Employee Engagement At Work

I love robots. As soon as I can splurge for it I'd love to pick up a Roomba from our workplace honoree iRobot. I'm also a fan of nanotechnology and can't wait to see what impact it has on everything from ending hunger to curing disease.

But I do think artificial intelligence has its limitations, especially when it comes to employee engagement and, as this press release from yesterday for I Love Rewards discusses, "combating the brain drain problem currently being faced by Google."

As the release notes, The Wall Street Journal (our media partner for our Top Small Workplaces recognition project) garnered a lot of buzz in leadership and HR circles last month when it reported that Google is using a new algorithm that calculates which of their employees are most likely to quit.

The Journal article talks about how it has already been used to identify employees who feel underused, and that is certainly a boon for a company with more than 20,000 employees. No doubt leadership and HR there are strapped keeping track of everyone's needs and trying to satisfy them.

But in smaller firms – the companies we study and honor each year for their exemplary workplace team building and employee engagement best practices top out at 500 employees, for instance – leadership and HR are better equipped to know not only if people are not satisfied, but if they're going to bail. CEOs at many of the Top Small Workplaces check in with employees at the interview stage and regularly once they're hired, once a month or once a quarter.

We hear a lot of stories of enterprises reallocating talent to different areas of the business and thus retaining them (and saving money that would need to be used to recruit and train new talent) when employees tell them, as part of this ongoing dialogue with leadership, that they're unsatisfied.

So while I think the math and technology Google is now using for itself – and could license and profit from if it wanted to go into that as a new business model – could be a value-add for large firms, I think that small and midsize businesses can save money and have a pulse on their workplace cultures by continuing the proven, decidedly 20th century practices of MBWA (managing by walking around), having an open door policy, and continually seeking ways to solicit and benefit from employee feedback.

What say you?

Comments for Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Intuition in Assessing Unsatisfied Employees?

Friday, June 12, 2009 by Greg Harris:: Mark--I think you're exactly right to point out the importance of MBWA in keeping a pulse on engagement. No matter how advanced technology gets, managers are not doing their job effectively if they're not intentionally monitoring the commitment levels of those on their team. But I don't think the 20th century model and the 21st century model are mutually exclusive. In other words, I don't think that anecdotal observation is a good surrogate for analytical research and vice versa. Each strategy will identify different symptoms and will presuppose different remedies. To use a health analogy, a person needs to pay attention to the aches and pains in their body to identify issues. But she also needs to go to the doctor on a regular basis because many common health conditions (think high blood pressure or arteriosclerosis) aren't readily diagnosable from external observation.