Company culture is top of mind these days, whether for recruiters enticing prospects, hiring managers deliberating over candidates’ potential fit, or leaders motivating and engaging employees to drive high-performing teams.
Culture is key to improving employee engagement and driving retention, both essential to building a resilient, agile workforce. By one measure, 84% of an S&P 500 company’s value comes from its employees’ talents, skills, knowledge, work ethic and health.
But to measure culture, human resources (HR) teams have long been limited to using basic data—how many employees are working, what they earn, when they join, when they leave—while struggling to identify who’s feeling engaged, who’s coming up with innovative ideas, and who’s building strong social bonds and fostering productivity and inclusivity.
Legacy methods for measuring culture through surveys or consultants are often difficult, costly, and quickly dated, and they may not reveal the culture that shows up in colleagues’ interactions rather than hard numbers.
However, the increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI) in HR reveals that many organizations are sitting on an untapped resource rich with data: employee recognition programs.
Insight-Driven Actions
Data from peer-to-peer employee recognition programs captures previously undetectable moments of connection in messages of encouragement and gratitude. From these exchanges, organizations can create a map of data points tracking employee skills, cross-functional collaborations, and the key players who enable work and culture to thrive.
There’s a large gap between this data and the insights that can change HR’s approach to culture and talent management issues such as skills gaps, ambition, career mapping, and identifying star performers.
But HR teams can use generative AI (GenAI)-powered cultural intelligence to create a map of recognition, overlaying employee recognition programs so program managers can mine data using plain-text questions, without any need for data analytics expertise. A recognition-specific language model can use data from an oragnization’s recognition program to yield real-time insights, informing decisions that can maximize people and business results.
Using AI tools such as natural language processing (NLP) and GenAI-powered insights, HR teams can submit questions and prompts to understand their company culture and make decisions based on every employee—not just those who answer pulse surveys or speak up in all-hands meetings. Using AI, HR teams can comb through their organization’s unique database of employee recognition messages to identify key skills, star performers, and culture-drivers in real time.
It’s a unique approach that employee recognition provider Workhuman now offers as Human Intelligence™: actionable business insights fueled by a combination of recognition data, the latest advancements in AI, and consulting practice. With Human Intelligence, business leaders across the organization can drive both culture and overall business performance.
Recognition Reveals Opportunities
Layering AI technology over existing peer-to-peer recognition programs can deliver hidden insights vital to understanding where a company excels culturally, what its employees value, and where it can make meaningful changes to strengthen business outcomes.
The incorporation of GenAI into the HR function can help answer such questions as:
• Which employees have demonstrated presentation skills? 63% of leaders say that availability of skills is a top concern in the next year. Leaders cannot fix what they cannot identify. This is where GenAI fills in the gaps, exploring the skill sets and networks that more fully reveal how they work, using NLP and machine learning to fill more positions with an eye toward skills. With greater visibility into which skills earn peers’ and leaders’ recognition, an organization can replicate success and determine new projects and career paths.
• What is the relationship between awards received and retention? Retention is a science. GenAI removes the guesswork from retention, revealing concrete numbers to help quantify the relationship between number of awards received and retention, delivering customized best practices for recognizing employees.
• Do we have any employees who can fill our new position? Without the right people insights, leaders must strategize growth opportunities and support performance based on guesswork. But the right cultural intelligence tool can illustrate different teams’ values, actions, behaviors, and skills and identify collaboration patterns that show where teams work well together—without the heavy lifting of managing a full HR analytics tool.
Getting the right workforce insights requires the right data and the right tools to help organizations uncover challenges, opportunities, and capabilities hidden in plain sight. Taking that deep dive into employee recognition data can deliver more than a glimpse of the employee experience; it can reveal untapped potential to create employee and company growth.
The Rewards of Recognition
In an era when loneliness and isolation are rampant at work, the value of giving employees a sense of belonging cannot be understated. Employees who strongly agree that recognition is an important part of their organization’s culture are 3.7 times as likely to be engaged and about half as likely to experience frequent burnout than those who do not. And new hires who earn awards within their first year at a company are twice as likely to stay at the organization.
Engagement and retention are business imperatives. The implications for well-being—and for business goals—make formalizing how employees say “thanks” appealing for organizations across industries
As skills gaps begin to hinder productivity and talent pipelines dwindle, recruiting and retaining talent will be a key part of business success. And AI-powered tools HR teams and other leaders have at their disposal are rapidly advancing. Those teams that can adapt to the future of work may reap the rewards of seeing their company culture thrive, drive growth, and create a competitive advantage to help outpace their competitors.
Learn more about the people analytic capabilities of an employee recognition platform and how Workhuman can help uncover elusive pain points, identify opportunities for improvement, and solve real challenges.
