In his decades of experience in customer-facing sales and executive roles, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd has learned a thing or two about understanding people. Operational and people skills are a critical part of managing Oracle, one of the world’s largest private employers, and addressing the constant need for new talent to sustain its growth. When Hurd joined the company eight years ago, Oracle had roughly 105,000 employees. Today, its global workforce comprises 137,000 people. It’s no surprise that keeping this many people happy, focused, and productive isn’t easy, and it would be unrealistic for Hurd to think he can treat every employee the same. Hurd addressed this personnel challenge by directing Oracle to deploy people- and system-driven approaches to enable Oracle’s HR department to develop personalized employee interactions and ultimately improve job satisfaction.

Achieve Personalized Employee Interactions by Listening to Your People

Hurd explained that personalized employee interactions begin with listening to your employees. At HCM World 2018, he said that Oracle once used “huge, monolithic surveys” that forced every employee to fill out the same standard questionnaire. It didn’t work as well as it could have. These days, Oracle uses a “much more nimble listening system,” which turns the small teams that are ultimately responsible for getting things done at the ground level into diverse small-scale focus groups. Hearing from employees in smaller groups helps develop personalize employee interactions.

He also noted that simply shifting the feedback focus to the team level and asking questions that were relevant to that team’s experience has helped Oracle boost its employee survey participation rate from roughly 62 percent to more than 90 percent. With Oracle’s new approach, team members are more likely to actively and productively engage with an employee feedback system that considers their team-focused, day-to-day experiences as opposed to one that sequesters them at their computers to select canned responses to predetermined questions.

Another key area that Hurd emphasized a focus on was the company’s employee onboarding experience, which Oracle streamlined through a comprehensive onboarding process. This improved process pushed favorable views of Oracle’s onboarding practices from roughly 30 percent of employees up to 80 percent of employees.

Achieve Personalized Employee Interactions by Leveraging AI

Effective data analytics capabilities are extremely important to large enterprises, and that’s true whether they’re analyzing financial data or employee performance. The analytics capabilities within Oracle HCM Cloud—augmented with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—can make a big difference for HR departments that are trying to align employee talents with company strategy and develop personalized employee interactions. AI can even help HR departments predict which employees will excel at tasks that they might not have handled before, which can decrease the significant time and financial costs that are required to hire experienced specialists.

“It’s not necessarily the people with the best profile who are going to succeed at Oracle. Our ability to predict, based on the information we have, why you came up with that information can help design discrete training curriculums for specific individuals.”

—Mark Hurd at HCM World 2017

By using AI-driven performance analytics, Hurd explained that Oracle can now design discrete skills and training for each person that can improve their score and their likelihood of success. No matter how experienced or talented an HR department is, manually personalizing training programs for more than 100,000 employees would be a formidable challenge. However, AI-driven analytics can help quickly, efficiently, and accurately accomplish this task by customizing each employee’s experience.

Another AI-powered tool that is helping Oracle’s HR team provide individualized attention is the chatbot that is integrated into Oracle HCM Cloud. This chatbot can address basic informational queries and allow HR professionals to focus on more complex tasks. To keep things personal, it will also forward an employee to the relevant HR representative whenever it cannot handle a request. Oracle uses chatbots in similar ways to provide applicants with information during the recruitment process. It helps to have the right support when you’re responsible for nearly 140,000 employees and expect to hire thousands more each year.

Ironically, some of the best tools for developing personalized employee interactions and engagement on the enterprise scale are operated by machines. For many years, companies that grew to a massive size by utilizing automation technologies did so at the expense of employee engagement. Artificial intelligence cannot replace a skilled and empathetic HR professional, but it can create an environment in which employees feel acknowledged, accommodated, and appreciated. Hurd has often said that AI will even create many new jobs. It might also help the people in those new jobs feel more connected to their employers, whether those employers field a workforce of 100 or 100,000.

For more information on Oracle CEO Mark Hurd’s thoughts on improving job satisfaction by developing personalized employee interactions by listening to your employees and leveraging artificial intelligence, check out the Oracle blog attached below.