Falon Fatemi, CEO and founder of Node, the first AI as a Service platform, wrote an article in Forbes about how to increase employee engagement with the help of artificial intelligence.

It’s a harsh reality, but the majority of employees are toiling away at their job – unengaged and lacking motivation. This is often due to the absence of a strong sense of purpose. Research from Gallup showed that the majority (51 percent) of U.S. workers do not feel engaged at work. Gallup dubbed the state of affairs as an “employee engagement crisis.”

Business units with high employee engagement often realize a 21 percent improvement in profitability. Additionally, employee engagement also has a significant impact on employee retention. Highly engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave their companies.

Given these numbers, it’s no surprise that employee engagement is one of the biggest challenges that is confronting businesses. To tackle this problem, many forward-thinking companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for help.

AI has the power to drive employee engagement through:

• Real-time feedback
• Learning and development
• Team composition

Increase Employee Engagement Through Real-Time Feedback

Far too often, organizations and their HR departments rely heavily on “pulse” engagement surveys that are often conducted on an annual or quarterly basis to assess employee engagement. These surveys are often lengthy and mundane. They neither stimulate not excite employees, so they diminish the odds of motivating thoughtful responses.

Additionally, these surveys rely on scaled responses like “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “neutral,” “agree,” or strongly agree” ratings. These tend to be difficult to interpret and have limited use in terms of unearthing deep insights. Given the fact that HR professionals spend weeks interpreting the data and delivering it to employees, results quickly become lagging indicators that fail to reveal the current state of affairs.

Luckily, AI can move waters in terms of gauging employee engagement in real-time. AI is able to leverage natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis to unearth employee morale and engagement. It has the power to look at what types of language phrases employees use in text-based conversations (like emails) or what emojis they use in communication/chat platforms. This information can be revealing. This real-time snapshot of information can help companies assess and increase employee engagement. This data empowers HR professionals to take swift action and surface the type of personalized recommendations that could never be taken away from traditional annual employee engagement surveys.

Increase Employee Engagement Through Learning and Development

Organizations that provide employees with compelling and impactful learning and development opportunities have a leg up on their peers. Millennials, in particular, have an especially strong desire for learning and development opportunities. A staggering 87 percent of Millennials state that professional development or career growth opportunities are very important. In general, 40 percent of employees who do not receive sufficient job training ultimately leave their positions within the first year.

Artificial intelligence has unprecedented potential to offer targeted and personalized recommendations in terms of learning and development. It is able to pinpoint which employees have the potential, based on hard and soft skills and motivational factors, to advance to specific leadership positions. Then, AI can suggest optimal learning and development opportunities that can help increase employees engagement and help employees advance and reach new heights.

Increase Employee Engagement Through Team Composition

Research shows that time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more in the past two decades. Strong performance in any work setting is dependent on collaboration. Far too often, teams are formed without much thought given to skillsets, motivational factors, and previous performance. Workers have different work styles, and this needs to be accounted for when forming teams. Effective collaboration pays enormous dividends. In fact, research shows that companies that promote collaborative working are five times as likely to be high performing.

AI can be a powerful force in assessing employee engagement and motivation. It can leverage results to help determine optimal team composition. Already, AI can determine what specific factors motivate specific employees and inform managers as to how to best motivate teams. Identifying this information can help increase employee engagement and motivation in your organization.

Conclusion

Employee engagement is top-of-mind for all recruiters, and companies must feel compelled to double down on their focus on AI as it relates to increasing employee engagement. However, AI adoption and embracement should not be taken lightly. Especially in the case of employee engagement, tools must be evaluated with a critical eye towards privacy concerns, biases, and effectiveness. Most importantly, employees should be part of the conversation in terms of whether these tools should be part of their workplace.

To learn more about how to increase employee engagement with artificial intelligence, check out the Forbes article and additional Quest resources attached below.