Last week I spent a few days away from
home attending the Annual Conference of the Chartered Institute of Personnel
and Development (CIPD) which takes place every year in Manchester England.
As regular readers of this blog will
know, we believe that there is an inextricable link between good employee
relations and good customer service. So therefore, many of the issues discussed
at the Conference relating to HR are also very relevant to customer
satisfaction and customer service generally.
There were numerous seminars, keynote
speakers, and educational activities taking place at the Conference, but just
two of them that especially caught my attention were related to artificial
intelligence and employee well-being. Both of these have a direct impact not
just on company staff, but also on customers as well, and I have briefly summarised
some of the interesting points below.
Health and Wellbeing
Dr Judith
Grant, associate director of health and wellbeing at Mace Group, shared her
experiences of joining the construction firm and developing a strategic
approach to their employees’ wellbeing. She said that the company had
previously focused on safety, but had never approached health and wellbeing in
a strategic way.
In her view: “traditional
occupational health is the focus of a construction company, and many viewed
health and wellbeing as offering our employees bicycles and smoothies - not
really strategic in any way. The culture was such that we whispered about
health, murmured about wellbeing and actually talked about safety.”
Grant said that she worked with senior
leaders to create a collective definition of wellbeing for Mace Group and align
that definition with the overall business strategy. They also used a wellbeing
survey to get a measure of the overall health of the workforce to target
intervention towards identified issues such as smoking and diet.
According to Grant: “the sites who reported
higher wellbeing on the surveys ended up reporting higher levels of
productivity, and we were able to demonstrate a clear link between wellbeing
and intention to leave.”
Artificial Intelligence
Cheryl Allan, Atos's director of HR
transformation warned delegates to be careful with tech terminology. The terms
'AI', 'automation' and 'robots' are used interchangeably and people don't always
understand the difference. In her view: "different tech terms are bandied
around under artificial intelligence, but they all have different implications
for the world of work."
Meanwhile, the Institute of
Apprenticeships Chief Officer Robert Nitsch said that organisations need to use
terms that resonate with people, or they'll be rejected. He advocated the use
of more user-friendly words like 'digital' when describing new and emerging
technologies, rather than 'AI' or 'automation' and he added that we're in
danger of having an "allergic reaction" to words if they're not used
properly.
Megan Marie Butler, HR AI analyst at
CognitionX, suggested that humans are going to need to "redevelop their
skills every few years" to keep up with changing technology, and she
asserted that “digital literacy, emotional intelligence and a growth mind-set”
are going to be the three most important skills needed in the future.