The COVID-19 pandemic has taught a few lessons to the world on how to live and work. It has pushed the workforce indoors and exposed organizations to remote work as a way of life. But it has also given way to employees being more stressed than when they worked from offices. According to the job portal Monster, roughly 69% of employees are going through burnout while working remotely.
What is causing the employees to burn out?
Work from home, which was a luxury a year ago, has turned into warfare. While people are saving time spent on commuting between work and home, they are struggling with longer work hours and fewer breaks. The Monster survey has concluded that 69% of workers are taking fewer breaks than they would earlier. Also, the boundaries between work and office hours have blurred adding to the constant stress of balancing everything all at once. For most, being at home translates into multi-tasking work and home chores.
Amidst all of this, according to Capgemini, employee productivity grew at 63% in the third quarter of 2020, but so has mental stress. Evidently, employees need support during these times, or else the buoyancy in productivity may evaporate in the long run.
How can organizations address employee needs?
As the pandemic marches on, there is no change in scenery for the average professional. Several months into working from home, they are dealing with the constant stress of doing it all alone. According to an Airtasker report, the best way to help employees stay productive is by taking breaks. Therefore, what employees need from their organization is the support to help them get more quality breaks. Better work and time management can allow employees the freedom to take a breather. Thanks to technology, this is possible with AI-powered e-workers.
What can an e-worker do to reduce employee burnout?
Know the convenience of having an Alexa at home? Now, reimagine an employee workspace supported with an assistant to help them navigate their workday. An e-worker is a virtual assistant for human workers to aid them in their time-consuming, repetitive tasks.
According to Gartner, 25% of the workforce will be using a virtual assistant by 2021. With an e-worker, employees get round-the-clock assistance all around the year. It helps them remember deadlines, create those weekly/monthly reports for the all-important review meetings, make recommendations, answer complex questions, and handle mundane routine jobs that end up consuming a huge chunk of the employees’ precious work hours.
In basic terms, AI virtual assistants make employees’ life simple. By getting the frequent tasks out of the way, they free up the employees to do more productive tasks and freeing up time. Below are some of the ways in which AI virtual assistants can help employees alleviate stress –
1. It allows employees to take time-off from routine administrative tasks
According to a survey, 66% of employees find it hard to disengage themselves from their work while working remotely. The responsibility of managing routine administrative tasks keeps them mentally preoccupied, sometimes even when they are on a break. This leads to higher stress and burnout eventually. With AI virtual assistants, employees can handover their administrative jobs to them during the day without worrying about the quality of work getting hampered. This helps them disengage from work and take more meaningful breaks.
A survey concludes that employees spend anywhere between 5 to 25 minutes looking for relevant documents. In fact, it is only 20% of the time that professionals stumble upon the right information the first time. AI virtual assistants can save this time by performing document searches or crawling all over the internet for information, while employees focus on other work and complete assignments in lesser time.
2. It helps HR get genuine insights on employee needs
When employees chat with their digital assistant, they leave behind a footprint of how they are feeling. Mining the words to gather insights into how the workforce is feeling is known as sentiment analysis. Using this AI-based technique, human resource teams can analyze the data generated from conversations between employees and their virtual assistants to understand the most common pain areas or the workforce mood in general. This can be done at different levels of the organization so that the organization can identify groups that need support.
Sentiment analysis is performed by using Natural Language Processing with Machine Learning. It involves combing through unstructured text from chats, emails, etc, and looking for keywords that may point out an issue. Machine Learning can train the systems to look for certain kinds of keywords. If an issue is observed to be widespread then the systems can flag them for further review by the organization. In this way, virtual assistants can reveal the stress that employees find themselves suffering from. This information can then be used by human resources to craft strategies that uplift staff morale and stop attrition.
3. It keeps employees away from stressful distractions
Virtual assistants run on machine learning and hence they can learn about employee behaviour over time. This means that they can be taught to filter distracting elements such as social media notifications, email, or phone calls that the employee prefers to ignore. This can help employees utilise their most productive hours efficiently and combat stress that arises out of getting distracted while working.
4. It acts as a trusted buddy
A virtual assistant is literally the perfect assistant one can have. Whether it is planning a weekend getaway, throwing a secret party for a friend, or discussing a potentially stellar but nascent work idea, a virtual assistant can act like a trusted friend and advisor who can add value to the employee’s thoughts without judging him.
Give your employees the gift of time with supervity.ai’s e-workers
supervity.ai’s new generational AI bots or e-workers can be assigned to each of your employees and customized to serve their unique job roles and requirements. These e-workers will help them eliminate redundancy by taking over the manual and repetitive tasks from the employees. Listed as one of the HFS hot vendors in the first quarter of 2020, supervity.ai will help you build a resilient and skilled e-workforce that enhances the productivity and experience of your human workforce.