Recently I have spent a considerable amount of time talking to and working with HR teams to help them understand the impact of technology. It is interesting that in almost all cases, the initial focus of the conversation has revolved around what the technology can do to help them in their roles. By that, they want to know what tasks within HR they can offload to the tech, and there is nothing wrong with that per se, however, but it misses the far bigger picture.
Using tech to help write policies, streamline employment contracts and the associated tasks, providing bots or agents to field repetitive questions from employees, is all well and good and it will no doubt be very helpful. But HR have a more complex challenge to face up to… the question of how the technology impacts the organisation and what changes will be needed to deliver a future fit workforce.
- The widespread adoption AI requires different employee skills – these are communication, information/AI literacy, and critical thinking.
- Question to HR – Do you assess or develop your employees’ skills in these areas?
- Business that will thrive with AI will develop continual learning paths to help stay relevant in the face of advancing technologies.
- Question to HR – Is your training limited to once, twice a year? Or not at all? Or have you offloaded your responsibility to a generic learning platform with no set user goals?
- AI is a cultural shift in innovation and creativity. Users know where the problems are and have an idea of how to rectify them.
- Question to HR – Have you formulated a program, incentive and metrics to help establish this as a requirement?
- Emerging technologies like Gen AI and automation are designed for users to fix their own issues.
- Question to HR – Do you have the relevant guardrails and policies in place? Are users trusted to make their own changes to how things are done? Are employees empowered to solve issues?
- AI and automation can create great productivity gains, and users use this time very differently. Coffee breaks, extra work, or finishing up early.
- Question to HR – If time savings are gained, do you know what is done with that time? Do you review the team sizes and structures to see if they need right-sizing?
- AI will result in the business managing the output of the machines.
- Question to HR – Have you considered how a business user performance manages an AI agent or other solution? Have you thought about what needs to be changed in their role descriptions? Have you considered what your organisation chart will look like in six months’ time?
- AI has a direct impact on the mental health of users, either positively, or through anxiety, risk of job loss, making mistakes etc.
- Question to HR – What mechanisms do you have in place to support this?
This list is by no means exhaustive, but the world of employment is changing, and it requires HR and People teams to look up further than resolving their own issues.
What you have in place now is not going to be sufficient to support the business in two years’ time.
