How AI could help your organisation thrive in the age of scrutiny

John Everhard explains the role of technology in establishing a more transparent, meritocratic workplace

How transparent is your organisation when it comes to diversity, pay and career progression? Do you feel confident that the right people are always at the right level and that they are all being fairly evaluated and compensated in relation to their performance? Unfortunately, the answer to both of these questions is, for many today, more likely than not an emphatic ‘no'. It's no coincidence that modern organisations are finding themselves facing more scrutiny than ever before over the makeup of their workforces - and in particular those in a position of power.

As it stands, women only hold 25 per cent of senior business roles worldwide, while two-thirds of the board seats of Fortune 500 companies are held by white men and the privately educated continue to dominate professional jobs. It's difficult to argue that any of these statistics are truly representative of the diverse range of people from a variety of different races, backgrounds and orientations that make up the modern business. So how do we ensure a fairer, more meritocratic system where performance, not privilege, is the key to career progression? You may be surprised to hear that artificial intelligence (AI) could have a significant role to play.

We at Pegasystems recently conducted a study amongst 845 global senior executives across a number of key sectors of industry, including financial services, insurance, manufacturing, telecoms & media, the public sector and retail. We found that more than two thirds (66 per cent) of respondents felt that a more transparent meritocracy will become prevalent in the workplace as the use of AI becomes more common in evaluating the contribution and skill of employees. What this means is that as AI-based measurement tools become more widely adopted, more individuals will increasingly find themselves rewarded as a direct of their performance rather than other ancillary factors which may have played a historical role, such as race or gender.

Such tools may seem a long way away, but the truth is that many organisations are already using workforce intelligence solutions today for just this reason. Indeed, almost three quarters (74 per cent) of respondents to our survey believe that it will become standard practice for AI to be used for evaluating employee performance within 10 years. 72 per cent also expect that AI will be in common use to set appropriate rewards for employees within the same timeframe.

Of course, it's impossible to reduce an employee's productivity, performance and happiness to a single algorithm that encompasses everything they do within their role. It's also important to recognise that not only do individuals add value in ways that cannot be measured, such as creative flair, empathy with customers or the ability to inspire colleagues, but that for some, their job is about more than just moving up the organisational pyramid. Such tools should be used to inform, but never dictate employee progression, and it's worth remembering that just because a set of analytics says that an employee is good at one job, it does not necessarily mean that they will be well suited to another, more senior role where perhaps a different skill-set could be required. However, what they can do is play a significant role in identifying the true value that each employee adds.

How AI could help your organisation thrive in the age of scrutiny

John Everhard explains the role of technology in establishing a more transparent, meritocratic workplace

84 per cent of senior executives responding to our survey agreed that it will be commonplace for AI to calculate the true value added by each worker within the next 10 years. Clearly, this will have ramifications for organisations who suffer from a lack of diversity throughout their business, but there's another important distinction to be made here. To be clear, this is not about Big Brother-like monitoring of employees and their daily activity with a view to rooting out individuals that are not performing well enough.

Transparency should be about more than just making people accountable for their actions. Organisations must not only use these tools and the increased transparency they provide to ensure that their best employees find themselves in the best possible position to utilise their skills; they must also use them to enable employees to be the best at their jobs that they can be by stamping out existing inefficiencies within the organisation.

A big part of this is remembering that, when it comes to employees, ‘inefficient' does not necessarily equal ‘lazy', and that true transparency can be a powerful tool when applied correctly. Let's use the example of a call centre employee, who is found to have an extremely long call handling time, which almost certainly results, in turn, in extreme frustration for the customer on the other end of the line and a potential lost customer.

Rather than just taking the extended call time as the beginning and end of the story, the use of analytics can help to determine the reasons why calls are not being handled more efficiently. It could find that one of the reasons is that the agent is having to copy and paste customer information between different applications which slows the process down, and leads the call centre to ask whether or not they need to invest in a more connected multi-channel solution to help their agents.

The net result of all of this, of course, is that the customer benefits. To use the above example, it stands to reason that more satisfied, engaged call centre staff who feel they are being fairly rewarded are more likely to be able to provide a positive customer experience. Meanwhile, activities that would previously have been monotonous and time-consuming for a human to do can be automated or, if necessary, eliminated. All of which leaves the agent to focus on developing their customer engagement skills. In both cases, it's a win-win for the customer.

For some organisations, opening up their business to increased scrutiny could open a can of worms. It's clear that there will be some initial resistance in many cases to allowing prying eyes to look behind the curtain of their operations and become fully transparent. Perhaps if they can see that such transparency can make them more efficient and more profitable as a result, the transition will become a smoother one. Regardless, there's little doubt that, whether we like it or not, the age of scrutiny is already upon us. It's up to us to decide whether or not we use the technology available to make sure that workforces are more diverse, meritocratic and efficient.

John Everhard is a director at Pegasystems