As small to mid-sized businesses continue to find ways to incorporate AI to streamline processes, it’s important to consider how AI in the workplace can also help create better work environments for their people.
A great workplace is one where companies that prioritize the employee experience, or experience-leader organizations, create an environment where employees trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with.
Global authority on workplace culture Great Place To Work® surveyed more than 14,000 people from 37 countries to better understand trends in the average worker’s day-to-day experiences of wellbeing in their workplaces. They found that, while employee experience is influenced by many factors, the key areas are mental and emotional wellbeing, sense of purpose, personal support, meaningful connections, and financial wellbeing. By incorporating AI in the workplace, companies can improve these areas through providing the support and surfacing the data needed to make a difference.
Providing Personal Support
Creating a supportive work environment is crucial for employee satisfaction and retention, and companies that prioritize safety, trust, and respect are more likely to foster a positive workplace culture. According to the State of Employee Experience in SMBs 2024 report by HR.com, only 37% of small to mid-sized businesses rate their average employee experience highly. This highlights the need for improved support systems, which AI can help provide.
- Work flexibility: Allowing employees to have their personal schedules taken into consideration is essential to fostering work-life balance. HR solutions that leverage AI can assist with this by allowing managers and employees to enter all their information, preferences, and requirements for their shifts and automatically have their schedules populated through AI. This not only saves time and ensures compliance, but also meets the needs of your people so they have control over their work schedules.
- Access to the answers they need: Leveraging AI-powered chatbots allows your people to quickly and easily get answers to their questions about company policies and processes or access instruction on how to use equipment. Incorporating this AI tool into an HR solution helps your people save time, get the answers they need, and move through tasks without getting stuck.
Ensuring Financial Health and Transparency
Financial wellbeing is a critical component of overall employee satisfaction. When employees feel secure and informed about their financial status, they are more likely to be engaged and productive. AI can help companies enhance financial transparency and support.
- Benchmarking: Companies that excel in measuring and benchmarking their employee experience efforts against competitors can easily identify gaps and improve their initiatives. According to HR.com, over a third of experience-leader organizations understand how their employees’ experiences compare with the experiences of employees in competitor organizations, while less than a tenth of other organizations claim the same.
- Paycheck understanding: Pay stubs can be confusing for many employees. However, understanding the different components is critical to understanding take-home pay. This can lead to a lot of follow-up questions for your payroll managers after payroll has been processed. AI can help employees understand their paychecks by breaking down complex salary structures and deductions and answering their questions directly in the solution, making financial information more accessible and saving your payroll managers time.
Benchmarking can be hard to calculate, but HR solutions that include industry benchmarking can use AI to make this task easy. For example, if you wanted to make sure your compensation practices were competitive, your HR software could compare your raw, anonymized payroll data with that of other companies in your region in your same industry and of the same size, allowing you to ensure that your pay is competitive and on par with industry standards.
Creating a Sense of Purpose with AI in the Workplace
A sense of purpose is essential for employee motivation and engagement. When employees understand how their work contributes to your organization’s larger goals, they are more likely to be committed and productive. In fact, experience-leader organizations are more likely to attribute their success to learning and development (L&D) and career development initiatives. According to the HR.com report, 61% of experience-leaders believe their employees view L&D as key to their experiences. AI can support this by helping managers provide continuous feedback and performance evaluations.
- Performance and feedback: In recent years, performance and feedback has been an important component for employees, which is why companies that may not have had processes in place previously are prioritizing this step in the employee experience. Once a performance plan is in place, AI can help keep track of employee progress throughout the year, gather data, and even help managers formulate constructive and thoughtful reviews. This ensures that employees receive fair and constructive feedback to help them grow and stay motivated.
- Self-reviews: An important component for reviews is also the self-review process and giving employees the opportunity to talk about their achievements. AI can be leveraged for this process by assisting employees with the formulation of goals, keeping track of their progress, and even helping them draft their reviews.
Building Meaningful Connections
Strong interpersonal relationships at work are vital for a positive workplace culture. AI can facilitate meaningful connections by enhancing collaboration and social interaction among employees, even in remote settings. The report highlights that experience-leader organizations are five times more likely than laggard organizations to say feelings of camaraderie and friendship with coworkers benefit their employee experience.
- Identifying collaboration opportunities: In a fast-paced environment with a lot of moving parts, it can be hard for managers to take a step back and ensure they are prioritizing building interpersonal relationships among their teams. HR solutions that prioritize building great workplaces offer AI-powered recommendations directly in the flow of work that identify areas of opportunity and nudge managers with these recommendations to ensure they are staying top of mind.
Improving Employee Wellbeing
Employee wellbeing encompasses physical, mental, and emotional health. AI can play a pivotal role in promoting wellbeing by offering personalized support and resources to help employees maintain a healthy work-life balance.
- Onboarding and training: Starting off on the right foot is vital for new employees and setting them up for success in their new roles. AI can help new employees get up to speed by guiding them through the onboarding process and answering their questions on demand. AI can also create personalized learning recommendations to help employees train for their current role and continue their career development, ensuring that employees feel valued and equipped to succeed.
- Burnout and flight risk: Burnout is one of the leading indicators that top talent may leave your company. Unfortunately, it is also something that can be hard to identify because your people may not communicate their issues to you directly. AI tools can help manage workloads and monitor key indicators of burnout, notifying managers of elevated levels and providing recommendations on how to combat burnout to reduce employee flight risk.
- Surveys: One of the most important ways AI can be leveraged to create a great workplace is by using it to listen to your people. By hearing directly from your people through surveys about what they love, what they think can be improved, and how they feel about their overall work experience is key to identifying areas of opportunity and making meaningful change.
This can be overwhelming for managers, though — so using AI to evaluate the responses and even provide further recommendations based on the responses can be very helpful to ensuring you are making the right data-driven decisions. Additionally, by leveraging a solution that can tap into the unique culture data provided by Great Place To Work, your leaders can better understand how you compare with other great workplaces and identify which areas are most important to focus on.
Conclusion
Incorporating AI in the workplace can significantly boost trust, build camaraderie, and improve the overall employee experience. By focusing on key areas such as personal support, financial health, sense of purpose, meaningful connections, and employee wellbeing, AI can help you create a truly great place to work.
