AI in Employee Engagement: 7 Applications to Try Yourself

15% of employees are actively disengaged and $8.9 trillion is lost in global GDP due to low engagement.

You don't want this to be the case for your company. Yet, from managing repetitive administrative tasks to ensuring personalized growth opportunities, leaders are stretched thin.

At Deel, our global experience shows that leveraging AI can empower organizations to tackle engagement barriers effectively. Whether you’re an HR manager or a team leader, AI-powered solutions provide actionable insights and save precious time.

So we're taking you through seven popular applications of AI in the employee engagement space so you can learn how to use AI coaches, bots, and other processes.

What are the potential benefits of incorporating AI in employee engagement strategies?

Artificial intelligence is already used in HR for various use cases, including recruiting, onboarding, training, performance assessment, and more. One of the core use cases, though, remains employee engagement.

Not only can using AI improve employee satisfaction and productivity, but it also helps you make sure that you meet your people's requirements (remote and onsite). You can use AI-based HR tools to: 

• Automate day-to-day processes such as feedback sharing or facilitating team member connections
• Automatic event scheduling reduces the burden on your HR team. This way, they can focus on the tasks that require human involvement, like one-on-one meetings or live coaching 
• Streamline conflict resolution by providing objective third-party insights and improving learning and development initiatives. Specifically, these tools use existing employee data to make better employee training recommendations and connect specific employees to growth opportunities (like new roles or departments)
• Gain deeper insights into employee preferences and proactively address any discontent across the organization

Ultimately, AI can foster organizational alignment, help you retain employees, and improve future performance. That's simply because you'll have more time to dedicate to every person on your team. 

Applications of AI in employee engagement

To start using AI solutions to improve employee engagement levels for good, we're talking you through seven common applications.

How to use them: Each artificial intelligence application and solution caters to a different need or challenge you're dealing with or might bump into in the future. 

Most AI-powered tools won't be able to help you with all scenarios. So take the time to prioritize your immediate needs and gradually test these applications with your employees. 

Chatbots and virtual assistants for employee support

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• Answering frequently asked questions
• Providing on-demand training and guidance
• Automating repetitive and administrative tasks
• Speeding up communication between employees and HR

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• When an issue requires a personal touch or human empathy
• When a topic is highly complex and requires a high level of expertise or knowledge that cannot be provided by AI
• When an issue requires people to be physically present (like technical support)
• If you didn't have the time or resources to train the bot properly

Sentiment analysis for monitoring employee satisfaction 

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• Collecting data from employee feedback surveys, social media, and other sources
• Helping managers find areas where employees are satisfied or dissatisfied

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• If you're unable to gather consent before collecting and analyzing employee feedback
• If biased results are likely to occur

Use case spotlight: AI-based sentiment analysis tools offer data-driven insights into employee sentiment and behaviors. Managers can use this data to examine their team's preferences, motivations, and performance drivers.

Gamification to ultimately boost engagement

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• To create and maintain a rewards system.
• To incentivize employees to complete tasks (e.g., by sending notifications when peers complete their tasks for a dose of healthy competition)
• To gather new (sometimes unique) data on employee behavior and preferences

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• If gamification practices do not align with your company's culture or values
• If the company or department is facing significant financial challenges

Use case spotlight: Use Deel Engage's AI assistant to create quizzes for your training courses.

‍Personalized learning and development programs

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• Creating individualized programs for each employee
• Gathering data on your employees' skills and interests
• Finding and recommending the best materials or activities to match the skills and interests of each employee
• Keeping track of the employee development progress

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• When the content of a learning program is sensitive or confidential and requires human discretion and judgment
• If the learning and development program is meant to build interpersonal skills or emotional intelligence (since human interaction is more effective in these cases)

️AI-driven communication and collaboration tools 

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• To improve communication efficiency and collaboration
• To automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks
• To analyze data and gain insights into employee engagement
• To provide customized feedback to your employees faster

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• If you want to build a stronger sense of community among your employees, relying solely on AI-driven tools may not be effective
• If you can't provide transparency in the communication process, your employees might not trust your AI tools

Use case spotlight: Set up communication training before all else and let AI record and keep track of your team's performance. An impactful communication training program will help your employees learn how to communicate effectively through methods like active listening or empathetic understanding.

Building an engaging onboarding experience 

How to use artificial intelligence: 

• If you need highly-personalized content in your onboarding checklist
• When real-time feedback is a must
• When there are large amounts of data to handle, curate, and summarize
• If you need to automate repetitive tasks (e.g., sending new hires resources, setting up accounts) 
• When automatically connecting employees to onboarding buddies
• For running a self-service center for new hire issues

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• If you need human connection at every single step of the employee onboarding process
• If you haven't had the time to test the AI-generated onboarding flow
• If your onboarding process involves highly technical or complex information

Recognition and rewards systems 

Implementing AI in your recognition and rewards system will enable to: 

• Accurately track employee performance
• Send regular rewards or recognition cues to your employees
• Interpret performance data and offer recommendations for improvement (especially relevant When you've got large teams where manually keeping up with employee performance is impossible)

When to avoid using artificial intelligence:

• If your team is generally hesitant to rely on artificial intelligence for decisions like these because they believe it's not transparent or inclusive
• If you don't have a person in charge of monitoring this system to ensure fairness

Use case spotlight: AI recommendations for growth based on past feedback results.

For example, suppose their last mid-year review highlighted a gap in presentation skills. In that case, they can get an automatic recommendation to sign up for a public speaking course.

Factors you should consider before investing in an AI engagement solution

Before you choose an AI engagement solution, take the time to test them all while keeping an eye on these core seven factors:

1. The return on investment (ROI): Will the AI tool you've picked save you money and time? How scalable is it? For instance, will it keep up with your needs as your business grows, or your team's size doubles?
2. Ease of use: Your team comes first. So you'll want to ensure the platform and its integrations are easy to get accustomed to and use daily (if needed)
3. Analytics: Insights give you the capacity to measure success and identify areas of improvement. Some of the best AI and machine learning solutions offer real-time analytics that uses past trends and data to predict future business outcomes
4. Key stakeholders: Think about everyone involved in using this app. Consider who will own it, who is in charge of managing day-to-day operations using the tool, and if any stakeholders should be informed, onboarded, and invested in this new addition to your tech stack
5. Ethical implications and bias: Make sure to take into account any ethical or legal consequences of using these AI tools
6. Building internal trust: This new tool is one more addition to the various solutions that are already taking over employees' days. Hence, your team should understand the power of this app and how they can use it without wasting time or being distracted
7. Maintenance and support: Simply put, someone will have to manage all this. Prepare accordingly and ensure the solution you pick has a support team always available to help you fix issues or find new use cases

Engage your workforce with Deel Engage

AI solutions are here to help you keep your people engaged and enable HR professionals. Whether we're talking about helping them gain new skills or just staying motivated, you can turn to a tool like Deel Engage to do it all.

Our suite of tools lets you engage and grow your organization's talent by:

• Getting people insights to help you engage meaningfully, spot and facilitate better development opportunities, and create stronger remote relationships
• Running training, one-on-ones, onboarding, and training faster with the AI assistant

Schedule a free demo to see how you can use it to keep your employees engaged over the long haul, not just for a week.