How AI can make life easier for HR teams: 4 critical matters to consider

ChatGPT’s release at the end of 2022 sent businesses scrambling to figure out how to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform their organizations for the better.

Now AI can make life easier for HR teams by improving our ability to attract quality candidates and pair open positions with candidates who align best with the role and the company’s culture.

But our responsibilities don’t end at the moment of a job offer. We also need to get better at making existing employees feel valued and respected. Employees who feel valued and respected are likely to be more loyal and productive contributors to the long-term success of our organizations.

AI can make life easier across functions

AI will make it easier for HR teams to attract good people and to assess them more effectively, and it can provide new ways to convince our employees to stay in their roles. Up to now, much of the focus on AI has been on its generative capacity to create content almost instantly; which will streamline our teams’ ability to execute critical tasks like drafting job descriptions and summarizing interview notes. But AI’s predictive abilities may be even more useful for HR departments.

By helping us leverage overlooked insights hiding in accumulated data — which usually goes to waste because human workers simply can’t process it fast enough — AI can help make us more responsive to issues that undermine satisfaction and, therefore, the performance and longevity of existing employees.

Reducing attrition

One of the greatest needs we face in HR is employee burnout and attrition. This is a problem in all industries and particularly so in service industries, where workers burn out quickly in high-pressure, customer-facing frontline positions. HR teams spend a lot of time and energy on backfilling vacated positions, and the process is almost always reactive because attrition usually happens without warning.

We may be able to gain a few insights through exit interviews with departing employees, but it’s hard to know how honest that feedback is, or how useful it might be in helping us prevent the next employee from quitting. And that process too is labor-intensive.

But AI can be used to aggregate data collected from employees (via surveys, reviews, etc.), identify common themes and reveal patterns that we can use as a benchmark against which to assess all employees. No manager has enough free time to peruse all the data and keep track of how dozens or hundreds of employees feel about their jobs. But this is a great use of AI’s strength, which is its ability to bring data-driven solutions to data-driven problems. 

Armed with these insights, HR teams can prioritize employees who may be struggling with problems that leave clues in the data — such as increasing absences and reduced productivity. HR Leaders can then proactively address the underlying problems and help prevent struggling employees from quitting. Best of all, with AI, this process is entirely automated and requires little to no intervention from HR teams.

By making it possible to identify early signs of employee burnout, AI can help minimize the scourge of attrition. That, in turn, will reduce pressure on our teams to constantly refill the candidate pipeline. And when the pressure to focus on quantity is reduced, our teams can dedicate more time to the human side of their work, which is to engage in personal evaluation of candidates and provide personal support for existing employees.

HR is all about people. The primary responsibility of any HR leader is to make sure employees feel valued, appreciated and respected. AI will free these teams to spend more time making sure employees have the support they need to succeed. This is especially important for today’s younger workers, who are more insistent that their work-life balance needs to be considered.

Create the support system

It’s critical to secure strong executive support for the use of AI. Each department head needs to be on board and aligned around a common approach, because employees generally turn to their immediate team leaders first when they have doubts or problems.

It’s also important to consistently reinforce the company’s strategy for using AI. If executives lay out a plan once and never mention it again, there’s a risk that the original message may get misinterpreted and altered over time. To combat this, my company, for example, begins our biweekly town hall meetings with a reiteration of our vision statement.

HR leaders need to remain proactively engaged with their own teams and with workers across the organization. Regular employee wellness surveys can help HR teams remain focused on the things that truly matter to people, and AI can help them draw the most useful insights from the data they collect. Anything these teams can do to improve employee experience will contribute to stronger company performance.

Bring AI into the workflow

Introducing AI into a company’s workflow is partly a technological issue and partly a cultural issue. As such, organizations need to handle it transparently. If employees don’t know what their organizations plan to do with AI, they may fear the worst, and their pessimism will spread like wildfire. Business leaders need to communicate to employees what they know about AI and its potential compatibility with their operations, what they don’t yet know, what they hope to achieve, and how they plan to go about implementing it.

Leaders should also seek input from their teams and explain what they expect employees to do to help integrate the technology into their work environments. If employees feel they have a stake in the situation and that their input is valued, they’ll be less threatened by, and more accepting of, the changes.

Striking the AI balance in HR

Effective employee team management has always relied on a blend of technology and human workers. Innovations in AI will continue to amplify efficiency and also improve human performance by enabling more proficient allocation of tasks between people and systems.

AI is already helping companies streamline recruiting and evaluation processes, and soon it will also help HR leaders solve the widespread problem of employee burnout and attrition, making it easier for HR leaders to build strong, resilient teams and keep them together.