Strengthen employee experience with Virtual Assistant

Digital environment as part of the employee experience

• HR professionals are expected to have solutions to these challenges. Expectations for HR professionals are very high. However, HR professionals time is often spent on day-to-day practicalities. Answering the same questions over and over again, advising where to find updated processes and how to act according to the organization’s policies.

• Criticizing current ways of working is easy, but it requires courage to try new and different solutions. The role of the digital environment has strengthened during remote and hybrid working, challenging HR professionals to think about it as part of employee experience. Traditionally, employee experience has been seen only as organizational culture. In other words, employees’ experience and feelings about internal matters of an organization, including its organizational structure, leadership style, rewards and benefits. However, the digital environment, i.e., the tools personnel use to carry out their work (e.g. computer, user interface, telephone and all IT systems used in the organization) and the physical environment play a major role in the employee experience₄₎.

• The aim of systems cannot be to create more work for people, but to actually perform part of the tasks. How to reorganize work so that people can focus on their strengths and machines do the routine work?

An intelligent virtual assistant for assistance?

• With an intelligent virtual assistant, an organization frees up HR professionals and managers time to focus on more meaningful work with people. Time for conversations with individuals and teams, creating common direction and building trust. Time of conversations that strengthen the emotional bonds between people in the work community, which inevitably faded during remote working. According to How Finland is doing -study, both disengagement and cynicism have increased during remote work₃₎.

• Virtual assistant is an AI-based assistant. It acts as glue between processes, people and systems in an organization being available 24/7. Virtual assistant helps and guides precisely at the moment and concerning those issues that the individual is wonder -whether the person is an employee or a manager. Virtual assistant loves routine, working and it always gives consistent advice. Virtual Assistant is a great helper, for example, onboarding new employees, who have a huge number of questions from lunches vouchers to organizational objectives.

• Virtual assistants and other digital workers should be seen as part of the workforce that need to be managed. Virtual assistant needs a trainer who will follow up on the discussions, respond to emerging needs teaching virtual assistant to identify new topics and provide answers to users. The role of virtual assistant trainer is one of the new HR tasks that will replace routine tasks. Gartner predicts₅₎ that by the end of year 2022, 70% of office workers will be interacting with conversational platforms.

• Front AI is specialized in a new generation of conversational AI virtual assistants. Speakers in the webinar will be Front AI experts Tiila Käenniemi, AI Operations Manager and Nina Koskela, Head of Internal VA.