With Digital Transformation Are We in Danger of Over-automating HR?
April 15, 2021
At a time when people are starved for human interaction, technologies like automated phone trees, self-service HR and chat bots are risky for companies because they remove HR from its core mission — to support candidates and employees.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
Tech industry analysts and observers are saying the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of “digital transformation” in companies by five to seven years. That’s huge. And they are saying many of these changes — including those brought about by the shift to remote work — are here to stay. According to McKinsey in their recent report, How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping-point — and transformed business forever,
· “Respondents are three times likelier now than before the crisis to say that at least 80 percent of their customer interactions are digital in nature,” and
· “Of the 93 percent of businesses who experience an increase in remote working and/or collaboration, 54 percent feel that those changes will stick vs. 23 who feel they won’t.”
While much of the fuss has been focused on the positive aspects of digital transformation for things like e-commerce and customer service, particularly with AI-fueled chat bots that replace customer service agents, the rush to automate everything for expediency and profitability has now turned to HR.
For those of us who are just trying to keep our heads above water with reduced staff and dwindling resources, it’s easy to get excited about having technology take things off our plates — particularly when our phones are ringing off the hook with employees struggling to adapt and navigate their way through remote work.
But as we move toward more automation of the HR function it is critical that we remember one thing: the most important aspect of our work as human resources is human connection.
Think about the number of times you’ve interacted with a chat bot that has no clue what you’re asking about. You’re then forced to send an email (and wait for an asynchronous response), or it forces you to spend your valuable time looking things up yourself. It’s pretty annoying, isn’t it?
In HR, our customers are our organization’s employees and job candidates, and our job depends on our ability to facilitate positive candidate and employee experiences — the kind that help our company attract and keep the best talent. The chat bot/voicemail/email/self-service runaround is not how we deliver on that promise for three reasons:
1. Candidates and employees need real human connection — now more than ever before.
2. Communication is two-way, and actually being heard in a timely manner is crucial.
3. The needs of candidates and employees are far more complex than a retail product catalogue, and they require the level of compassion, understanding, agility and problem-solving expertise that only a human being can provide.
So back to being overwhelmed. What happens when the demand for HR is greater than the number of hours in your day or the people on your team?
In this accelerated digital era, we propose a radical return to a tried-and-true function, refined in the world of IT tech support and reinvented for human resources: live, on-demand HR helpdesk.
In my 20+ years in corporate HR, I’ve spent most of my career developing people practices. And as an HR consultant, I’ve seen too many companies struggle, even prior to 2020, trying to figure out how to mind the candidate and employee experience gap. We saw them respond with technology and then struggle with the high cost of implementing and training AI chatbots that only ended up delivering sub-par experiences. And we learned from employees — who soon became candidates for other companies — how damaging it can be to employee retention when people do not feel heard and appreciated.
Now the stakes are higher than ever. And that’s what led us to create Bright Experience, a live, on-demand HR helpdesk service staffed by real, experienced HR professionals. We invested in the text and voice chat technology used successfully for years in IT help desk, and we developed best practices that enable our Experience Associates to get up-to-speed in as little as 30 days on our clients’ internal processes and existing operations.
Today our Experience Associates are serving as live extensions of our clients’ HR teams, allowing them to scale by answering questions in real time, escalating issues and providing the human touch. And the cool thing is, outsourcing to real, trained HR pros whose only job is to provide real, human connection, is actually more cost-effective (for many reasons) than purchasing, implementing, training and supporting AI chat bot technology. (And I’m willing to bet your IT department already has too much on their plates too.)
Of course, we’d love to hear from you if your HR team could use some extra support. But the most important message we’re passionate about getting out into the world today, in this era of digital transformation, is that human connection matters. And nowhere is that more important than in HR.
Self-service portals, voicemail and email have their place. And if you have the in-house resources to provide live phone and chat support when people need it, GO FOR IT. There is simply no substitute for that human connection. But if your HR team is feeling stretched too thin and there’s pressure to automate, we invite you to start with the question: “Is this going to improve our candidate and employee experience?” And if not, now there is another way to go.