts everything your employees need to thrive at work in one place.
A proud member of the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Institute, we’re dedicated to helping you deliver an amazing employee experience and reduce HR helpdesk tickets by giving your employees everything they need to do their best work. Request a demo today.
