The Damage of Distraction in HR and How to Eliminate it
Ever wondered just what a distraction can cost you? Whether it’s a phone call, an email alert, or a bothersome co-worker, your mind will need 23 minutes to refocus on a task after being distracted.
According to India Times, we lose an average of 3 hours a day, this translates into 60 hours lost per month per paid worker.
The Vicious HR Cycle
HR’s tasks are riddled with the most distractions. From internal to external matters and transitioning from one to the other and then vice-versa, HR is in charge of it. That entails keeping in constant communication with current employees, interview candidates, and new-hires. What do the questions below have in common?
‘How many leaves do I have left?’
‘When is my evaluation?’
‘How do I file for reimbursement?’
They’re all questions directed to HR. They require locating information and relaying them to the asker. These questions also usually come in the form of a distraction: emails, messages, meetings (unfortunately), and disruptive conversation. If they came separately in one day, your HR manager would have already lost an hour’s worth of productivity.
How can HR stay focused on its strategic goals while also helping employees with their ad hoc inquiries? Emphasis on good employee experience means that juggling strategic goals alongside ad hoc employee requests won’t go away. Traditional automation struggles to automate these sorts of interactions. Chatbots offer a new form of automation, where conversation itself can be automated. HR associates only need to answer questions once and then let the chatbot answer the other similar questions.
Eliminating Distraction through Automation
Employees reach out to HR when they can’t find the information they are looking for on their own. Like a librarian, HR associates have an intimate understanding of the policies and forms that govern an organization. Many questions are the same and are easily automated via chatbot. Other questions have personalized answers that require looking up employee-specific information. Quick responses that are thoughtful and personalized ensures employee experience isn’t sacrificed. At Pez.AI, data showed the use of our Expert bot took only a few weeks before employees asked questions out of HR’s scope. This exhibits the comfortability of our team with the bot and the appreciation of instantaneous responses.
Quickly provide answers about policies, benefits, and forms
Employees rarely remember all the details in their employee handbook. In a fast-paced environment, nobody wants to spend the time digging for the answer.
“It’s easier to ask a chatbot about vacation policy, leave policies, health benefits, rather than search for that information in a handbook or portal. ”
The chatbot can respond with a brief comment followed by a link to the actual policy, just like a human would. Best of all, when a policy or document changes, it’s easy to update the bot to point to the latest document.
While it can happen that a bot isn’t updated with the latest information, there are bots that learn on the fly. That means you can teach the bot how to answer a query it’s not been trained to respond to without having to code or even access the dashboard.
At Pez.AI, our Expert chatbot can be redirected to a human SME (Subject Matter Expert) to know who to go to for a specific topic. Expert can also automatically add responses to questions without having to manually add it to its lexicon. How cool is that?
Provide personalized answers for each employee
Unlike general questions that apply to everyone, some questions are specific to an employee. When an employee asks about the number of vacation days they have left or the results of their performance review, they need to get responses specific to them. These questions require a data lookup from a spreadsheet or database. In the past, these sorts of integrations were expensive and required IT involvement. With chatbots like Expert, data source integration is self-service and can be done by anyone within HR!
One of the many benefits of having your own Expert chatbot means, never having to do the legwork of finding information in the wrong places ever again. Expert’s spreadsheet integration feature allows the bot to find records for a specific employee easily. HR would only need to link the Google sheet database and the bot will do the rest.
There will be no need to handhold new team members, nor will there be a need to answer the same question twice. Having a bot do repetitive tasks will drastically improve HR productivity and empower them to use their time wisely.
From onboarding, talent development, and even workplace operations, chatbots are your HR’s partner in automation. Lost time is reclaimed, human interaction is reprioritized and distractions are eliminated.
Pez.AI is a chatbot company automating management one bot at a time. Learn how bots can automate information gathering, knowledge sharing, and coordination in your business processes and projects at www.pez.ai or Drop us a line here. 🤖
