Words by Dr. Rima Ghose Chowdhury
Workplace social systems have been undergoing rapid changes, due to factors like generational diversity on the rise, global boundaries getting reduced, pandemic that shook the world and of course, Artificial Intelligence, that is bringing with it myriad possibilities. AI is leading to redesign of many of today’s tasks and workforce configurations. A renewed, imaginative focus on workforce development, learning, and career models will be important. Perhaps most critical of all, will be the need to create meaningful work—work that human beings will be eager to embrace, involving new collaboration with intelligent machines .
Every major human capital management cloud provider is now implementing algorithms, making it important for organizations to maintain accurate data and carefully review these tools for accuracy and potential bias –
There is also growing recognition that AI tools require human oversight. Behind the scenes, major tech firms have tens of thousands of humans continuously watching, training, and improving their algorithms. This realization has given rise to new jobs with titles such as “bot trainer,” “bot farmer,” and “bot curator.”
AI can have huge human-centric impact, through multiple ways.
Personalisation
People have very different styles of learning, and, with the many generations now filling the workforce, embracing modern training practices has never been more important. AI is helping to personalize corporate learning, by capturing meaningful employee data relating to a wide range of learning experiences and behaviors. The same machine learning computer algorithms that “learn and recommend” by analyzing your choices of where to shop or travel or dine, will “learn and recommend” when it comes to employee training. In fact, these systems will continue to parse and analyze as more and more employee interactions occur, and be able to tweak training programs accordingly, making training more efficient, and training outcomes more effective. Effective skilling will reduce workplace inadequacies to a great extent.
Improved Recruitment
Human beings are complicated, and it is very difficult to get base-level data on individual people, enough to run an analysis on, especially when hiring. Still, in its (relative) infancy, the software driving natural language processes and predictive language analysis will help speed up recruitment by allowing to weed mismatches out faster, and with fewer mistakes. This goes a long way in eliminating unconscious bias. We have AI enabled system taking input for required features in text form for a post and then objectively/semantically searching them in the CV’s to rank them in order of preference or suitability of resumes for the specific job posts.
Better prediction models
Whether it is predicting future turnover rates, reduced (or increased) employee engagement levels, project completion problems, and any other unexpected hidden issues that would usually take years to surface, artificial intelligence will (most likely) be one step ahead. This leads to a lot of cost savings and overall organisational efficiencies.
We have helped heavy engineering clients in managing their human resource requirement. Key elements of Project Plan for engineering activities, machines and operational requirements, time lines were extracted and right resources (from HR records) were mobilised based on the best match and availability. It helped to achieve optimum performance for specific project – right resource mobilisation, find out redundant skills, skills in high demand and short supply, cross skilling. Employee turnover prediction with artificial neural networks also helped clients prepare better for future.
Sentiment analysis
We have developed and deployed a customer feedback analysis system for high value customer, where the system reads all emails to look for appreciation, concerns or complaints in their communication. The goal is to capture such sentiments, classify, perform root cause and create a plan for improvement. Such a system can be extended to employee emails as well to look for specific patterns of concern. For our internal employee engagement surveys, we have used HR sentiment analysis with text mining, and taken up remedial measures or launched new initiatives.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to disrupt our world. With intelligent machines enabling high-level cognitive processes like thinking, perceiving, learning, problem solving and decision making, coupled with advances in data collection and aggregation, analytics and computer processing power, AI presents opportunities to complement and supplement human intelligence and enrich the way people live and work.
AI and People are smarter together!
Dr. Rima Ghose Chowdhury is President & CHRO of Datamatics
