Hi 👋 I'm Phil Haussler, Chief Product Officer at Quantum Workplace.
Artificial intelligence has been dominating headlines for the past year. And for human resource pros, AI is driving both headway and headaches.
On one hand, chronically understaffed HR teams are using AI to automate their workflows and scale their impact. But just talk to anyone who has posted a job recently and you’ll likely hear how many candidates are using ChatGPT (poorly) to apply.
Humans and human relationships are messy. So working in HR tends to rewire your brain toward the way things can (and often do) go wrong. It’s natural that the teams responsible for monitoring and driving employee success are watching (and using) AI with a mixture of excitement and skepticism.
AI is a lever for scaling HR's impact
Generative AI is just a tool. It’s a new, fancy tool and the instruction manual is changing every day. But there’s no doubt it’s a power tool. With power comes responsibility. So, like you, we’re approaching this new tool with optimism, while wielding it with care.
We've spent countless hours studying user behavior and interviewing customers on the frontlines of employee success. Here's what we've learned:
HR knows how important employee success is to the business—and they need to find ways to scale it.
They want to share the responsibility of engagement, performance, and retention more widely, save valuable time for their managers and employees, and provide actionable insights. All so they can retain their top talent.
And if AI can help, they want to leverage it. With care.
The problems with employee success
Quantum Workplace's employee success platform helps amplify engagement, boost performance, improve culture, and increase retention.
Engaged employees perform better. High performers that are positioned to do their best work become highly engaged. When you get engagement and performance right, it’s the recipe for employee retention.
Simple concepts. But without the right tools, none of it is easy.
Feedback is complex and time-consuming. Foraging for insight requires time, energy, and brainpower. Activating managers sometimes feels out of reach. Not to mention—your entire workforce feels strapped for time. Your HR team is spread thin, managers are overtaxed, and top talent is at risk of burnout when there’s misalignment, lack of clarity, and a relentless pace of work.
Staying aligned, engaged, and growing can be difficult, time-consuming work. It gets exponentially harder with each step up the chain.
AI can help.
AI inside Quantum Workplace
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the buzz about generative AI went into overdrive.
Many on our product team had been using generative AI in our work and personal lives—and thinking about opportunities to solve long-standing problems in our customers' lives—even before it was widely available to the public. We saw the potential immediately.
For the past 18 months, our product development teams have been evaluating opportunities to use AI. As it turns out, many of these opportunities have risen to the top as the biggest opportunities we can chase to create impact for you and your teams.
We’ve already rolled out a half dozen AI-assisted features. And we’re actively testing a dozen more. I’m proud of the way our teams have balanced speed and intention as we’ve brought our first AI-assisted features to market.
We would never deploy AI inside our product just because it's new and fancy. We've never chased any technology for technology's sake.
We're rooting our roadmap in the biggest challenges we hear from HR leaders and the teams they serve. Just like we've done for the past 20 years on our mission of making work better every day.
Here are the AI-powered features we’ve deployed to our customers, who are already seeing positive impacts:
I’ve talked with HR teams who have spent weeks (even months! 🤯) digging for insights in their engagement survey comments. We’ve spent years working to help leaders find the storyline in comments more quickly, with less brute force.
Smart Summary is the latest feature in our Narrative Insights suite. This summarization engine helps HR and leaders quickly find the storyline in any set of survey comments. Together with our other natural language processing models (for sentiment and thematic classification), Smart Summary helps you reduce the time spent foraging through survey comments.
We don’t want to replace reading survey comments so much as reduce the time spent re-reading comments again and again as you cut and slice your organization’s data. Smart Summary is a place where multiple users can collaborate to develop a shared truth about the crux of survey comments.
“Smart Summary cut the time we spent analyzing comments in half. In minutes, we can break the information into bite-size chunks that are easy to share and ready to act upon."
~ CHRO with 13,000 employees
Feedback is hard… but incredibly important! When done poorly, feedback can backfire. So the stakes are high. It can take time to write feedback well and make sure it lands. And time is something managers and employees just don’t have.
Feedback Assistant to the rescue. Feedback Assistant helps users give better and faster feedback. Jot down a rough list of bullet points and Feedback Assistant can transform them into high-quality feedback.
Almost 10 years into building a goals feature that helps managers and employees get and stay aligned, we’ve seen our share of crappy goals.
