HR Chatbots: Why Automating Employee Engagement is Important for Strategic HR
HR chatbots improve employee engagement by increasing employee satisfaction. AI-based chatbots make HR departments more efficient by reducing repetitive and time consuming activities and enabling employees to focus on more important tasks.
Improving employee engagement is key to obtaining high organisational productivity and performance.
Employee engagement is a an area of strategic importance to HR, particularly at director-level and at the same time an area of significant concern among businesses in the private sector.
As competition for people and talent intensifies, businesses are now moving away from traditional HR practices of offering competitive salaries and career progression.
Through implementation of HR chatbots, the automation of employee engagement becomes another competitive arena for businesses vying to attract and retain top talent to maximise employee productivity and performance.
The UK’s Employee “Disengagement Crisis”
A report by Gallup found that 85% of the global workforce are disengaged with their work with the UK lagging behind the world’s average for employee engagement.
According to a survey of 4,500 workers, the UK has an average employee engagement score of 45% in comparison to USA (60%), Australia (56%) and France (54%).
They also identified that 17% of employees in the UK plan to leave their organisation after two years usually due to high levels of stress and no support for a work-life balance.
Meanwhile, the not-for-profit organisations have a staggering 93% employee engagement rate.
The core values of their staff aligns with those of their organisation and believe that their work has greater purpose in terms of making a difference. Therefore, their employees are highly committed and engaged with their work.
What is Employee Engagement?
Workers that are happy with their jobs and operate a healthy work-life balance are more motivated and engaged at work. Engagement is high when employees understand the purpose of their role within the organisation and if their core values aligns with the goals and purpose of the organisation. There are many benefits to employee engagement:
- Influential in recruiting and retaining talent.
- High employee satisfaction.
- Increased productivity and work performance.
- Lower staff turnover.
- High employee loyalty.
Employee engagement is a mutual commitment between employees and their organisations that increases business performance and profitability.
A survey by Hay Group and Fortune magazine has shown increasing recognition among 94% of the world’s most admired companies that employee engagement is a competitive advantage.
What is a HR chatbot?
Chatbots use a natural language processing software and sentiment mining to emulate human-like conversations and converse with employees on a one-to-one basis.
Through access to a database with extensive information, chatbots are able to understand questions and draw information from company database to formulate an answer or direct employee to a source which can answer their question.
They can also identify and detect a selection of human emotions such as frustration, unmotivated and anger, and will involve a HR professional for human interaction accordingly.
HR Chatbot for Employee Engagement
Below are the ways chatbots can engage employees:
- Increased operational efficiency — chatbots take over time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as admin work and mass candidate screening and complete them quickly, enabling employees be more productive by focusing on more human-centred tasks.
- High accessibility — chatbots can provide 24/7 advice and answer almost all employee questions relating to everything including company policy, job responsibilities etc. For more complex questions, they automatically direct the chat to a HR professional.
- Increased employee enablement — employees will now be able to access knowledge and information critical to their role without having to waste time scanning vast amounts of company data or signing into numerous management systems just to access relevant information. Chatbots can direct employees to the right source of information related to their questions and offering a more centralised point of access.
- Real-time response — conversations with chatbots are seamless and can respond simultaneously to multiple people.
- Higher return on investment (ROI) — the automation of HR processes reduces operational inefficiencies and increases productivity on higher value tasks.
- Data analytics for HR — chatbots collect and analyse data from conversations, questions and feedback received from employees. This informs HR functions what they are doing right and which areas they could improve on.
- Personalised learning and development — workers are more engaged when they feel themselves getting better at their job or developing new and existing skills. Chatbots can act as virtual mentors and design a personalised career development plan showing how employees can further develop their skills for promotion.
- Personal recommendations — chatbots can make personalised recommendations of activities outside the organisations such as social clubs or health recommendations including exercise tracking and physical activity.
- Lower costs — automation reduces work usually handled by internal help desks and IT maintenance, which are departments employees normally go to when they have general enquiries. Therefore, reducing the use of resources within those areas.
- Remote work — chatbots are particularly useful for working remotely as they enable communications among employees to be manageable and productive. For example, new employees undergoing on-boarding can ask chatbots anything about their role and company and saving their specialised questions for their supervisor.
Overall, HR chatbots are highly convenient, accessible and responsive allowing employees to easily access vital information they require to do their job without wasting time by either skimming through various company resources or waiting for their supervisor to respond to their question. By doing the time-consuming and repetitive tasks, chatbots increase worker productivity and satisfaction as they can now focus on more meaningful tasks. The data collected from these interactions can also be used to improve HR service delivery and make personalised career development plans that engage employees and retain those talented individuals.
HR Chatbot Limitations
HR Chatbots can be quite an investment depending on the size of your business, the scale to which you want to implement it or the complexity of the chatbot. They can be more expensive particularly if they are built from scratch or custom-made.
Understandably, its as important to know its limitations as well as its benefits before adopting this technology into your service delivery model.
- HR chatbots can be negatively influenced
The biggest problem with machine learning chatbots is that its a ‘double-edged sword’. By this I’m referring to the idea that what gives chatbots its amazing advantages can also be the cause of its own undoing.
Chatbots are only as good (or bad) as the humans behind its creation and its users. A famous example of a chatbot gone wrong is Tay made by Microsoft. It was initially friendly up until its machine learning capabilities enabled it to learn racist and sexist phrases from Twitter users.
Chatbots are unable to distinguish between good or bad and right or wrong.
2. Limited understanding
HR chatbot responses are based on the data incorporated into their software. Therefore, they will only be able to draw responses from a limited database and in this case will only know answers related to HR. They would be unable to understand or have very limited understanding of queries relating topics outside of HR and the organisation.
3. Data privacy
Like with everything relating to personal data, privacy remains an issue for chatbots that store personal information and conversations had with employees.
Summary
Chatbots have clear limitations that should be addressed and considered when thinking about implementation.
However, these limitations have not stopped companies from incorporating these systems as strategic HR practices with the aim of achieving a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Potentially because the use of chatbots benefit a wide range of organisations from multinationals to SMEs and their capability to improve employee engagement which could further result in more strategic HR benefits such as talent retention and low-cost administration function and ultimately a higher ROI, in some ways outweigh its limitations.
