Company culture is of utmost importance today, from recruiters attracting candidates, hiring managers reviewing candidates' suitability, to leaders motivating employees and driving high-performing teams.
Culture is key to improving employee engagement and increasing retention, both of which are essential to building a resilient and agile workforce. By one measure, 84% of the value of S&P 500 companies comes from the talent, skills, knowledge, work ethic, and health of their employees.
But to measure culture, human resources (HR) teams have long been limited to using basic data like employee headcount, salary, start date, and end date, struggling to identify who is engaged, who is coming up with innovative ideas, and who is building strong social bonds that foster productivity and inclusion.
Traditional methods of measuring culture through surveys or consultants are often difficult, costly, quickly become outdated, and may not reveal the culture that manifests itself in colleague interactions rather than hard numbers.
But as the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in HR grows, it’s becoming clear that many organizations have an untapped, data-rich resource: their employee recognition programs.
Act on insights
Data from peer-to-peer employee recognition programs captures previously undetectable moments of connection in messages of encouragement and gratitude. From these interactions, organizations can create a map of data points that track employee skills, cross-functional collaboration, and the key players that enable work and culture to thrive.
There is a huge gap between this data and the insights that could change HR’s approach to culture and talent management issues, such as skills gaps, ambitions, career mapping and identifying top talent.
But HR teams can use generative AI (GenAI)-powered cultural intelligence to create a perception map and overlay it on their employee recognition programs, allowing program managers to mine data using plain-text questions without needing data analytics expertise. Recognition-specific language models use data from an organization's recognition program to generate real-time insights that inform decisions that can maximize people and business outcomes.
Using AI tools like natural language processing (NLP) and GenAI-powered insights, HR teams can send questions and prompts to understand company culture and make decisions based on all employees, not just those who respond to pulse surveys or speak up in all-hands meetings. AI can also enable HR teams to comb through an organization's own database of employee recognition messages to identify key skills, top performers, and culture drivers in real time.
This is the unique approach that employee recognition provider Workhuman delivers as Human Intelligence™ – actionable business insights delivered through a combination of recognition data, the latest AI technology, and consulting practices. Human Intelligence empowers business leaders across organizations to drive both culture and overall business performance.
Awareness Reveals Opportunities
Layering AI technology onto existing peer-to-peer recognition programs can provide hidden insights essential to understanding where companies excel culturally, what employees value, and where meaningful changes can be made to enhance business outcomes.
Incorporating GenAI into your HR functions can help answer questions like:
• Which employees demonstrated good presentation skills? 63% of leaders say skills availability is their top concern for the next year. Leaders can't fix what they can't identify. That's where GenAI fills the gap, exploring skill sets and networks to more fully uncover how they work, and using NLP and machine learning to focus on skills to fill more positions. With a clearer picture of which skills are recognized by peers and leaders, organizations can replicate success and determine new projects and career paths.
• What is the relationship between awards and retention? Retention is a science. GenAI takes the guesswork out of retention, reveals hard numbers that help quantify the relationship between awards and retention, and provides customized best practices for evaluating employees.
• Are there employees available for new positions? Without the right talent insights, leaders have to guesswork when strategizing growth opportunities and supporting performance. But with the right cultural intelligence tools, you can uncover the values, actions, behaviors, and skills of different teams and identify collaboration patterns that help teams work well together — without the heavy lifting of managing a full HR analytics tool.
Gaining the right workforce insights requires the right data and the right tools to help organizations uncover unseen challenges, opportunities, and capabilities. Digging deep into employee assessment data can not only provide a glimpse into the employee experience, but also reveal untapped potential that creates growth for employees and your company.
Recognition Rewards
In a time when loneliness and isolation are rampant in the workplace, the value of giving employees a sense of belonging cannot be underestimated. Employees who strongly agree that recognition is an important part of their organization's culture are 3.7 times more likely to be engaged in their work and nearly half as likely to frequently burn out than those who do not. And new hires who receive an award within their first year are twice as likely to stay with their organization.
Engagement and retention are business imperatives. Given the impact on employee happiness and business goals, formalizing a way for employees to say “thank you” has appeal for organizations in every industry.
As skills gaps impede productivity and talent pipelines dwindle, recruiting and retaining talent is key to business success, and the AI-powered tools available to HR teams and other leaders are rapidly evolving. Teams that can adapt to the future of work will benefit from a thriving company culture, driving growth and creating a competitive advantage to beat competitors.
Click here for details Human Resource Analysis Ability Employee Recognition Platform Work Human It helps you uncover elusive pain points, identify opportunities for improvement, and solve real challenges.
