chatbots – Workforce

As the world throws curveballs at businesses, new workforce management tools are created as old ones may become irrelevant or even more daunting to use.

Luckily, new technologies are constantly being created to address these challenges.

Geofencing

With more employees clocking in on their phones, it could be possible for them to clock in anywhere. Geofencing — a capability in which time and attendance tools can put a fence around a location that that workers cannot clock in unless they are on premise — is one solution that’s gaining momentum.

Karen Piercy, a partner in Mercer’s Philadelphia office, said that she’s recently seen more clients ask about geofencing when looking for vendors. While it used to be something that clients were not directly seeking when looking for a vendor, now it’s something on many wish lists.

Also read: Companies may pay the price for poorly managed payroll practices

Fighting burnout and fatigue

One of the biggest challenges of recent years is the quick pace of transformation and innovation, said Jan Bruce, CEO and co-founder of meQuilibrium. These changes can impact the way that employees work on a day-to-day basis. Even before COVID-19 hit the U.S. in early 2020, companies and employees were struggling with how to deal with change effectively.

She gave the example of distribution workers, who years ago may have gone about their day with a clipboard and a manifest and did their daily deliveries based on that paper document . Now it’s more likely they used an iPad, where tasks can be updated whenever it is convenient. In the future, it’s possible that self-driving cars are instructed where to go, and the employee is essentially only used to offload products.

People don’t change as quickly as technology does, which can lead to change fatigue and burnout, Bruce said. Change fatigue refers to people feeling tired out by constant change, and burnout refers to people feeling overwhelmed by not having enough resources to deal with these changes appropriately.

Bruce suggested that resilience training software can help employees deal with change better. Resilience refers to not necessarily working harder but adopting the skills to solve problems or address a situation as efficiently as possible with the resources available.

Additionally, managers have a role, as well. It’s not all on the employees. Managers should understand how employees as a group are feeling and learn the overall climate of the workforce, Bruce said. If workers are stressed, managers can explore the question of what is causing burnout and hindering their productivity.

Also read: How technology can help your employee engagement strategy

For this, Bruce recommended using a HR tool or software that provides managers data-driven insights, rather than something that simply shares tips and guidance. Good workforce management tools here will deliver actionable insights to managers.

Adopt workforce management tools with personalization

In the context of burnout, personalized tools can help in many ways. Bruce said the right tools could help people track their stress levels and get instant feedback from a chatbot if someone is seeing a pattern of feeling more stressed than usual.

Users could get insights like that they’re always a little more stressed on a certain day of the week or after a specific type of meeting or event. From there, they can identify a specific stress point and go on from there trying to deal with it better, Bruce said.

Personalization is also something that applies to the broader spectrum of workforce management tools and technology.

Machine learning is gaining traction

The Gartner report “Six Emerging Human Capital Management Technology Trends” explored different tools and technologies likely to become commonplace in the near future. One of these tools is machine learning in HCM, likely to see mainstream adoption in the next five to 10 years, according to the report.

Machine learning is broadly applicable to most, if not all, HCM processes, the report stated, and in order to be successful, organizations must have access to rich data sources, including historical data. By adopting this tool, organizations may be able to take advantage of the many benefits from helping people and processes evolve to guiding talent planning and investment decisions.

The report also included some warnings regarding the impact of machine learning. “Beware of the limitations of machine learning in HCM. A decision based on bad data or a bad analysis will usually result in an unexpected/poor outcome,” it stated.

Additionally, deploying machine learning as a one-off initiative is not the most effective use of the tool, the report said. It’s better used consistently for continuous improvement over time.

Voice of the employee technologies

The Gartner report also highlighted “voice of the employee,” or VoE, technologies, which are able to collect and analyze the opinions, perceptions and feelings of employees through means such as surveys or feedback tools. It is estimated that these tools will see mainstream adoption in five to 10 years, according to the report.

These solutions offer a way for managers to measure and improve employee engagement and retention, and they better allow managers to identify any commonplace issues among staff.

One important recommendation Gartner has for organizations interested in this technology is to build a VoE strategy with data privacy and security requirements in mind.

Also read: Shift feedback software is an immediate conversation starter

Chatbots for bots

Organizations have been incorporating AI-enabled chatbots in their HR systems for years, but that becomes difficult to manage when there’s a different bot for each HR function, said Will Manuel, partner at Mercer.

One of the newer innovations is bots for bots, he added. Socrates.AI is one of these software technology companies that helps manage the bots an organization uses so that the way questions are being answered is consistent across bots.