One reason so many goals suck is that both employees and their managers suffer from “blank page syndrome.” When faced with a blank page, people freeze. Goal Generator helps users do some divergent thinking so they can converge on more meaningful goals, faster. It helps fill the blank page and spark ideas unique to you and your context.
Goal Generator acts like a patient mentor that prompts you with a few simple questions, and based on your responses (and context like your title, function, team size, and soon your company strategy), suggests potential objectives. Once you’ve made the goal your own, Goal Generator suggests possible key results to measure success against your objective. We keep a human-in-the-loop here and let users make sure their objective and key results fit their unique setting and context before finalizing.
“Survey fatigue” isn’t always caused by too many surveys. What’s actually tiresome for employees is when they don’t see their feedback lead to any action. And effective action can’t just be done by you and your leadership team.
But your managers and teams are busy. And they’re not engagement experts. According to our research, only 35% of employees say they are actively involved in action planning, but those who do are more than 3x more likely to be highly engaged.
That’s why we built AI-assisted Action Planning.
AI-powered Discussion Starters help managers facilitate effective conversations around engagement with their teams, generating questions about high-impact drivers of engagement based on research-backed survey results and an existing library of expert-informed questions.
AI-powered Action Ideas help teams avoid the blank page syndrome and develop more effective post-survey action plans by suggesting action items that are grounded in team context, discussion notes, and past expert-informed suggestions.
Our approach to employee-centric AI
Now you’ve seen what we’ve already shipped. We have at least a dozen more AI-powered features already in active research and development. And lots more we're not actively chasing (yet).
The future of Quantum Workplace will likely be assisted by AI. I highlight the word assisted here because we're AI-assisted, not AI-led.
When it comes to AI, we want to operate from first-principles. Here are the first-principles that are guiding our work with AI.
We prioritize people over technology. We view AI as a tool that can empower humans to do their best work. We believe AI can enhance humanity. Our AI will work with you. It will make people more effective and more efficient, without needing lots of new training or assistance. It will be simple, painless, and effective.
What will you do with the time and potential that gets unlocked when AI is doing your most boring, time-consuming work?
Picture that new human potential...
...imagine what you might do with it...
...now multiply that by your team members...
...now factor that across your entire organization.
We’re committed to making sure our data acquisition, usage, and governance protect you and your data. All of our AI-powered workflows ensure your data never leaves our cloud-hosting environment, which guarantees it cannot be used as training data. Everything we build aligns with privacy, security, and data protection regulations.
We’re dead serious about maintaining trust by upholding the confidentiality promises we make to you and your employees. We regularly conduct privacy and security assessments and monitor our AI-assisted workflows for impact (both positive and adverse).
We focus on problems, not technology for technology's sake. We're committed to understanding our users, their problems, and the progress they’re trying to make in their lives. We’ll use AI to solve problems within existing workflows to make our users more efficient AND more effective. And we’ll use AI to enable entirely new approaches to solving long-standing problems.
We don't yet know what solutions AI will enable. But no matter what, we’ll remain in love with the problem space and utilize AI as a set of tools in our toolkit for solving problems.
There may be times when some level of tension arises between these priorities. We may find some opportunity to solve a deep-rooted problem in a way that feels slightly at odds with another principle.
Consider a dumb example: imagine an employee selection tool that can access ALL your past mistakes. Even if it could flawlessly choose the "best" candidate, how might one design a solution that embraces the people-first concept of forgiveness, that humans deserve second chances?
If and when tensions arise, we'll work with our customers and a diverse set of stakeholders to mitigate the tension and find solutions that align with our principles. And when we run into areas where we cannot find alignment, we'll prioritize people, then privacy, then problem-solving.
The future is AI-assisted
There is a lot of hand-wringing about the future of AI. The narrative is often framed as humans versus machines, with AI displacing not just human work, but also human workers—and with them, human values and human interactions.
We envision a future that looks less like substitution. Where AI doesn’t replace humans, nor human values, emotion, and interaction. We believe AI can be about augmentation, with AI enhancing human knowledge, capability, and experience.
We’re committed to applying AI intentionally across our employee success solutions to drive better feedback, more alignment, deeper understanding, and more action. We believe the real power of AI comes from humans, assisted by machines.
As we look to the future of employee success, we envision your people and teams doing their best work because they’re empowered by AI.
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Published April 2, 2024 | Written By Phil Haussler
