HR departments are the gateway between employees, management teams, and boards. They play a fundamental role in communicating an organisation’s strategy to employees and providing feedback to management teams on experiences to guide future planning. HR teams, therefore, must walk the difficult tight rope of balancing both the strategic priorities of management and the everyday operational and wellbeing needs of their staff. This blog seeks to explore how technology can help HR professionals effectively balance these demands.
What are Management's Needs?
Typically, the primary objective of management boards is to deliver success through profitability to their organisations. In recent times, this has become trickier for some organisations, with changes to consumer buying habits and many people ‘tightening their belts’ In the wake of the pandemic.
However, regardless of the growth and success of an organisation’s industry, many business leaders are seeking ways to deliver efficiencies to their processes to deliver time and cost savings within their internal processes.
What are Employee's Needs?
On the other hand, the needs of employees are more complex. COIVD-19 has meant that many employees are now working from home some or all the time – with this set to be the norm for businesses moving forward. This change in working practices has resulted in increasing demand for support, but also highlighted the difficulties employees face in accessing information to complete tasks – often needing to navigate multiple systems and sources.
Employees, therefore, want an easier way to access the information and resources they need.
This requirement is also being driven by the Increasingly sophisticated and wide variety of communication channels available to them outside of work environments, including instant messenger, chatbots, etc. – providing them with instant access to information and communications in their preferred channels.
Balancing both the needs of management boards and employees would therefore seem to be a complicated challenge for HR leaders. However, technology could offer HR Leaders a solution to balancing the needs of both parties.
Technology as a Solution
Automation technologies are widely considered by business leaders as a way in which to deliver efficiencies to processes, automating manually repetitive tasks such as data entry to generate time and cost savings. Automation deployments have typically been focused on back-end processes such as invoice processing.
The growing sophistication of technology applications such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing within Conversational AI Assistants platforms, the benefits of automation could be extended to more human facing processes. Providing a platform for not only supporting an organisations efficiency goals but also the needs of employees.
What are Conversational AI Assistants?
Conversational AI is the application of a set of technologies, such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning within an automated voice and chat messaging Assistant.
Conversational AI Assistants enable users to make requests, perform actions and interact with a variety of complex systems in a natural way, delivering faster and more meaningful responses leading to improved satisfaction and efficiencies.
Conversational AI enables organisations to achieve even greater transformational benefits and efficiencies than the average chatbot through its application of Intelligent Automation technologies and the ability to orchestrate a far wider variety of tasks.
Due to this use of technology applications, Conversational AI Assistants can be deployed across a far broader variety of use cases, including not just customer service, but also Sales, Supply Chain, HR, Finance, and IT.
What are the Benefits for HR and Employees?
For HR teams and employees, this means that employees can ask questions, access all the information they need, and perform tasks within one easy to use conversational interface which can be deployed via their preferred channel (mobile, web, Instant messenger, or voice), 24/7.
Conversational Assistants can support employees at every stage of their lifecycle from recruitment and onboarding to training and day-to-day support. Integrating with existing HR, LMS, and Payroll systems and automatically ingesting documents such as handbooks to deliver meaningful and accurate responses to employees in seconds – improving satisfaction and engagement.
Through deploying a Conversational Assistant to support employees, HR teams can generate significant time savings by reducing the volume of repetitive emails and calls received by employees, enabling them to focus on more strategic areas of importance to the board and delivering value.
Additionally, Conversational Assistants also deliver time savings directly to the employee, by removing the need to navigate complex systems and documents to find Information and relying on emails to support their role. Instant access to support and information not only improves the employee experience and reflects the more digitally savvy workforce, but also helps to Increase productivity through removing delays and misinformation within tasks.
In Conclusion
Ultimately employees and management boards are seeking the same outcome – to make life easier and more efficient. Through deploying a technology solution, such as Conversational AI Assistants, which combine the benefits of automation with more personalised and on-demand support, HR teams can balance the needs of both parties and ensure the future success of their organisations.
If you would like to find out more about how Conversational AI Assistants can help transform your HR processes and employee experiences, get in touch today.