The unexpected beauty of HR × AI.
How will AI impact the workplace?
Uncertainty is driving employees' AI anxiety to unprecedented heights.
Our crystal ball is not much clearer than anyone else's.
But we believe Large Language Models (LLMs) stand a strong chance of revolutionizing the work experience in one very constructive way.
Here's our thinking—available in an expanded version as a workshop, keynote, or sprint.
(And now as a leadership course.)
Engagement is driven above all by our sense of personal impact.
I often feel like a musician who can't hear themselves play.”
— Gen Z Business Analyst
“
At the end of the day, the purpose feeling that drives workplace engagement is not the mystical force it's often made out to be.
It's a sense of personal impact.
Unless they interact with customers, most employees get that from their direct managers.
Who in turn tend to feel inadequate to the task—which is why bad bosses are the #1 reason people leave jobs.
Today we rely on our direct managers, and surveys.
Peer recognition systems and 360 surveys have gone a long way to fill this gap.
Both enable individuals to understand where their work is making a difference.
Like all surveys, however, they still have a drawback, on top of the cost:
The need to step out of regular workflow to provide data, which can make personal feedback untimely and untrustworthy.
Source: HappyOrNot
How AI changes the game.
Slack AI Screenshot, February 2024
Source: Salesforce
“What did people think of my recommendation in the meeting?”
“Of 10 participants:
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5 had no opinion
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3 didn't understand it
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2 thought it was genius
Also
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4 have downloaded your presentation
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2 have forwarded it
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1 has it open right now.”
What if managers and employees didn't have to do surveys to know where we stand?
What if we didn't have to go out of our way to give colleagues feedback?
This is the prospect raised by the advent of overlaying LLMs on top of company chat feeds, like Slack AI and Microsoft Copilot for Teams.
Imagine if we could simply ask our computers previous unimaginable queries such as:
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“What impact has my work had this week?”
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“How many thank yous have my reports had this month and from whom?" and
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“Which members of my team require attention?”
This is the future.
A world in which expertise may still be required to ask the right questions and makes sense of what comes back.
But the data set is virtually limitless—and we can get a better sense of our impact at will.
How to de-risk AI × HR:
Lay an engagement foundation.
Our imagination regarding new tech tends to be constrained to imagine more efficient versions of what already exists.
No one predicted social media. Not the greatest internet gurus. Not even sci-fi writers.
AI × HR may prove to be the social media of AI, enabling a previously unimaginable form of interaction with our peers, bosses and customers.
Like social media, it will also bring risks and negative disruptions.
The best way to prepare for these? To ensure that our engagement houses are already in order.
Starting with laying an accountability foundation, which we can present as a workshop or keynote, or help implement as part of an engagement sprint.
Get ahead of the curve. Book a discovery call or drop us a line today.
