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Highlights
- The human resource landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by a dynamic business environment and unprecedented technological innovation.
- A proactive approach could hold the key to providing employees with hyper-personalized, intuitive experiences, akin to the consumer experience of today.
- A ‘digital friend’ to guide through the entire employee life cycle by making data-driven decisions based on observations, HR data, analysis, and contextual best practices will ensure such an experience.
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Focus on employee experience (EX)
The human resource (HR) landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by digital innovations, changing workplace dynamics, and evolving business models.
Technological advancements have given rise to alternative work and business models bringing in a myriad of changes in the way work gets done. This has necessitated the need for a digitally skilled workforce while intensifying talent shortages, forcing organizations to look at creative strategies to transform, attract, and retain talent. Technology has also brought forth its own set of challenges with respect to employee well-being and performance. The emergence of GenZ workforces has led to a profound shift in employee preferences and their expectations from employers and workplaces—they expect a higher level of self-service options and tech-enabled seamless and intuitive experiences.
Excelling in offering the right experience holds the key to long-term success and market differentiation. Organizations are looking to craft people-centric and hyper-personalized employee experiences to win this race for talent and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This involves placing employees at the center of decision-making, making work processes less complex and more enjoyable, and boosting engagement, well-being, productivity, and resilience.
Cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning can usher in a new era of personalized and superior experiences. HR organizations are increasingly focusing on adopting these technologies to succeed in their role, helping businesses and employees flourish in these rapidly changing times.
From a reactive to a proactive approach:
While organizations have started to pay more attention to bolstering employee experience, the approach has largely been reactive.
Employees still have to reach out through various channels such as emails, chatbots, portals to get information, responses to their queries, and complete their tasks.
With the advent of advanced technologies, there is scope to significantly elevate the employee experience by connecting it to ‘moments that matter’ by breaking down silos and thinking of experience more strategically by adopting a ‘proactive’ approach. Under this model, HR services are delivered proactively to the users as part of their regular workflows. It involves anticipating potential needs or issues beforehand and providing suggestions proactively instead of waiting for employees to reach out through HR channels.
A proactive approach to employee needs could hold the key to providing employees with hyper-personalized, intuitive experiences, akin to todays’ consumer experience. We can draw parlance from a retail fashion brand, where AI-based personal stylists proactively help customers with their outfits. The personal stylist chooses the best outfits matching the preferences and styles best suited for the client, helping to explore and discover their style, and build a wardrobe that fits their taste, lifestyle, and budget, thus significantly elevating customer experience.
This calls for a significant shift not only in the selling method but also the mindset—from reactive, ie, waiting for a client to do the shopping, to a proactive one where client gets outfits chosen by a stylist and has it delivered to them, aligned to their personal preferences.
‘Digital friends’ for a proactive approach
This transition from a reactive to a proactive approach for providing employee experience is possible by integrating the concept of ‘digital friends” into the HR processes.
Consider ‘digital friend’ as an assemblage of technologies that guides an employee through the entire employee life cycle making data-driven decisions based on observations and employee data analysis clubbed with contextual best practices. It stays with an employee right from the time they apply for a job in the organization to the time they leave, guiding them in the right direction and helping them through-out.
A ‘digital friend’ follows an employee in their day-to-day work, proactively supporting them in ‘all moments that matter’. It can proactively share news updates, interesting learning paths, performance reports, and even communicate with the employee to keep him/her engaged, also promoting wellbeing. It can anticipate an employee’s questions and needs based on personalized insights. It can anticipate an employee’s questions and needs based on personalized insights.
It can also probe the employee at regular intervals for updates and actions. All of this can be enabled with the leverage of advanced technologies like AI, GenAI, and advanced analytics which interface with the HR systems and connects employee data related to learning, development, and performance for creating customized employee insights and actions.
To elaborate this further with an example - in a reactive HR approach, employees have to reach out to dedicated helpdesks to get their queries addressed. This may lead to delayed responses and employee frustration and is also prone to human error. Under a proactive HR delivery model, applications powered by AI and GenAI can act as ‘digital friends’ to pre-empt employee queries based on their profile and past data, and provide the information without them having to manually reach out to HR channels. Learning management systems powered by AI can also analyze employee profiles, interests, and habits to proactively suggest courses and learning paths to help them progress in their career within the organization.
