The Future Is Now: AI Algorithms in Corporate Culture

Frequent searches for applicants for quickly empty vacancies, registration, retraining and full integration of new employees increase the workload of personnel, form a critical mass of inevitable errors, negatively affect labor results and imperceptibly, although noticeably, burden the budget.

Oleg Demchenko, Development Director and Managing Partner of the digital integrator QSOFT, talks about which digital technologies in HR can help reduce costs and improve productivity.

The success of a business directly depends on the ability to work with people. Digital tools help automate the search for the right specialists, hiring and adaptation. A healthy working atmosphere, in turn, has a positive effect on the growth of labor productivity and business profitability.

Adaptation processes are usually decomposed into three components, each of which has its own digital functionality.

Pre-boarding begins when the employer is ready to make a job offer to the job seeker. At this stage, the area of ​​responsibility is outlined, the work schedule and conditions, career expectations, the amount of remuneration, benefits and advantages are discussed. In parallel, administrative issues are resolved, documents are drawn up, the workplace in the physical space of the office is prepared. Regular communications at this time play the role of anti-stress: they reduce anxiety, increase involvement and give rise to joyful anticipation on both sides.

The function of such interaction – preliminary informal acquaintance with the company, team, culture – can be partially entrusted to a chatbot or corporate neural network operating 24/7. They will show a presentation, recommend online platforms for independent study of related topics before starting work, offer to subscribe to thematic or corporate groups in social networks, familiarize with the current version of the job description, answer questions, take into account the individual interests and needs of the future team member and send a welcome letter on the first day of work. And they will congratulate you on your birthday before everyone else, and even privately, if you are a chronic introvert. Consider that you definitely have one friend in the new place.

Introductory adaptation (onboarding) starts from the first working day and takes a couple of weeks or even months. This is the stage of corporate socialization, face-to-face acquaintance, establishing connections with colleagues, immersion in goals, work processes and nuances of corporate culture.

And here, chatbots, virtual assistants and AI can automate many aspects of adaptation: provide access to corporate resources, calendar, task trackers, user instructions in a concise, digestible form, an archive disk where the collective memory of completed projects is collected. They will invite you to an online meeting or virtual coffee break, warn you about corporate events and present opportunities for development. The smart system itself will take into account the coincidence of interests and select a mentor for the first time.

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Ongoing adaptation (post-boarding) conditionally lasts about a year, during which critical relapses occur approximately every three to four months. At this stage, employee productivity monitoring and feedback play a major role. Chatbots with built-in artificial intelligence algorithms can also be entrusted with formulating questions and finding out the newcomer's opinion on the adaptation experience. Well-established feedback will help fine-tune work processes and learn lessons for the future.

"Unifying thousands of employees into a single digital platform is an important task in the field of human resource management. Currently, the indispensable internal services of large corporations include a number of tools: a corporate portal, an intuitive mobile application, as well as special HR services with gamification elements, facilitating onboarding and much more.

As a result, all of the above allows us to significantly reduce the time spent on routine tasks, improve communication between employees and management, and increase the level of user comfort and satisfaction,” noted Oleg Demchenko, Development Director and Managing Partner of the digital integrator QSOFT.

It can be argued that investments in adaptation improve key performance indicators of a business. The list of advantages will include the following arguments and figures:

Low turnover: Once employees have gone through the full onboarding cycle, they are more likely to stay with the company. This will provide significant savings on recruiting and retraining costs. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the cost of replacing a full-time employee can be up to 200% of their annual salary.

Active involvement: Only a specialist who creates results and understands his/her value can be involved. Such a person experiences satisfaction from work, which serves as a source of strong internal motivation. Gallup claims that teams with a high level of involvement demonstrate labor productivity 17% higher than average and provide a profitability increase of 21%.

The corporate portal allows you to introduce elements of gamification into work processes – maintain your own Q&A column or blog page, or take part in a promotion or competition – thus ensuring a variety of forms of active participation of employees in the life of the company and increasing their involvement.

Strong Employer Reputation: A positive onboarding experience helps build a strong, positive employer reputation. Satisfied employees become the company’s strongest advocates, indirectly working to grow the brand.

High Customer Satisfaction: Motivated employees are more likely to provide high-quality customer service. Research by Temkin Group shows that companies with active, engaged teams have 12% more satisfied customers than competitors that do not pay attention to employee motivation.

Innovation Culture: A team that embraces change because it loves the new, the challenging, the fun, and the non-routine, cultivates innovation from within.

Research shows that pre-boarding reduces the likelihood of new employees leaving after their probationary period by 20%, and strong onboarding can help retain new employees by 50% in their first year.

So, employee adaptation goes beyond filling vacancies, it is a continuous process of accepting and mastering changes: new people, new programs, new competencies and related functions. As paradoxical as it may sound, it is digital adaptation tools that ensure human-centeredness without heavy psychology.

According to experts in the field of recruiting and human capital development, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to optimize HR processes will become widespread in the coming years. We need to prepare for this state of affairs.

Today, AI algorithms can automate the production of intranet content, offering relevant information based on user behavior, optimizing the layout to make it intuitive for users to interact with. AI can provide intelligent support through chatbots, analyze user interactions to identify potential problems, provide centralized storage of corporate knowledge, and detect and proactively respond to security threats to protect sensitive data.

Companies will have to work hard to attract and retain the best talent, developing less hierarchical business models and paying attention to each employee. So in a broader context, introducing digital tools into HR practices is not a luxury, but a way to adapt to change. The question really is: will you do it sooner or later than your competitors?