The mental health and wellbeing of employee’s has risen up the corporate agenda as a shift to home working and isolation has been imposed following the pandemic. Exactly what and how organisations should support their employees is a moving target for HR teams.
We recently ran a survey of UK employees asking about their thoughts on working from home. The results present an interesting dilemma – a massive 91% of those surveyed wanted to continue working from home or remotely some or all of the time. However, 69% said their wellbeing and mental health had been moderately to severely impacted. Add to that 25% citing low motivation and 31% feeling a lack of connectivity with their colleagues as a result of working from home and the challenge becomes all too clear.
So, if we agree that the working environment has changed for good, then organisations need to look to technology as an enabler to help with the challenges faced by organisations and employees alike. Providing employees with the on-demand support and information they need, whilst also freeing up HR Teams to focus on spending time with employees and understanding their world.
With the rapid evolution of Conversational AI Assistants organisations now have a new mechanism with which to engage with and provide support to their employees at scale. The Assistant’s use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) means it is able to understand and identify employee sentiment within conversations and can be used to flag concerns, prompting human intervention. For example, this could be as simple as repeated negativity identified in employee responses, which triggers a notification sent to the appropriate team leader with a recommendation to check in. Or more complex analysis of interactions and conversation trends which help HR Teams to identify potential mental health and stress related issues before they arise.
I firmly believe that Conversational AI Assistants have a significant role to play in how HR teams will support and look after the wellbeing of employees beyond the pandemic. AI used in a predictive capacity can help HR focus their wellbeing programmes at a much greater scale than previously possible. Technology will enable HR teams to increase employee access and the scope of mental health programs available, ensuring happier and more engaged people wherever they may be working.
To understand how we are already helping organisations get ahead of the curve and to understand how our HR Conversational AI assistants are helping HR Teams to better support their employees, get in touch today.