AI in Employee Engagement: 7 Applications to Try Yourself

18% of employees are actively disengaged.

You don't want this to be the case for your company. 

But, at the same time, you might simply not have the time to dedicate to daily repetitive tasks and face-to-face conversations.

So we're taking you through 7 popular applications of AI in the employee engagement space so you can learn how to use AI coaches, bots, and other processes. 

In the end, you'll be able to increase employee engagement and:

• Help employees find their strengths and weaknesses.
• Set better long-term goals and suggest learning resources to your team members.
• Offer real-time feedback and consultation to every single person.
• Create progress reports in seconds.
• Keep your team up-to-date with their goals and assessments.
• And more ways to ensure that intimidating tasks like creating career frameworks are no longer daunting!

📈 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. 

Tip: Taking the time to listen to your employees, gather feedback, and sit down face-to-face to discuss everything helps you build better relationships and provide a better work experience.

🤖 7 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. 

Tip: Use an engagement action plan to document your priorities and track critical to-dos. 

👩‍🎓 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).

💡Use case spotlight: A tool like Zavvy will coach your employees enabling their development. Zavvy's AI helps your people create actionable development plans at light speed.

💬 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: Jive Insights Advanced offers data-driven insights into employee sentiment and behaviors. Managers 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.

‍Simon Bacher, Co-Founder at Ling, a gamified language learning app, notes that artificial intelligence can be used to gamify employee experiences:

"Managers can create AI-driven engagement programs, including virtual games and contests for remote companies. Gamified AI apps allow employees to create volunteer initiatives, train, and vote on work and engagement opportunities. For instance, employees can personalize their learning experience (such as language learning) and participate in community give-back programs to boost their morale, productivity, and self-fulfillment.

With badges, leaderboards, scorecards, and challenges, employees become more eager and motivated to perform at their best and participate in company-initiated engagement activities. Including AI gamification in your company programs promotes interactive and fun communication and collaboration for more meaningful and unforgettable employee experiences!" 

💡Use case spotlight: Use Zavvy's AI to create quizzes for your training courses.

Team Zavvy is not only developing, but also using all of these exciting new features.

🗣️ 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 management software.

💡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.

💡 Use case spotlight: Roadsurfer uses Zavvy to provide a customized employee onboarding experience. Zavvy's AI features allow them to automate onboarding and increase content creation, achieving significant time and work reductions per hire.

Sometimes, improving your employee onboarding experience can be as simple as sending regular reminders for people to participate in a walk-and-talk program.

🙌 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: Giving employees automatic recommendations for improving their performance. 

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. 

⚡️For more ways of using artificial intelligence in HR, read our complete guide on AI in HR examples.

🕵️‍♀️ 7 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 people with Zavvy AI 

AI solutions are here to help you keep your employees 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 Zavvy to do it all.

Zavvy's employee engagement software lets you engage and grow your organization's talent by:

• Getting the AI Coach integrated with Slack to provide employee productivity tips, answer questions, and provide support with solving diverse problems. Zavvy's AI coach can help with writing feedback, finding learning resources, or setting development goals. 
• Getting people insights to help you engage meaningfully, spot and facilitate better development opportunities, and create stronger remote relationships.
• Plus, running training, one-on-ones, onboarding, and training faster with Zavvy's integrated AI features!

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

❓ FAQs 

How does AI motivate employees? 

You can use AI to collect accurate, timely, and actionable data about an employee's performance, allowing you to track employee progress in real-time and even make future predictions. 

AI and machine learning can also be handy to automate work processes and provide feedback on employees' tasks. 

Finally, you can turn to AI for real-time insights into employee behavior so that managers can offer custom motivation and rewards based on results.

AI can also analyze a myriad of data points to help map potential career paths for employees based on their skills, experiences, aspirations, and company needs. This visibility into possible career progression can be a strong motivator.

What are AI tools for employee engagement?

Some of the best AI tools you can use for employee engagement include:

• Zavvy
• Slack
• Donut
• Monday.com (Monday.com vs ClickUp)
• Vantage Circle