- Skepticism is healthy — it’s essential to implementing AI into HR processes for the first time.
- Look for opportunities where AI can do the heavy lifting in administrative duties. This frees up your HR teams, allowing them to spend more time on meaningful work.
- Give ample attention to privacy questions and transparency about how data is used — employees will be more trusting of your process.
It’s practical, but is it ethical? HR leaders and practitioners interested in using AI for recruiting and talent management often ask this question.
They’re on the right track. Understanding how AI works throughout your entire talent life cycle is essential to the adoption and scaling process of any new talent platform.
Today, many talent leaders are already seeing the benefits of using AI to improve talent processes. But before anyone leaps to the tangible rewards of AI — quality talent matches, faster screening and hiring times, internal mobility, and career pathing — they must do their due diligence to ensure that the AI is being used in a transparent, ethical, and responsible way.
Recently, I joined a discussion on the benefits and challenges of using AI in employee engagement and career development. Read on for our top observations on how to approach adopting AI in HR.
Watch the webinar “Leveraging new technology to gain insight into the workforce” on demand now.
Top benefits of AI in driving employee engagement
Your starting place for using AI should be in the spirit of experimentation.
Jumping in with a “just try it” mindset may feel scary, but this is how leading organizations are learning what they can and can’t do with AI in HR.
“What I find as an organizational psychologist with 25 years of experience is that I really need to experiment with the technology,” said Patrick Hyland, Organizational Psychology and Strategic Adviser at Remesh, an AI-powered research platform. “I need to try it. I need to verify it. I need to suss out the strengths of the technology and how that squares up with my traditional methods and figure out where the synergistic point is.
“I think that’s a really important perspective as we jump into this world of AI and employee research,” Hyland added. “We really need to be both open to it, but we also need to have a healthy level of skepticism to see where the potential issues are and pitfalls are.”
One area where AI can help in employee engagement is identifying fatigue and burnout, especially in middle management as it collects feedback. AI can also analyze the data and provide insights to review and learn from.
“I think the biggest value is in understanding and acting on the data that you get,” said Chris Coultas, Senior Director of Employee Performance and Engagement at McKesson, a health care supplier of equipment and tech solutions. “It’s not so much in the execution of the measurement, but more in the understanding and action. There’s millions of different ways to slice and dice the data, and AI can do that a lot faster than analytics teams or can certainly augment the efforts of people-analytics teams.”
AI can also measure employee performance when it comes to creating and assessing achievements in a development plan. It can develop a breadth and depth of customized content in minutes that would take talent managers hours to piece together.
“I really see AI uplifting the talent community,” said Sarah Waltman, VP of Global Talent Management and Organizational Development at Dentsply Sirona, a dental equipment manufacturer. “This would allow HR professionals to think more about the strategy and allow AI to do more of the work — let AI be the trainer, the content developer. There’s not many things that AI can’t do as far as tactical [assignments], which gives us the chance to think about the strategies and what types of things they would want to map out for their development plan, versus actually making the things.”
4 ways AI can enhance employee engagement
AI can help HR teams by freeing up time so they can focus on more meaningful work, but AI also helps improve the employee experience.
Benefits include:
- Creating more inclusive job descriptions to attract best-fit, high-quality talent.
- Surfacing candidates based on skills and potential by mitigating unconscious bias through masking.
- Reducing time-consuming work that can be easily automated and analyzed.
- Providing greater transparency in hiring and personal development processes.
Top challenges with AI in employee engagement
Since AI in HR is so new, many talent leaders are still figuring out the best way to use it. Challenges in learning how to use AI in HR are natural and healthy — this is where ample attention must be paid, especially around privacy and transparency.
“We need to move forward with great caution,” Waltman said. “It would be good for all of us to pause to say, ‘Do we have a good procurement [or] legal review process going forward for AI type technology?’ Those of us who are in HR need to be particularly careful, just like someone in R&D or investor relations, because we’ve got very sensitive information. [We need to come] up with a checklist or some boundaries — how we’re going to work going forward.”
It’s important to also consider employee perception of how AI is administered and be upfront about how data is used. Doing so can help gain employee trust.
“If you don’t have psychological safety, no one is going to participate or participate fully,” Hyland said. “So what really becomes important is the way that we set up these listening experiences with the stakeholders themselves. We find when we go talk to employees that they really do prefer anonymized feedback loops rather than identified feedback loops.”
Coultas added that his organization provides employees with clearly explained confidential feedback surveys, which has resulted in quality response rates and gained employee trust.
“We are very explicit that only eight people in the entire company within HR can see the identifying data,” he said. “[Employees] have to put in identifying information, but we’re very explicit that only eight people can see it anytime it’s ever used.”
Measuring results with AI
Use of AI in HR gives leaders the freedom to hand off administrative tasks in the process and focus on supporting their talent with what they need at the right time. AI has the capability to check in with employees on progress at a cadence that works best for them, giving talent leaders the insights they need to help those employees further their careers.
“We’re going to employees [who] want to be engaged in conversation about real-life issues on a much more regular basis,” Hyland said. “I think those conversations should be happening weekly and monthly, and technology allows us to do that at scale. Regular feedback that leads to action doesn’t overwhelm and swamp us is really the key. Momentum is important.”
Coultas agreed. “If you’re trying to drive action at an enterprise level for 50,000 employees, measuring quarterly might actually be a little bit too much. It may be more like, we have a big annual one and then a biannual pulse check, and so that allows you to keep track of progress there. But to Patrick’s [Hyland’s] point — at the manager-by-manager level, anything you can do to keep tabs on a more frequent basis is better in terms of measuring the effect of this new tech. It just depends on what the point of the tech is, and what do you think the expected outcome is.”
Waltman says the final piece of the puzzle is knowing what you want to get out of any new AI tech platform you’re implementing.
“Establishing what your ROI is going to be like [is important],” she said. “[Asking], ‘What would success look like by deploying this?’ Some of that might be higher engagement or higher business results. I think that’s something you can really partner with that provider to help you establish.”
Rebecca Warren is a Director with our Talent-centered Transformation Team. Before joining Eightfold, she held multiple talent roles with global manufacturing and retail organizations.
Watch the webinar “Leveraging new technology to gain insight into the workforce” on demand now.
