Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to boost employee engagement levels by eliminating the ‘survey crunch’. It can also create personalised actions for each people manager in a format that’s simple and digestible, explains Steven Frost.
Addressing employee engagement can feel like trying to summit Mount Everest with just a threadbare rope and a couple of crampons. While HR leaders often know how to achieve the pinnacle of strong employee engagement, they lack the time and resources to make an indent – especially when it comes to actioning engagement survey insights. This is one side of the double-sided engagement problem, which has plagued organisations for decades. But thanks to AI which has eliminated the ‘survey crunch’, we can now welcome a whole new era of employee engagement.
The problem with surveys
Since the 1990s, employee engagement surveys have been crucial for finding out employees’ wants, needs and satisfaction levels. When done well, engagement surveys bring about positive change, identifying engagement drivers, enhancing employee experiences and equipping managers with customised action plans to support and empower their teams.
However, there is a double-sided problem with engagement surveys that has been holding back organisations’ progress for decades. The first issue is that HR teams are often at full capacity so don’t have the time to ‘crunch’ the results from engagement surveys, put together tailored action plans, and then work with each people manager to influence change. And on the flipside, people managers have limited experience of slicing and dicing dashboards, interpreting survey results, and then prioritising their actions. The outcome is that the survey findings and actions simply fall into a black hole.
Up until now, HR has tried to circumvent this double-sided problem by growing their teams, using third-party employee engagement consultants and/or educating people managers on engagement survey analysis and interpretation. However, the time and costs of achieving this make it unfeasible across many organisations. Instead, HR teams muddle through, working long hours to interpret and action the survey findings, often with just enough capacity to action a handful of the insights. The outcome is frustration rather than impactful change.
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Eliminating the survey crunch
Thankfully change is here in the form of AI.
AI is set to improve employee engagement levels through totally eliminating the ‘survey crunch’ and serving-up tailored actions for each people manager in a simple, digestible format.
Here’s how it works.
As soon as an engagement survey closes, the results are instantly analysed and the key findings pulled out by AI – all within seconds. This also includes analysing open-text employee comments for a quick and concise understanding of how people are feeling.
The findings can be delivered as high-level organisation-wide summaries as well as tailored department-level summaries in relation to specific departments and teams. These AI summaries are personalised, actionable and context-aware so that each people manager understands clearly how their people are feeling, what is going well, what could be improved and importantly HOW the manager can go about making improvements.
AI removes the need for interpreting dashboards, but instead the findings and actions are delivered by an avatar and/or in text format, automatically adapting to suit the recipient’s role, language and managerial level.
From onboarding recommendations through to advice on staff recognition, each people manager automatically has access to crucial guidance on what they need to focus on to achieve a more engaged and productive team – and delivered in a way that works for them.
Making engagement work – at last
The impact of AI eliminating the double-sided problem is transformational. There’s no lengthy delay between analysing the insights and translating these into tailored actions. The process becomes instantaneous, giving back time to HR and people managers and removing the data interpretation stumbling block.
The fact that time from analysis to insights and then action is so dramatically reduced, means that HR, business leaders and people managers can drive productivity improvements and enhance the employee experience straight away. Plus, with employees seeing that their feedback is having an immediate impact, they will feel empowered and that their voice really does count, further improving engagement levels.
The death of traditional surveys
It’s not just the delivery of the survey insights that is changing. Traditional engagement surveys including the delivery of insights via dashboards will fundamentally change with AI. In fact, we’re already seeing the death of the dashboard.
AI’s capabilities are so vast that organisations will move to more personalised, intuitive, interactive and real-time conversations with employees rather than asking them to complete a ‘one size fits all’ survey. And AI will become an embedded part of these conversations, providing tailored recommendations and visualisations that are context aware based on work roles and environments.
Engagement 2.0
Change is happening now, and HR leaders must understand both the advantages and implications of AI, putting in place the right frameworks to manage the change ahead rather than stifle it. The employee survey is just one area being transformed with advanced AI, signalling the next generation of employee engagement in which empowered and motivated employees accelerate performance at a rate never seen before.
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