We’ve talked a lot about the importance of Employee Experience (EX), but why is it so important?
In this post (Who Benefits from an Employee-Centred Environment), we examined what employees want from their workspace and the positive impacts such an environment has on organisations and individuals.
There is evidence to show that improving your Digital Employee Experience will help reduce costs and increase productivity - areas we explored in this post last year and this more recent one.
There is, however, more to it than that.
This article from Salesforce explores how happier employees can lead to 1.8x faster revenue growth.
The same article states, “A reported 89% of revenue growth leaders said that improved EX leads directly to improved CX”.
And this Harvard Business Review article tells us that businesses with highly engaged employees generate significant increases in profitability.
These numbers show the importance of employee experience, but how will Artificial Intelligence (AI) support you in developing your Employee Experience levels?
Improving Your Employee Experience With AI
This previous post documented how AI boosts efficiency within contact centres, but improving the employee experience isn’t just about removing friction. In this post, we want to look at how your organisation can use AI to ensure a positive employee experience.
Empowering Your People
Empowering and engaging your people will have a significant impact on building positive EX within your organisation.
With the right data, AI will be able to identify areas of personal development for individuals and then personalise training materials and delivery methods based on individual learning styles. It can even recommend follow-up exercises to solidify knowledge retention.
AI can personalise the employee experience, tailoring learning paths, software interfaces, and internal communication based on individual needs and preferences. This will help develop each employee's sense of value and belonging.
AI’s ability to gauge sentiment can be used to better direct users and ensure their needs are met. It can also analyse sentiment in emails, messages, and even video calls, helping leaders identify potential issues or areas where employees need additional support and encouraging a culture of open communication and well-being.
Data and information repositories will be much easier to build and update with AI, and intelligent search functions will improve accessibility. Just think of the benefits of reducing the time wasted sifting through endless documents.
Improving Your Processes
Negative employee experience is often the result of frustration with processes and tools, so improving these with the use of AI will provide your organisation with significant benefits.
AI will improve decision-making within automated processes to provide more direct paths. Equally, these improvements in processes will allow employees who are required to make their own decisions to be better informed when doing so. And AI will empower leaders to make data-driven decisions that directly improve the work experience by analysing data to generate insightful reports and recommendations.
We’ve seen how AI can efficiently develop and review content, allowing employees to be creative but avoid the repetitive elements of their work. Using AI to streamline content creation for training materials, presentations, or internal communications, can remove tedious work for individuals, simply!
With AI supporting your organisation’s content creation - instead of disparate individuals within different teams- you can ensure your messaging is clear and consistent. It can even review existing content, suggesting improvements for clarity and effectiveness.
Streamlining of services and processes can be achieved with the data and insights gained from AI, providing huge benefits to employees. By analysing vast amounts of employee data, AI can uncover hidden patterns and trends to:
identify potential roadblocks before they impact productivity
develop AI-powered chatbots which handle routine enquiries and requests
create systems where employees can access information and troubleshoot issues without calling helplines
AI for Good: Addressing the Risks
While AI offers huge opportunities and benefits, it's important to acknowledge potential risks:
Amplifying Bias: We’ve seen that AI algorithms can perpetuate existing biases if not carefully designed. Rigorous testing and diverse datasets are crucial to ensure fairness and inclusivity.
Undermining Trust: It’s essential you maintain the trust of those in your organisation. Automation powered by AI can threaten certain jobs and concerns around this need to be managed. Your focus should be on reskilling and upskilling employees to thrive in this changing workplace.
Erosion of Privacy: There needs to be transparency, with employees being told how AI is being used and for what purposes. Individuals are likely to have concerns about who is accessing data and how any personal data is being used. Open communication will help build trust and mitigate concerns.
The Future of Work is Human-Centred
Your AI solutions shouldn’t be designed to replace employees but to empower them. By strategically leveraging AI, we can create work environments that are not only productive but also stimulating, engaging, and personalised.
This is the future of EX—a future where humans work with AI to achieve extraordinary things and enjoy the experience.
If you’re thinking about integrating AI into your employee experience strategy but are unsure where to start, we can help. Just get in touch.
About the Author
I'm Terry Chana. I am an innovation strategist that connects customer, employee and brand experiences. My passion lies in building ecosystems to solve business problems by combining creativity and technology.