Figure 1
How a digital friend will transform HR operations
Figure 1
Uncovering the invisible with a ‘digital friend’ in a wearable device
If we momentarily crystal gaze into the future, a ‘digital friend’ can also be a wearable device that tracks even minute details about you like heartbeat, nutrition, and activity levels.
This ‘digital friend’ concept not only takes into consideration the aspects of a human being that are visible like performance, tangible behaviors, and ideas, but also underlying aspects that are not visible to us–such as competence, emotions, habits, beliefs, and needs. This is more in the realm of ‘the art of possible’ keeping aside data privacy and compliance concerns to depict a futuristic view.
This bridges the silos between the visible and invisible–it connects the network of data, actions, activities, and emotions by pulling in data from all available sources, captures the flow of actions in real-time and analyzes them to give back contextual information, responses, advice, and even warnings. This proactive approach can anticipate and suggest actions aligned to the nuanced needs of an employee.
This can for example, suggest to an employee (Prashant, for example), to consume a healthy diet by monitoring the calories taken during the day, suggest frequent interactions to encourage the well-being and health of Prashant. Another example is that the ‘digital friend’ can ask Prashant what’s on his mind by detecting through the camera that he looks concerned and is frowning his eyebrows. Prashant’s ‘digital friend’ proactively interacts with him by asking him if he’s okay, can give advice or refer him to get support. To keep Prashant engaged the ‘digital friend’ regularly checks on his mental well-being, linking it to performance data and pulse surveys. Based on Prashant’s needs, the ‘digital friend’ increases or decreases interactions while taking the employee life cycle and fixed HR cadences into account.
Figure 2
The level of a digital friend’s interaction during an employee’s life cycle
Figure 2
Key tenets of a proactive HR service delivery
Switching from a reactive to a proactive approach requires not only a fundamental shift in the HR operating model but also in the mindset.
Here are some key tenets of the new target operating model:
- Human-centric: A human-centric approach focusses on understanding the individual needs of employees and candidates and providing them hyper-personalized solutions based on their unique needs. Human-centered design is fundamental to this, as it allows the involvement of human perspective in all steps of problem-solving. By personalizing recruitment and development strategies, organizations can create more meaningful connections with their workforce. Technologies like GenAI can analyze employee feedback and sentiment in real-time, allowing HR to proactively address concerns and improve the workplace environment. They can also provide personalized support pre-emptively, understanding employee needs and preferences, offering recommendations for career development, wellness programs, and learning opportunities.
- A digital core: The proactive approach is enabled by technologies like automation, AI, GenAI, machine learning, and cloud. This brings in AI-powered applications to pre-emptively provide employees with answers to frequent queries and guide them through various HR processes, enhancing overall experience. If we deep dive into the ‘art of the possible’, taking the HR service delivery to a proactive model would require a wearable device for employees to support them in all moments that matter, including performance output and underlying emotions and wellbeing.
- Intelligent: The new approach will require a strong AI-powered predictive analytics capability that connects all data to give meaningful advice and insights. Predictive analytics involves using historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify patterns to predict future outcomes. Using predictive insights, HR can then proactively engage with employees for say personalized retention strategies, career development opportunities, and mentorship programs.
- Integrated and interconnected view of data: While solutions powered by technologies like AI, GenAI and predictive analytics can be a potential game-changer for delivery of proactive HR experiences, their effective implementation is largely predicated on the quality of data. An integrated, interconnected view of enterprise data across multiple systems and avenues can provide strategic insights into causal links between seemingly unrelated data elements with a 360-degree view for accurate decision-making.
Figure 3
Key tenets of a proactive HR operating model
Figure 3
Key considerations
While a proactive approach to EX leveraging technologies like AI and Gen AI holds the key to future success, organizations need to be conscious about their ethical usage.
The European Union (EU) has passed the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which is the world's first concrete initiative for regulating AI. Similarly, organizations, too, must have a robust data governance framework that includes the consent of the employee to use data for any AI and advanced analytics purpose.
This aspect of proactive service delivery is likely to become a hot topic of discussion in the future as technology advances further and sees wider adoption. For example, in case of futuristic scenarios like the one we have mentioned previously, where wearable devices are used as ‘digital friends’, enterprises need to be mindful about following all necessary regulations and obtaining requisite employee permissions while undertaking their operating model transformation journey.
Also, data privacy regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, for example, need to be taken into account while designing a proactive HR service delivery model.
