I have a growing sense that HR professionals are feeling overwhelmed with AI. Leadership continues to encourage employees to use Generative AI (GenAI) to streamline processes, but every day, we see updates from big tech offering new features that fundamentally change the landscape.
While 93% of Fortune 500 CHROs are adopting the new technology, most workers use GenAI tools, like ChatGPT or Copilot, like a search engine. Never fully unlocking its more impactful capabilities.
HR teams primarily use GenAI for fundamental processes with 64% during talent acquisition to write job descriptions, and 43% applying it to learning and development to create curriculum.
However, emerging AI tools are becoming more and more specialized to support efforts like analyzing employee metrics, predicting outcomes and proposing effective measures. All of which can increase employee retention and create a more connected company culture.
Embracing next level AI starts with bringing the right questions and prompts. And who better than HR teams, who know their organizations’ nuances best, to craft the questions that result in the best data?
We’re all learning when it comes to AI
If you feel like you’re not getting the most effective answers from AI, you're not alone. Shortly after ChatGPT was released, I was having a conversation with my dad about the evolution of technology in business. After he asked several great questions , I decided to have him try it out.
My dad is a long-time farm kid, so his prompt looked something like, "what was the average yield for corn in Iowa in 2021?"
Dad didn't agree fully with ChatGPT’s response, which looked a little low to him. He proceeded to hit the delete key and simply added the county name of where he grew up.
That small change, yet impactful detail, yielded the results to his expert satisfaction. Proof, that, in his own words, "it's always been about asking the right questions.”
Your expertise and knowledge before AI is an incredible asset and, ultimately, what these models continue to source their data from.
By working collaboratively with internal and external partners, HR teams can deploy their knowledge and make a bigger impact on their organization’s success.
Powering predictive AI with employee engagement metrics
Popular Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot pull from large, open-source data around the web. The results can be general but are only as good as the prompt written by the user.
With the rise of Agentic AI and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), organizations need to move beyond using AI as a search engine. Agentic AI builds on GenAI, so it doesn't need complete data to offer results.
Paired with your employee engagement metrics, sentiment surveys or HR systems, AI can help your team glean unique takeaways. Results can help your team preempt potential issues and discover new opportunities in your employee experience.
How AI predicts employee attrition
Employee attrition often indicates the health of your organization's work culture. When employees feel fulfilled or recognized at work, they're more likely to stay. Higher employee retention results in cost savings, better productivity and increased customer satisfaction.
Instead of reacting to employee turnover too late, predictive HR analytics can help organizations identify the key factors to prevent churn.
1. How teams review churn without AI
Conducting exit interviews, reviewing sentiment surveys or hosting focus groups.
2. How teams review churn with AI
Analyzing employee metrics for other indicators. Reviewing years in current role, years with their current manager and years since last training, much like IBM’s AI-based attrition model.
Using AI, researchers can determine more accurate indicators influencing retention. With these takeaways, AI can then support building programs specifically tailored to optimizing the negative predictors and maintaining the positive ones.
Related: 3 metrics to track employee engagement
How AI magnifies workplace purpose and connection
Team bonds and work purpose keep employees engaged long term. However, 20% U.S. employees feel lonely at work. That lack of connection can impact employee performance, overall morale and employer brand perception.
Connection happens on a human-level. And while technology can’t replace that interaction, employee engagement platforms, like ITA Group’s Cooleaf platform, can enable large, diverse organizations to carve out employee programs.
Our platform can help managers engage employees no matter where they are, creating connections through recognition and online activities. These resources help teams gather relevant data such as participation or peer recognitions issued or received. HR teams can pair these metrics with AI tools to help create effective programming for an individuals’ strengths and needs.
LLMs can process and analyze data from text, images or audio, along with user interactions. The broad data helps business leaders set-up opportunities for impactful connection.
1. Onboarding
HR teams and admins can use AI to match up mentors to new hires, creating a more fulfilling onboarding that meets the new employees' needs or goals
2. Learning and development
Managers can track department engagement, recommend changes in training or manager coaching to support an individual's preferred learning style.
3. Employee experience
Current and predictive employee sentiment scores via pulse surveys simply alert leadership to necessary adjustments for employee experience initiatives. With AI, managers have support to better analyze the results and take action.
4. Employee recognition
AI can notify managers of wins beyond business results, like when a team member is recognized for a company core value, prompting the managers to issue their own follow-up recognition.
Related: Personalizing your recognition program
How AI keeps a pulse on employee sentiment
Several factors can influence employee sentiment, from leadership support to growth opportunities. Pulse surveys are a great way to routinely check in on morale.
Exit interviews or focus groups offer nuanced data, which approaches like natural language processing (NLP) can summarize. NLP can examine context, "positive" or "negative" keywords, colloquialisms and tone to help HR teams categorize sentiment, especially with large, global-spanning teams.
NLP can help teams understand the nuances in different departments or locations, so HR teams can optimize surveys for better analysis.
AI best practices for employee engagement
I hope my examples can inspire you and your team to further investigate ways to incorporate AI into your culture planning. Here are best practices for getting started.
Centralize and consolidate your data
AI-infused analytics questions will be much more fruitful when all of your data is consolidated in a centralized location and model. Strategic consolidation efforts often precede this.
Think engagement benchmarks, annual employee surveys, customer or employee satisfaction, or feedback forms. The "closer" these data domains live together, the more likely (and more quickly) you’ll find a consistent trend or theme to help your team find answers and strategize.
Venture but validate
Be intentional when it comes to using these new tools to ensure the quality and validity of your results. Yes, venture into new spaces and methods you never thought you could before, but don’t trick yourself into thinking the AI will always output the correct answer. Consciously evaluate results with internal partners and subject matter experts.
Your knowledge and experience with your organization and in your role will work with AI to get the most accurate and useful results.
Embracing AI in employee experience
AI's rapid advancement and adoption give HR leaders new tools to shape employee engagement strategies for their team’s needs. HR teams have a wealth of experience and understanding they bring to AI.
Remember how my dad was able to get the best response from ChatGPT because of his deep knowledge of Iowa agriculture? Understanding the nuances of a company’s culture can help us craft the right prompts and questions to get the results critical to our organization’s success.
We can turn around retention, improve work performance and create a more consistent customer experience.
Shift your approach with AI by finding and pursuing the partners committed to helping you scale your knowledge and understanding of your organization.
Understand the cost savings and benefits of investing in company culture with our employee engagement calculator.