Can AI truly take over your corporate culture management?
Interview by Jennifer Ip
Last week we had a pleasure to give an interview to an amazing person and a friend of Elin team — Jennifer Ip. Jennifer is a Senior Human Resources professional with 10+ year’s experience as a coach, mentor, and catalyst of organizational transformation and employee engagement initiatives. Currently, she is on a journey to prepare her thesis about remote work and we were happy to speak with her about Elin and our vision of culture management in remote teams.
Meet the team:
Anna: Head of Business Development and Partnerships
Nadya: Head of Content and Product Design
Jennifer: I’m so thankful to Anna for reaching out. Discovering your company and what you guys bring to the table in creating a better culture for remote working teams is definitely a need I’ve discovered in my own research. You are providing a needed tool for companies to use. I am excited to see where the future of the company goes especially as AI is growing in all areas especially in HR. Below are just some questions I’d love to learn from you both as you launch this new company!
Prior to creating Elin.ai, what were both of your roles and what was the impetus for creating Elin.ai?
Anna: Over my entire career I have been working mostly in sales and marketing and my last 8 years I’ve done it remotely. By remotely I mean still working within a corporate environment, not freelancing. With the time being it became obvious to me that remote work is the future of any company that wants to have access to the best talent. To stay productive, I have begun to learn various team collaboration tools (both software and hardware) as well as to talk to the companies that promote so-called New Ways of Working. It gave me a push to start my own blog about remote working and this is when I found out that Nadya and my other friends who I have known since my student years are working on Elin’s development. This year I’ve joined the team as a Head of Business Development and Partnerships and couldn’t imagine a better way to combine my passion for remote work with my professional career and necessary skills.
Nadya: I started my career in HR and Talent Management. After a few years I discovered my passion for technology and found my happy place in HR tech — on the intersection of HR and technology, working on making People Operations more efficient, yet human-focused. Early on I became a passionate advocate of giving employees the freedom to choose where and when they choose to complete their tasks. Then three years ago, my employer at a time supported my plans to move countries, but keep my role, despite me becoming their first remote employee. I experienced all the joys and challenges of remote work, but it was clear that it is possible to make it work, it’s a necessity for companies and lifestyle of choice for more and more people. Creating a tool that helps remote teams be more engaged felt like a great next step.
Jennifer: In short, what exactly does Elin offer? How does it work?
Nadya: Elin is an AI-driven Culture Officer for remote teams. She observes available team communication, analyzes the patterns, compliments conclusions with the direct questions and brings awareness to what the company culture is and how it translates to remote employees’ mood, engagement, wellbeing, collaboration and the feeling of making an impact.
Currently, we are integrated with two most popular remote teams’ platforms — Slack and Zoom, where Elin acts as a Slack bot and a Zoom app. In Slack Elin communicates directly with the employees, she is able to ask regular questions and suggest individual coaching. In Zoom, Elin analyzes emotions of the team calls to add to the picture of objective data on the company’s communication. We summarize its findings in a user-friendly continuously updated analytics, available to everyone.
Jennifer: Engagement is something HR departments are always trying to improve upon, how did you decide to use the metrics you are using to collect data?
Nadya: We asked ourselves the questions — What are valuable metrics that would help the CEO of a mostly remote company know how their people are doing? What are the metrics that are difficult to have a feel of when you’re not sitting in the same office? And key 5 dimensions came to mind:
- Mood: is the first indicator of the team’s health.
2. Engagement: do people have all the support they need to be motivated and bring their best to work?
3. Wellbeing: Are people burning out while working really hard? Do they manage their energy and commit to work-life balance? This is probably the most difficult to track while having a remote team.
4. Collaboration: Do people feel like part of a larger company? Can they easily connect with people outside of their teams? Do they know how to give feedback or suggest a new idea?
5. And finally, Impact: Do people feel like they are contributing to the larger company mission?
Jennifer: You use slack and zoom as your main source of information gathering, how did you decide to use slack and zoom? Has this limited your clients? Will you be developing your program for use with other platforms?
Anna: Slack and Zoom are undisputed leaders on the team communication software market and starting with them means catering a larger number of customers. Nevertheless, in the future, we are aiming to integrate Elin with other major communication platforms to meet the needs of any remote team.
Jennifer: One might argue that to truly gain an understanding of an employees’ mood or engagement, you need to have a physical conversation or you need some sort of human to human connection. You use AI. Which then insists that the questions people will answer in the feedback questions, they are answering truthfully. Is this your assumption or can Elin pick up on a potential lie?
Nadya: We collect two kinds of data: the answers people give on Elin’s questions, but also understanding of communication patterns from their public communication in Slack and Zoom. We understand that answers can be situational and depend on the current circumstances. However Elin is there not to catch a lie, it is there to show more information than answers can show and offer support where it's potentially needed.
Jennifer: Is there a fear that Elin will be seen as a tool to micro-manage employees?
Nadya: All data we receive from users is anonymized, so there is no way for management to see individual results and metrics. Elin only brings awareness of company-wide or team-level metrics, but on the individual level, it offers awareness of your own situation and coaching to support improvement areas. So no, it will not be a micro-management tool. We support the interests of each user as much as the interests of the company in general.
Jennifer: What is the feedback you are hearing from current clients?
Anna: The overall feedback we hear is very positive. While a lot of companies are talking about the importance of the internal culture and its measurements, the number of tools that help to analyze and quantify them is very limited and the functionality of those existing ones is very limited and mostly based on pulse surveys. Elin is still in its early stage of development and we are open to receive any constructive feedback on our product that will help us to become better and actually meet the needs of our customers.
Jennifer: What do you believe is the greatest benefit for a company in using Elin? What do you believe id the greatest benefit for an employee?
Anna: Elin helps employees to feel they are really part of the team, their voice is heard and their efforts are appreciated, which leads to a happier and healthier environment in the company and better business results.
Nadya: I believe awareness is a very strong tool in itself. Our metrics, coaching and even the questions themselves, help every remote employee and company management ask the right questions about the way they work.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for your answers. I am very excited to hear more and to see where the future of AI in HR will be going. No matter what we believe currently and are experiencing, AI is and will continue to disrupt industries and departments. So I think Elin has a very real future. I’m super curious to see what your next steps will be as you move toward more clients. I would also be open to helping connect you with any companies as I do research! Thank you so much!
- Thank you, Jennifer!
