Improving Employee Experience And Engagement

Five smarter ways new technologies can help

Just as we collectively might feel that we’ve seen the arrival of the digital revolution, more change is forthcoming – at a faster rate and with more impact. More than ever, new technologies are shaping how we live, work, communicate and collaborate. And even how we think. Whether it’s in the workplace or a social setting, we’re able to connect countless participants across different networks to communicate, share content and accomplish work. 

Now, with Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things, not only does technology facilitate digital collaboration, but it is also becoming an active participant. At the same time, unintended consequences or dysfunctional outcomes can creep into the equation as organizations learn how to best leverage new technologies. Here are five ways that we believe that new technologies – if deployed wisely – will make a positive impact on employee experience and engagement.

1. Avoid uncontrolled adoption of disparate collaboration point solutions by employees. Some of us can remember the early days of email technology, where over a dozen incompatible email standards existed, and each vendor’s proprietary system couldn’t talk to the others. The same thing happened a century ago with early telephone systems. We are the same stage with team collaboration tools, where collaborative communities are divided by the technology they use if allowed to adopt disparate point solutions. This problem can perpetuate even more easily now that public cloud-based applications, which often can be activated for free or nominal fees by individual employees or departments.

Going forward, make a concerted effort to foster the adoption of common tools among your employees. And, as a ‘backstop’ tactic, seek out solutions that have open interfaces or plug-ins so you can interoperate with customers, partners or suppliers who may be using different collaboration tools.

2. Remember that employees will still engage in voice conversations – but not always with other humans. In our digital world, perhaps many employees feel verbal conversations are becoming a lost art form. But not so fast – it is likely that we will see a renewed focus on voice communications than we’ve seen in the past decade. This will be driven by voice-enabled virtual assistants being adopted by both employees and consumers, with voice-driven software bots that understand natural language for customer service and convenience, voice-controlled devices (especially within vehicles and the home). Not to mention the huge strides in accuracy and performance in voice dictation to capture content, do real-time translations, and ease text composition. It will still be a multimedia world, but voice will get a boost going forward.

Knowledge workers will also benefit, with easier and streamlined voice-driven interfaces to access to archived information, minutes and transcriptions, and shared content.

3. Employee and team meetings can be reimagined with the arrival of new ‘virtual’ technologies. With new augmented reality technologies, meetings may become more fun and exciting experiences, rather than potentially seen as dreaded and boring. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), software bots and augmented and mixed reality will combine to create innovative new ways to collaborate with a mixture of human and machine participation. Rather than eliminate or threaten employee positions, these advances will collectively make us more creative, engaged and more productive. Virtual teams will include virtual team members and operate within virtualized environments.  

For some quick examples of what could be ‘next level’ virtualized collaboration, check out this Unify blog and this published Unify article.

4. Engaged employees want to feel good about where they work and how they operate as a sustainable and responsible business. We now have great tools and technologies available to enable ‘anywhere working’ and flexible work terms – a potentially powerful benefit for employee experience. However, many organizations are still hesitant to adopt it due to traditional office-centric management assumptions and lack of motivation to change. Meanwhile, as Millennials and Gen-Z knowledge workers comprise the biggest segment of the new workforce, the common shared value of sustainability should drive employer behavior in terms of provisioning flexible working terms. In order to attract and retain talent, organizations must “do the right thing” to reduce the climate impact and urban congestion of unnecessary commuting to a central office location.

Where appropriate, working from home just twice a week can reduce related CO2 emissions by 40% or likewise reduce the load on already over-stressed transit systems and congested roadways. Companies that fail to recognize this trend will struggle not only to attract and retain talent if they are not enabling flexible working in support of sustainable business.

5. Be aware of the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence adoption – especially in hiring and employee impacting processes. Whether it is algorithm and learning sample bias that skews hiring decisions, disastrous maneuvers of self-driving vehicles or unintended and dysfunctional guidance from customer service bots, business leaders and customers will become more and more aware of the ethical risks and flaws inherent with the current generation of artificial intelligence (AI). The debate will surround three areas: the diversity, inclusiveness and completeness of the programming and learning that drives AI systems; the “explainability” of complex AI decisions and outcomes (that is, can a human expert reliably explain or predict why the AI system made the decision that it made); and whether AI should be used as a substitute for human judgment, reasoning and compassion where matters of individual safety, welfare or social justice are concerned.

So, while AI will no doubt provide efficiencies in many HR processes, be vigilant and scrutinize the potential unintended or dysfunctional consequences that “unbalanced” AI can generate.