In this edition of "Office Optional With Larry English," Larry discusses how using AI can improve workplace culture in your organization.
When my company, Centric Consulting, hit a rapid growth period, cracks emerged in our workplace culture. An increasing number of situations weren’t handled as we had hoped. Leadership could no longer spend quality time coaching every single employee in our core values. To ensure the intended culture survived as the company expanded, we implemented an in-depth culture training program for all employees, as well as training for leaders on leading with our value system.
That was more than two decades ago. If those same cracks in our culture began now, AI might be part of the solution.
AI and culture may not seem an obvious pairing. AI is as high tech as you can get, while culture is deeply human, encompassing how people treat each other, treat customers and work with one another.
But some experts believe AI is the right tool to solve the problem my company faced many years ago: How do you reach every employee and help them learn your culture? How do you coach them through forming better habits of communication and collaboration?
Using AI to Coach Employees and Improve Workplace Culture
One such expert championing the use of AI for culture improvement is Andrew Rashbass, a member of the van der Schaar Lab, the renowned AI and machine learning lab at the University of Cambridge. Rashbass is also founder of ScultureAI, a tool that coaches employees in their everyday digital interactions, guiding them toward whatever core values an organization desires to instill in the workforce.
Coaching has long been recognized as a powerful force for organizational change, helping companies improve leadership, team effectiveness and employee self-efficacy — all elements contributing to culture. A recent Harvard Business Review article described coaching as “work that all managers should engage in with all their people all the time, in ways that help define the organization’s culture and advances its mission.”
One-on-one coaching is also time intensive, and each leader can only mentor so many individuals. While AI-powered coaching can’t be as effective as one-on-one guidance, Rashbass says there is an 80/20 to consider here. “Is there a way you can get 80 percent of that value and scale to thousands of times?” he posits, adding that AI should be considered complementary, not a replacement for, personalized coaching.
Rashbass and team developed ScultureAI, for instance, to do just that. The tool is trained on an organization’s core values — a process CEO Elie Rashbass calls culture encoding — and uses that knowledge to suggest tweaks to emails and collaborative team chats on Teams or Slack. Spread throughout an entire organization, ScultureAI can accomplish countless small coaching moments each day, adding up to a big impact, Rashbass claims.
“Most organizations haven’t really thought about the huge volume of in-the-moment everyday transactions, which is where a lot of cultural issues come up,” he says. “Micro-interactions, especially digital ones, are the real fabric of organizational change.” This rings especially true for hybrid or remote workplaces (like my company), where employees interact largely through the digital realm.
Of course, using AI for coaching is just one possible application of AI to culture improvements. For instance, the technology also seems well suited for mining culture-related insights from digital exhaust, helping leaders pinpoint areas that need improvement.
Tips for Using AI for Workplace Culture Without Degrading Trust
There is one obvious challenge of using AI to improve anything in an organization, including culture. “Trust is the AI elephant in the room,” says Adam Holtby, an employee experience, workplace transformation and future of work expert as well as analyst at Omdia, a technology and advisory group. “Decisions made using AI-generated insights or data must be done so with an element of transparency and fairness.”
Trust is particularly weighty when it comes to culture. A great culture simply isn’t possible without trust between team members and between employees and leadership. In short, if employees feel like they’re being spied on with AI, that will severely degrade organizational culture.
So how does an AI tool such as ScultureAI get around this AI trust issue? Rashbass says his team has kept this issue front and center when designing ScultureAI to prevent any unintended damage to organizational trust. They’ve chosen to make the tool on demand — employees must actively push a button to accept coaching in the moment — and the company is adamant about not collecting data.
Needless to say, leaders should do their due diligence before implementing any AI tool for culture (or any other use, for that matter), ensuring the tool has safeguards against trust issues. Holtby recommends leaders prioritize data security and privacy, as well as adherence to ethical standards. Additionally, he says, “From a data perspective, it is important that employees understand what data is being collected and how it is being used. From a broader strategic perspective, involving employees in the development and subsequent implementation of any AI system is also important.”
It's Time to Consider How AI Can Boost Workplace Culture
Culture has yet to be a major part of the conversation on how AI can improve the workplace, but perhaps that will change soon. After all, culture plays an essential role in an organization’s performance. Culture is also a common area of struggle: A recent Gallup poll found that only 21 percent of U.S. employees feel strongly connected to their culture.
Leaders clearly have a lot to think about when it comes to the intersection of AI technology and workplace culture. Yet so many leaders haven’t expanded their thinking beyond how AI can automate processes or power productivity, Rashbass says.
“The huge opportunities are with people who are thinking more about true transformation — the people who are wondering what it is that we can do now that was never even imaginable before, and striving to change the nature of work, changing what’s possible.”
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