3 ways AI is changing employee experience

Employee experience is deeply human, but that doesn’t mean artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t a valuable tool for improving your team’s day-to-day routines.

AI has dramatically altered how we approach modern work, so it’s only fitting to use it to improve our employees' working experience.

Here’s our guide to getting started.

Employee experience (EX) is the sum of the people, policies, and processes an employee interacts with daily while working for your company or team. 

While EX can be subjective and personal, companies can (and should) strive to foster a working environment that creates an overall positive experience.

There are countless ways to improve EX, but you must be open to exploring new solutions to pain points. 

Whether you choose to use AI to improve your employee training personalization or streamline your hiring process, there are plenty of ways your company can capitalize on the benefits of AI resources. This can create a more desirable working environment and experience for your team, from supporting creative efforts to offering improved employee wellness programs.

Suppose your company wants to improve EX. In that case, there are AI resources you can use to rapidly review and streamline human resources processes, ensure improved compliance and efficiency, and allow HR leads to make more informed decisions to support your team better.

Using the power of AI, here are three ways your team can offer a better EX:

Streamlining recruitment processes

Hiring a new employee is a complex, multi-faceted process—especially during rapid growth. Offering a pleasant and respectful recruitment experience to potential candidates while also finding and placing high-value candidates requires a ton of time, organizational skills, and resources. 

With the support of AI tools, this process can be simplified, helping to alleviate the administrative workload for your HR team while ensuring that effective hiring practices are in place.

Some examples of ways your team can integrate AI tools into your recruitment process include

• Candidate screening—Depending on the number of applicants your team receives for a new job opening, filtering through every submission is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Using AI screening tools, your team can set up parameters to filter submissions based on skillset, previous experience, and any other factors you deem appropriate. Used ethically and strategically, these systems help recruit the best possible candidates.

• Talent assessment & interview support—Once you have selected candidates to interview, AI tools can help you build more compelling interviews to determine who is best fit to join your team. Capable of writing relevant interview questions, creating comprehensive interview transcripts, and identifying behavioral and personality traits from candidates’ answers, AI tools can be a super helpful way to ensure that you hire the right person for the role.

Improving human resources operations

HR plays a significant role in maintaining the day-to-day function of a business— and with the help of AI tools, these tasks can be streamlined and improved to free up time and resources to allocate for new projects and initiatives.

As a great way to create more efficient ways to get HR work done, here are a few examples of ways your team can implement AI into your existing human resources operations:

• Automating administrative tasks—No matter the size of your company, there is always a seemingly unending list of administrative tasks that need completion for day-to-day operations to run smoothly. But, as these tasks build up, they can become time-consuming and cumbersome, leading to burnout and delays. Using AI tools to automate repetitive tasks like setting up weekly check-in meetings, managing employee benefits, and creating tickets for HR concerns, your team can reduce stress and repetitive tasks to improve productivity and efficiency.

• Compliance monitoring—Staying on top of legal requirements and regulations is a vital role of HR experts (but it is labor-intensive, especially if you work for a global organization). With the help of specialized AI tools, your team can more accurately tackle compliance issues by automating compliance checks, monitoring online presence, and staying on top of changing regulations in real-time.

Encouraging employee development & engagement

HR professionals face the demanding task of ensuring employee happiness and engagement. Involving regular upkeep with training opportunities and consistent employee well-being check-ins, these processes can be supported with specialized AI tools to make the process less labor-intensive..

Build a more engaging, supportive work environment by using AI tools designed to help your team with the following HR tasks:

• Identifying training gaps—AI tools can help identify and target training gaps and target them with specialized learning sessions by using employees’ skill sets and career aspirations as data points. As a great way to show continued investment in employee well-being and career development, these resources help reduce time searching for valuable training opportunities by highlighting critical areas of interest and demand.

• Supporting improved engagement—Collecting data about your current level of employee engagement is challenging (especially if you have a large, remote team). By integrating AI tools capable of collecting survey responses and analyzing feedback trends, your company can identify opportunities and changes conducive to a more engaged and satisfied team.

Despite its many benefits, there are plenty of areas where AI falls short of improving employee experience (and, in some cases, may actually worsen it).

As your team explores ways that AI tools can be integrated into cultivating a positive employee experience, leaders must be mindful of common AI pitfalls: 

• AI contains bias—AI is not an all-knowing resource. Instead, it is a computer system trained on provided data sets, which will contain inherent human bias. This can be a particular issue during recruitment when AI tools are used for the first pass of resume assessment. According to Alexander Alonso, chief knowledge officer at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), there are two possible outlooks on AI-related screening bias: "The first is that it is going to be less biased. But knowing full well that the algorithm that's being used to make selection decisions will eventually learn and continue to learn, then the issue that will arise is eventually there will be biases based upon the decisions that you validate as an organization."

• AI tools require frequent adjustments and monitoring—AI cannot read the room and adjust as new trends arise, meaning that the tools require continuous monitoring by a person familiar with the process to be the most effective. Depending on the project’s scope, this task can quickly become quite large, and your employees may prefer to limit the amount of AI used to certain areas of work, preventing additional work and supervision from being added to their plate.

• AI is just a machine, and there are just some things it can’t do—AI is not a live, sentient being, and it cannot understand human nuance and interactions at a high level. While it can be a helpful tool to improve our existing systems, it cannot do everything for us—meaning that human involvement will always be the most important aspect of creating a positive EX.

Employee experience is significant for your workplace culture and productivity.

AI is here to stay and, if used strategically, can also positively impact your team.

No AI resource is perfect—nor is it an answer to poor leadership or a toxic workplace culture— but it can be a valuable tool to help you streamline and optimize your existing practices. 

The need for human-to-human interaction and consideration is still at the heart of every business. As a result, human direction is at the core of navigating the complexities and subtleties of creating an effective and inclusive working environment.

AI is an accelerator, but human touch is the gas. Both things must work synergistically to create a sustainable company that offers a positive employee experience.

At the end of the day, improving employee experience is an inherently human process, but that doesn't mean that we can't leverage technology to help us along the way.