“Otherwise, even though you’re leveraging new technology, you’re still creating silos. And integration is better,” Manuel said.

The days of face-to-face meetings and group emails may soon be coming to an end. From texting job candidates and using Slack for project management, to building artificially intelligent chatbots that answer questions about human resources, communication technology in the workplace is evolving. All of this is a good thing, said Sharon O’Dea, a digital and social media consultant based in the U.K. These tools enable faster, more efficient communication, via the devices employees have in their hands all the time, she said. “We all use instant messaging in our personal lives. It is natural to see that shift into the workplace.”

Younger workers are far more likely to choose text or Slack over email or phone calls, which they view as cumbersome and outdated, said Adam Ochstein, CEO of StratEx, an HR technology and consulting firm based in Chicago. Email can also be tricky for contract workers and frontline staff, who may rarely check their emails but always have their phones. “They want to communicate in real time with their fingers, not their voices.”

The use of instant and automated technology to support communication isn’t going away, so managers need to get on board or risk creating information gaps in the workplace. A 2017 report from Dynamic Signal found that only 17 percent of companies had recently invested in technology for internal communication, even though 73 percent said communicating company information to employees was a “serious challenge.”

While chatbots won’t be taking over the way we engage any time soon, the tools we use are evolving, and skeptical managers need to get on board, Ochstein said. “If you want to be an employer of choice for this generation, you’ve got to adapt.

Conversation Bots

Along with changing how employees communicate, new technologies are also changing what information they can share, said Rob High, chief technology officer for IBM Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing system. “Artificial intelligence tools, at their most basic, improve the likelihood that employees can find and share information as they communicate.” This enables faster problem-solving and ensures they can make decisions based on data, not gut instinct. High envisions a day where AI conversation agents will be the third party in a conversation, automatically searching for information and providing context.

Also read: Meet Your New Colleague: Artificial Intelligence

High’s team has also created the AI-driven IBM tone analyzer, which uses linguistic analysis to examine the emotion in text messages. The goal is to help employees vet the “tone” of texts and emails, just as you might spell-check before hitting send. “It’s an efficient way to reduce misunderstandings,” he said. High believes AI technology will change the way we communicate at work and at home.

O’Dea agreed. “Chatbots offer huge potential for employee communication. They can take over the tasks that are needlessly complicated.” She believes early applications will focus on things like filling out employment forms, requesting days off and accessing personal data. “Chatbots can provide employees with instant access to this information through an app, which is where they spend more of their time anyway,” she said. For those who think chatbots are too inhuman for workplace communication, O’Dea believes it’s the opposite. Many employee communication platforms and corporate emails are “generic and impersonal, but chatbots can have human conversations,” she said.

In an era of social sharing, the casual nature of texts in the workplace can put companies at risk.

The Trouble With Text

The adoption of instant communication in the workplace isn’t all good news. In an era of social sharing, the casual nature of texts in the workplace can put companies at risk. We’ve all read the stories of managers cursing out employees for some minor infraction or flirting in a way that makes someone uncomfortable, only to have those conversations go viral and result in someone getting fired.

“There is a fine line between casual conversations and inappropriate content, and instant messaging makes that line very easy to cross,” StratEx’s Ochstein said. It’s rarely intentional. He recalls a recent day at his own company when employees were using Slack to discuss whether the company’s “no-shorts policy” should be abandoned when temperatures rise above 90 degrees. That evolved into a conversation about why female employees were lucky because they can wear skirts, which led to a “guys vs. girls in the workplace” battle. “That’s when the HR team had to get involved and shut it down,” he said. “It was innocent banter, but all of [the] sudden it was going in a direction no one wanted.”

Such scenarios are all too common, particularly when teams work long hours together or are out celebrating a project success. “One person may think a text is funny, where the other thinks it’s inappropriate,” he said. “But once you send it, you can’t get it back.”

The instant nature of these tools also creates legal issues with hourly gig workers. If a manager sends an email at night, it is assumed a contractor will respond the next day, but if they send an instant message the implication is that they expect an instant response. “Does that mean you have to pay them for that time?” Ochstein pondered. “Once you cross that chasm, the legal stuff can get bad.”

That doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t use instant messaging apps to interact with employees, but they should define clear policies for their use. Ochstein advised “over-communicating” to employees about texting protocol and reminding them that anything they say on text is as admissible as any other document. He also urged HR leaders to promote a culture of caution. “Encourage them to pause and think about whether a message could be construed as not respectful,” he said. “If there is any chance it could be construed as rude or not respectful, don’t send it.”

Tag: chatbots

Workforce management tools to help address modern workplace challenges