Why should you care about GenAI and employee efficiency? Generative artificial intelligence is already in the hands of your employees. According to a report by McKinsey, 79% of respondents have had some exposure to GenAI, while 22% regularly use it at work.
Most people have heard of tools like Chat GPT in their personal lives — and even used them — but a disconnect remains between these applications and how they’re used in the modern workforce. Your team might not know if they can use GenAI or your company’s GenAI policies or might not have the resources to implement AI-supported systems.
Here’s one shiny fact though: A strong correlation exists between GenAI and employee efficiency. MIT Sloan found that GenAI can improve a worker’s performance by 40% when used correctly.
It’s time for leadership to embrace GenAI and train employees on how to use it. GenAI can be a powerful tool, but humans still need to guide its use and applications. Use this guide to learn more about the capabilities of GenAI across your departments and how it can increase employee efficiency.
Table of contents: GenAI and employee efficiency
- The connection between GenAI and employee efficiency
- The connection between GenAI and employee experience
- Leveraging GenAI to improve efficiency in HR and internal communications
- GenAI intranet benefits and use cases + examples
- Get ready to increase employee efficiency with GenAI
Explore our comprehensive guide to boosting employee productivity
The connection between GenAI and employee efficiency
What’s the main benefit of leveraging GenAI in your organization? Saved time.
GenAI has the potential to support employees org-wide, especially by eliminating laborious tasks that bog down an employee’s workday. McKinsey reports a few top ways different departments use GenAI:
- Creating first drafts of documents and various texts
- Summarizing complicated or long text documents
- Identifying trends in large bodies of data
- Forecasting trends and catching anomalies
- Using chatbots for customer service
Let’s look at analyzing reports. Instead of downloading data sets and spending an entire day analyzing them, GenAI can analyze and summarize findings for you in just a few seconds. It can highlight key points, changing trends and potential issues. What this means is you or your analytics team can focus on developing and implementing action items from those insights, shifting from a state of analysis to action.
Another example of an efficient use of GenAI is with customer service. The customer service industry was an early adopter of GenAI for a reason, and Boston Consulting Group estimates that GenAI could increase productivity by 30% to 50% for customer service operations.
Here’s just one use case: Instead of employing and training hundreds of employees, organizations can train GenAI to address customer needs with personalized responses. The tech can handle an inordinate amount of issues and requests faster than humans, resulting in more resolutions within a given time. These are tangible metrics that increase productivity.
The connection between GenAI and employee experience (EX)
By improving overall operational efficiencies, GenAI can foster a more positive experience for your employees. And a better EX means stronger business outcomes. According to Deloitte’s 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, organizations with a positive employee experience have:
- twice the customer satisfaction (Net Promoter Score).
- 12% greater shareholder returns.
- 25% greater profitability compared to their peers.
Here’s how GenAI can help.
Enhance collaboration and reduce burnout
The American Institute of Stress found that more than 60% of employees have high levels of fatigue, stress and anxiety. Now might be a good time to review team workloads and identify opportunities to shift tasks to GenAI. This will give your team more space to support each other and collaborate on projects moving forward. The ultimate goal is to focus less on day-to-day tasks and more on big-picture goals that move the company forward.
Promote innovation and creativity
Your best ideas happen in the shower for a reason. Your brain needs to relax before it can think creatively and connect problems to solutions. By offloading menial tasks for GenAI to complete in seconds, your team will have more time and brainpower for higher level activities and even innovation.
Build resiliency by streamlining processes
Not only will process optimization help your employees in their current roles, but it can build resiliency in your team. Your staff can take more time to refresh and recharge, stretch into other meaningful projects, and eventually progress through their career ladder without leaving gaps in the workflow machine. Processes make it clear what each contributor does throughout the workday.
These are big promises. You might not believe that one tool can reduce burnout while empowering your team members to collaborate better and implement new ideas. But keep in mind the tangible benefits of GenAI, specifically time-saving for your employees.
Discover how AI can help create a modern employee experience
Leveraging GenAI to improve efficiency in HR and internal communications
GenAI has the potential to help solve some of the biggest challenges faced by human resources and internal communications professionals — finding the best talent and then keeping those employees happy and engaged in their work.
Using GenAI for HR
Organizations thrive with a talented and committed workforce. Yet the hiring process can be cumbersome and, while the Great Resignation is over, employee retention continues to challenge HR teams. Gartner predicts the turnover rate to be as high as 24% in the years to come. What’s more, replacing employees costs up to twice their annual salary.
GenAI can streamline the hiring process and increase job satisfaction to help ensure retention.
The technology can help HR pros manage talent more efficiently by:
- collecting, analyzing and summarizing employee feedback. Sixty-three percent of employees say their voice has been ignored in some way by their employer. Organizations that prioritize feedback see 1.4 times higher employee engagement rates.
- providing personalized onboarding, upskilling and training materials.
- drafting effective job listings that attract more qualified candidates.
- filtering through resumes and summarizing information about high-quality candidates.
- identifying high-potential employees for internal promotions.
- surfacing benefits information and responding to benefits-related questions. NFP’s 2023 US Benefits Trends Report found that only 39% of employees fully understand their benefits.
Engaged employees are happier employees. And happier employees are less likely to leave.
