AI Will Affect How You Manage Employees: 6 Ways to Handle New Issues

Love or hate it, AI is here to stay in life and work. So AI will affect how we manage people.

That impacts HR and front-line managers in new ways — not necessarily negative ways. Just new ways.

It’ll be nearly impossible to escape: More than 90% of companies predict they’ll use some sort of AI-related solutions in their organization by 2028, according to an Amazon Web Services and Access Partnerships study.

Nearly every employee will touch — or be affected by — artificial intelligence.

AI will affect the masses

“As AI enters our world, those who are proactive and embrace it fully will get a head start. Like every new adoption — desktop computers to laptops, wired phones to mobile devices, from an all-office to a hybrid approach — people adapt by learning,” says Linda Lee, Chief People and Culture Officer at Velocity Global. “People leaders must create an environment for their workforce to safely and compliantly do just that while encouraging them to leverage these new skills.”

The good news: More than 85% of employees expect to use AI in the next few years to be more creative, automate repetitive tasks and increase their learning.

Now it’s time to manage the people who will work in the age of AI.

Here’s help from change management and AI experts — six tools for the new issues.

1. Manage fear, excitement

AI prompts fear and excitement: Some employees worry AI will take over their jobs, lives — the world! Others can’t wait to explore it and find more ways to integrate it into their jobs, lives — the world!

So the first thing managers will need to do is manage the change.

“The process of change firsts introduces disruption, then the opportunity to engage and discover how the change will work and eventually harvest planned and, even unplanned benefits, from the change,” says Curtis Bateman, VP of International Direct Offices at FranklinCovey and co-author Change: How to Turn Uncertainty Into Opportunity “The adoption of AI will certainly follow this predictable pattern.”

First move: Give employees opportunities to share their concerns and/or excitement. Then you can help move them from uncertainty to progress.

Bateman suggests addressing these questions (among others employees will have):

• What does this mean for me? 
• What does it mean for how I work? 
• What impact will it have on my role, my team, my organization?
• What types of activities will our team move from and to? 
• What results are we moving from and to? 
• What will be the outcomes we agree on?, and
• When will we expect them?

2. Get them excited to play

Think of the emerging AI — under the umbrella of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude — as a big playground that needs to be explored and experimented with before people find their favorite thrill.

“It’s like this weird cavern that’s opened up, full of weird treasures,” says Robert Bray, an Associate Professor of Operations at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in his research. 

So give employees permission, time and ideas to play around with the tools your company feels are safe and helpful. If you haven’t started “playing,” you’ll likely want to so you can give employees some tips on prompts to use, roadblocks to avoid and ideas to get more creative.

From there, set up a AI-chat channel on your internal communications app (such as Slack or Teams) where people can share their new finds and top tips. Or meet regularly to share them in person.

3. Rethink work

When a team — or enough individuals on a team — get proficient with AI, or you find ways AI can take over tasks within your group, you’ll want to reevaluate resources. We are NOT saying it’s time to let people go. What we’re saying is that some projects and processes that required a certain amount of resources probably don’t need as much anymore.

For instance, if four marketers usually brainstormed on content, and you throw AI into the idea-generating mix, you likely don’t need as many people on that task anymore. Perhaps, the time of two people is better spent picking up new projects.

Bottom line: If and when managers find effective ways to use AI, they want to follow up with implementing better ways to allocate available resources.

4. Align incentives

People get motivated by fear and excitement — intrinsic prompts to help them work with AI. But you might have to manage extrinsic motivators carefully, too.

AI has the potential to make people more productive. When productivity goes up, expectations tend to rise, too. The problem is, AI can potentially raise those to unrealistic or unfair levels.

So as productive AI use increases, Bray suggests leaders look at how they can align incentives with the new way of work. For instance, you might want to offer cash incentives to people who discover and share new ways to tackle problems or increase efficiency. It’ll likely prompt more ingenuity and prevent people from keeping their productivity hacks secret.

Bray also advises against doing this too soon: AI is ever changing, and managers and employees will discover what makes them more efficient for one month — but then it might turn into a time-suck the next month.

5. Create your vision

With AI and all things new, it’s often important to revisit what’s old. In this case, that’s creating a vision and ways to communicate and implement it.

That’s “extremely important in sharing the story of why the change is being implemented and helping paint a picture of the possibilities,” says Bateman. “As leaders envision how, why and where the use of AI will help their organizations they should communicate this vision. Talk about it. Share examples. Invite dialog and stick with it.”

Whether your team is two or 200, you want review the vision regularly and talk about it to keep employees engaged in the process, changes, goals and rewards.

6. Create connections

The rise of AI threatens human connection. For instance, Bray found in his research that people preferred working alone — that is, alone with ChatGPT — over collaborating with others once they mastered inquiries and could quickly verify what they found.

So, as people increasingly use AI, you’ll want to make an effort to manage workplace connections and engagement.

“This is an ideal time to develop talent, increase capability and prepare for what may be next,” says Bateman. “Learning can be done solo but in my experience it is often more impactful when done with others where we can challenge ideas and discover new possibilities together.”

Try intentional collaboration. Bring employees together to generate and share work ideas and give them time before or after that to connect on personal levels too.