BALANCING TOUCH WITH TECH: ENGAGING BOTH MINDS & HEARTS
A positive and healthy organization culture will need humans and technology to work together to create a healthy and positive culture at work. Neither can substitute the other.
Digital transformation and new age technologies are evolving and making current workplaces smarter. Wide range of Generative AI based tools, VR & AR based applications and automation techniques have started adding value to the process efficiency, workspace formats and content variety.
The impact of these emerging technologies on employee experience from a cultural lens is something to be assessed and watched out for. Any employee experience can be broadly mapped along two dimensions, emotional & rational dimensions.
Emotional dimension consists of softer cultural aspects and is based on affective norms. It defines how employees feel at the workplace, degree of belongingness and inclusion, feeling valued at work, deeper social connections with colleagues, inspiring leadership, degree of work-life balance and flexibility, sense of joy and pride etc.
Rational dimension consists of work nuances, satisfaction from career growth, rewards proposition, upskilling programmes, systems support, effectiveness of organization structure etc.
Technology, no doubt as it advances, will certainly strengthen the current ways of working, bringing smartness and standardization at work thus enabling employees achieve more. It will predominantly add value to the rational side while also serving some emotional aspects. Self-Determination motivational framework which lays down three important intrinsic motivators of people -- Competence, Autonomy and Relatedness -- is a good reference to look at the interplay of advance technologies on human motivation at work.
The integrated approach between human element and technology element will be key to creating a positive balanced culture at work.
Let us take an example of AI based chatbot, inFeedo (Amber) which is being used by multiple organizations to track employee engagement on a real time basis. While the tool can reach out to employees and capture their responses, it cannot distil psychological insights or reason out their issues. That requires follow-up connects by HR professionals or managers to have a detailed discussion and close the loop. A lot of employees express on inFeedo with an expectation that somebody will reach out to them to understand their problems better and provide an appropriate solution. So somewhere, humans need humans to connect. Hence, people connect, important to nurture Relatedness, will be an important area to watch out for.
Another example which was shared by one of the HR professionals was around content personalization. He said that managers of this organization used to share handwritten notes with their team members on important occasions. Recently, they started sharing chatbot generated content through digital media which, as per team members, does not look natural and individualized. So, the communication with employees will be another area to be watched out for. Some of the communication will need to be in-person and tailor-made to individua’s context. This is another example where sustaining Relatedness at work will be important.
Generative AI will enable and empower employees with powerful content which may be superior to what a human brain can conceptualize alone, but this may also have a bearing on the satisfaction emanating from individual’s creativity and intellectual stimulation, thus Competence as a motivating factor, more in terms of creating something new, will be important. In the long term, if this creates over dependency on technology, Autonomy might also get impacted.
A positive and healthy organization culture will need humans and technology to work together to create a healthy and positive culture at work. Neither can substitute the other. Let us see how they work in tandem to tap into both minds and hearts of employees at work.
The author, Ankur Poddar, is Head HR - India Consumer Business and Lead - Culture & HR Operations at Lenovo.
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