Using GenAI for IC
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report finds that only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs. And employee engagement impacts the organization on myriad levels — from productivity to profitability and retention. A striking 92% of business executives firmly believe that engaged employees significantly enhance performance, leading to greater team accomplishment and superior organizational outcomes.
Internal communication drives employee engagement.
In fact, the team at Harvard Business Review found that employees who get enough communication are nearly three times more likely to be engaged in their work — and organizations with engaged employees report 23% higher profits.
But there’s an issue. Effective communication is time-consuming. Yet more than 30% of IC pros surveyed by Gallagher said they lack the time and capacity to do their jobs as fully as they would like.
GenAI can help internal communicators work more efficiently with the resources they have by:
- drafting messages aligned to organizational culture and values.
- refining those messages for consistent brand voice and style.
- personalizing and targeting internal comms.
- identifying optimal send times and channels.
- helping employees quickly find information stored in the knowledge base.
Check out how employee efficiency can increase org-wide with an intranet that innovates with GenAI.
Learn what to know when using AI in communications strategy
GenAI intranet benefits and use cases + examples
The effective integration of AI to solve a variety of use cases can be a game-changer for organizations looking to work more efficiently. A modern intranet, like Simpplr, can transform the work experience in areas ranging from employee communications and engagement to knowledge services and frontline worker support. According to the 2023 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Intranet Packaged Solutions (IPS) report:
“While AI is still emerging for many IPS competitors, Simpplr offers fully functional and integrated AI applied to a wide range of functions. For example, Simpplr uses AI to boost analytics and personalization, learning employee preferences and analyzing intranet activity to deliver insights, recommendations, and predictions to intranet managers and end users. AI-powered content moderation helps to ensure compliance and content hygiene by employing autolabeling, tagging and categorization.”
Simpplr scored the highest among 15 IPS vendors in five of six use cases, including Employee Communications and Engagement, Employee Services, Knowledge Services, Work Management and Frontline Worker Support.
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How to improve efficiency with an intranet powered by GenAI
Writing assistance: Teams can streamline and scale content publication and responsibilities. An intranet with GenAI writing assistance, like Simpplr’s writing assistant capability, enables employees to:
- instantly generate ideas, outlines and drafts for content such as emails, newsletters, memos and presentations — which employees can then finesse for style and tone.
- improve writing for clarity.
- produce more on-brand, concise messaging.
- support a global workforce with multiple languages.
- translate documents, procedures and announcements quickly and securely — without paying for additional tools.
A recent survey by Forbes Advisor shows 46% of business owners are already using AI to help them craft internal communications.
Intelligent search: Intranets with GenAI-enabled search functionality, like Simpplr’s enterprise search, enable employees to:
- find the most accurate and comprehensive answers. Simpplr’s Smart answers capability displays a comprehensive and tailored answer by summarizing the updates (along with relevant citations) at the top of the search results page — eliminating the need to navigate through numerous web pages and click on multiple links.
- search across documents, intranet content and even people using profile information and expertise tags.
- search across all apps from multiple cloud-based file management systems including Microsoft Office 365 and Google Drive.
- refine search results by filtering by site, content type, author and publish date to find exactly what they need.
Personalization: The best intranets use AI to adapt and adjust based on employee preferences and searches — and serve up individualized, relevant information automatically. With Simpplr’s adaptive personalization, employees can:
- zero in on the right communications and individualized content right away.
- view feed content that is customized based on employee activity, roles, locations and interests.
- access compelling information and stories that keep them coming back for more.
- receive personalized employee newsletters with dynamic content relevant to their unique role and needs.
Virtual assistance: Virtual assistance, like chatbots, isn’t just for customer service. Intranets with built-in virtual assistance, like Simpplr, empower employees to:
- quickly find the information and support they need by providing relevant answers and executing simple tasks within seconds.
- slash the number of emails flying back and forth between departments.
- expedite human resources and IT tasks by acting as a live chat that supports employee requests and escalate to a human only when absolutely necessary.
Simpplr’s Virtual Assistant uses GenAI to turn indexed results into human language to deliver 90% response accuracy.
Employee listening: Understanding employee pain points can be an involved, time-consuming process — especially with the way we work today. The best intranets leverage GenAI-powered employee listening to surface hidden employee sentiment and identify trends from employee feedback. Then share those insights via easy-to-understand dashboards that empower people managers to make more data-driven decisions.
For example, Simpplr’s Employee Listening combines survey responses with AI-powered passive listening to detect underlying sentiments and emotions, helping HR leaders understand unspoken pain points. The My teams dashboard then aggregates those insights and guides people managers to engage with and check in on their direct reports.
The Gartner® Critical Capabilities report states Simpplr’s “out-of-the box analytics are rich, well-aligned with intranet goals, and capable of capturing in-the-moment employee sentiment.”
The bottom line: GenAI alone won’t solve every efficiency problem, but investing in and applying this technology can make huge strides to that end. GenAI can address many of the routine tasks that keep employees from focusing on the work that drives the biggest outcomes for your organization.
Get ready to increase employee efficiency with GenAI
If you’re unsure about GenAI and its applications, start with some small test projects. Try GenAI to solve a few pain points and see how your team responds. From there, you can expand its use to other scenarios and grow your confidence with the technology.
Ready to make the workday more efficient and less stressful? Request a demo to see how Simpplr leverages the power of innovative and responsible AI to enhance and elevate the employee experience and boost productivity.
