BlueScope

Brad McLean

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a significant part of our daily lives, and the workplace is no exception. As AI continues to evolve, it's important to understand how it can enhance the employee experience. This article outlines my personal views on some practical ways in which we can do this. 

Identifying how AI can help

The first step is to identify tasks that AI can perform now and in the future, allowing employees to engage in more meaningful work. For instance, AI can take on repetitive, manual tasks, freeing up employees to focus on more complex and rewarding tasks. 

Think of tasks that require the analysis of lots of data – where someone needs to identify patterns and trends to provide insight on problems and solutions. This could be anything from a machine operator needing to examine past failures to plan for future maintenance all the way to a financial analyst needing to examine changing stock levels to better manage inventory.

We then need to think about how jobs can be redesigned and workflows reengineered so that AI and humans can best work together.

Upskilling employees

To best leverage AI for the employee experience, we should also ensure that our workforce is upskilled in how to use AI, how to work with AI, and how to harness our unique human skills. 

This will be critical given current predictions on how AI will change the world of work. For example, the World Economic Forum predicts that the growth of AI will eliminate 85 million jobs and create 97 million new jobs by 2025. By 2030, McKinsey estimates that 375 million workers will have different jobs because of AI.

We should also reskill our people on how to work alongside AI. If current predictions are correct, this will be essential. Here, Accenture Research suggests that up to 40% of our time at work will be assisted by AI in the coming years. One of the reasons for this is that, although AI can perform certain tasks for us, humans will still be needed to provide direction and quality control.

As part of this, workers must learn how to effectively delegate tasks to AI and then understand how to best combine their uniquely human skills with AI. One example of a success story here is in medicine. According to Harvard research, AI algorithms can diagnose cancer scans with 92% accuracy, whereas humans can do so with 96% accuracy. However, when humans and AI come together, this boosts accuracy to 99%.

As well as reskilling employees to work with AI, we also need to invest more heavily in growing our people’s uniquely human skills. For example, critical thinking and curiosity. Not to mention social and emotional skills such as relationship building, connection and care. This increased need for uniquely human skills is already being recognized, with LinkedIn reporting that around 94% of business leaders consider soft skills, including interpersonal skills, to have never been more important. This is also reflected in McKinsey predictions, where social and emotional skills are estimated to take up an extra 24% of the workforce’s time as a result of AI by 2030.

Speaking of upskilling, we can’t forget to encourage our employees to use AI for self-directed learning. Amongst other things, AI can suggest relevant webinars and conferences for employees to attend based on their development needs. AI can also act as a teacher and coach – setting tailored learning plans and assessments and then guiding employees through any difficulties.

Using AI appropriately 

For AI to improve the employee experience, we also need to ensure that AI is used responsibly, ethically and safely in the workplace, and this should be backed up by policies and procedures for its use.

When introducing AI into our workforce, we need to be very conscious about considering its impact on employees, including on their privacy, and any unintended consequences that AI may produce.

We also need to ensure that AI does not inadvertently jeopardise employee health or well-being. We need to consider – especially in current times – the impact of AI on employee psychosocial safety. Given that AI can perform basic tasks to free up an employee’s time to work on more complex tasks, we need to think about the potential for higher levels of employee burnout. This could arise if employees end up spending most of their time on complicated, intense, and mentally draining tasks, which they may not be used to. Therefore, it will become even more important for us to consider implementing things like brain breaks and digital disconnection.

As we look ahead, let's not just see AI as a tool but as a partner. Let’s embrace this new era of AI and pave the way to improve the employee experience.