Picture this: After months of discussion in executive meetings, your organization has decided to integrate generative AI into the workflow. When the announcement comes, employees make a beeline to HR and flood your inbox with questions about what it means for their jobs.
If you had to sum up the general acceleration of AI with a movie title, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” might fit the bill. But titles like “Alien” or “Unknown” might be better descriptors for how some employees perceive AI in the workplace.
“It’s so broad—it’s everywhere—but it’s also really in its infancy,” says Steven Boyce, Director of Business Systems, IT, and Security at The Predictive Index. “The journey of AI adoption has just begun, placing us on the cusp of discovering its boundless potential and transformative impact.”
There is certainly fear that AI will contribute to job displacement, Boyce says. Other concerns include the ethical use of the technology, the amount of environmental resources it consumes and whether the chosen AI tool is right for the organization.
As an HR professional, you play a leading role in addressing some of these fears and managing your organization’s AI adoption in a way that preserves its people-driven culture. By becoming a strategic partner to senior leaders during this implementation phase, you can ensure a people strategy is prioritized alongside the business strategy of AI rollout.
Leading with empathy
According to a recent McKinsey report, 92% of companies plan to increase their investments in AI over the next three years. Managing the workplace changes that come with implementing those investments largely falls to HR leaders already juggling other priorities, including onboarding new employees, boosting engagement and stemming turnover. Yet your leadership is indispensable in ensuring that the people concerns in the organization are heard and addressed.
“We need to make sure that we’re adapting to the needs of the business, the individual and the team,” Boyce says. “One of the biggest things we can do is just make sure that we’re leading with empathy.”
Empathy fosters a culture of psychological safety in which employees feel assured that their expressed concerns will be understood and addressed, not held against them. It builds trust in that you and other organizational leaders value their feedback and contributions to the team.
The capacity for empathetic leadership will grow with deeper insights into the perspectives of workers and your fellow HR professionals about AI. In a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 61% of HR professionals expressed optimism about the potential for their organizations to use AI effectively.
Yet that same study also found that about 70% of respondents currently using AI within the HR department have faced challenges, such as data privacy issues, employee resistance and lack of trust, as well as insufficient resources to monitor and correct problems.
The results of an informal poll conducted during a Deloitte webinar, with about 3,900 participating workers and leaders, mainly based in the U.S., found three top concerns about the potential hidden impacts of AI:
- blurring distinctions between the work of humans and technology (54%)
- privacy breaches and AI surveillance (50%)
- less collaboration with people (49%)
Driving Communication, policy and training
An effective HR strategy for addressing these and other concerns about AI in the workplace must include communicating with employees about what’s happening, developing policies around AI use, and providing the necessary training for adapting to the changes.
Here are some essential practices in each of those categories:
Communication
- Be transparent. Acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers, but be clear about what you do know. Use companywide meetings, team meetings and internal department communications to ensure a constant flow of information about the AI adoption and application process.
- Facilitate employee feedback. Provide platforms for workers to share continuous feedback without judgment. Consider software solutions for conducting employee experience surveys and behavioral assessments, as well as enhancing team communication.
Policy
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Set guardrails. Guide your organization’s leaders in determining the requirements and restrictions for AI usage, including within the HR department. Implement protocols for information security and privacy protection.
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Allow for adaptability. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution right now, and we need to be very focused on each individual team and what their success looks like,” Boyce says.
Training
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Fill in the knowledge gaps. In the McKinsey survey, 94% of employees reported some familiarity with gen AI tools, but nearly half said they wanted more formal training.
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Use technology. Tools like cognitive and behavioral assessment software may be helpful in designing your AI training program.
Giving workers a voice
You are your organization’s expert in understanding, motivating and supporting its most valuable resource: its people. And no AI rollout can succeed without their buy-in. That’s why your leadership is so valuable to ensuring that their voices are heard and their concerns are addressed.
“Being vocal and being the person who can raise those challenges to the organization helps everybody have a clear path when it comes to AI,” Boyce says.
Download The Predictive Index’s ebook, “Work Redefined: HR’s playbook for the AI era,” to explore how HR can help guide AI use in the workplace.