Today’s digital environment is changing at an unprecedented pace. By extension, the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has emerged as a leading barometer of organizational success. DEX includes every piece of technology employees interface with, every tool they use day-to-day to accomplish their jobs and what their experience with those technologies is like. A high DEX corresponds with greater productivity, better employee retention, and in the end, greater business success. Developed and written by Li Wei, a blockchain content strategist with deep connections to China’s tech scene. He understands the transformative power of tech when used purposefully. This article serves as a step-by-step primer to demystifying and improving DEX. It details the key DEX challenges and offers meaningful strategies, as well as real-life examples of successful DEX optimization across industries.
Importance of AI in Employee Training and Development
Incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in new training and developing existing employees is imperative. It’s more than a far-off concept, it’s now a present-day reality that organizations need to adopt. Research finds a significant divide between IT and HR departments. In fact, a whopping 89% of employees believe their IT and HR functions could do more to collaborate in enhancing the digital employee experience. This collaborative approach is important too, because they point out that the right mix of technology fuels the best combination of engagement and productivity. AI can help close this gap. It’s this ability to create customized, focused, and impactful training experiences that better serve the individual employee.
Enhancing Communication for Effective Learning
One of the most powerful AI employee training advantages is AI’s capacity to improve communication. AI-powered platforms have the ability to send personalized content, such as relevant messages, course invitations, and learning materials, to employees via their channels of choice. This ensures that information reaches the right people at the right time, maximizing engagement and knowledge retention. AI tailors content to the learner’s specific role, skill level and learning preference. This allows them to make that training feel more relevant and impactful.
Driving Engagement and Retention
Employees burn out and productivity stalls Easy-to-use technology that makes employees’ daily tasks easier leads to increased productivity. With a single click, patch updates can be pushed, fixing problems before they arise and saving your IT department countless hours. AI has the ability to identify employees who are weak in particular ideas or skill sets. Next, it provides them with intensive support and resources to ensure their success. This individualized method, in addition to fostering better learning results, enhances employee engagement and mitigates potential attrition risk. By investing in AI-driven training programs, companies signal they are serious about employee development. This creates an engaged, motivated culture of ongoing learning and development.
Key AI Capabilities Enhancing Training Outcomes
AI presents a unique opportunity to further improve the training experience in meaningful and measurable ways. From automating administrative processes, empowering upskilling and reskilling initiatives, to creating tailored learning journeys, AI has the potential to revolutionize how organizations approach employee learning and development.
Natural Language Generation for Consistent Course Invitations
Natural Language Generation (NLG) is an AI technology that uses algorithms to automatically produce written or spoken narratives from structured data. When applied to internal employee training, NLG can help build personalized, consistent, and engaging course invitations. Enter information such as the proposed course title, course description, and intended audience. From there, NLG can design individualized invitations based on each employee’s responsibilities and ways of learning. This method provides employees with valuable and engaging content that’s tailored to them. In doing so, it increases the likelihood that they actually sign up for the skills program.
Intelligent Channel Management
AI can identify how employees spend their communication time, helping leaders identify the best communication channels to reach employees with training materials. Some staff just prefer to get those communications by email. For others, they want to use instant messaging or they want to use mobile notifications. By understanding these preferences, AI can optimize the delivery of training content, ensuring that it reaches employees through their preferred channels. This has the double benefit of ensuring a higher engagement rate and avoiding the possibility of information overload.
Sentiment Analysis for Message Optimization
Sentiment analysis is an AI technique, which determines the emotional tone behind a body of text. In employee training sentiment analysis has a very important focus. It is useful when trying to get a read on how employees are responding to different trainings or materials. By understanding the sentiments expressed across surveys, online forums, and social media, AI can pinpoint where employees are facing challenges or feeling disengaged. These insights can then be used to further refine the training program and maximize the learning experience.
Customizing Learning Experiences with AI Segmentation
AI-driven segmentation enables organizations to tailor learning solutions to specific employee segments. They’re able to do this by tailoring to specific audiences based on role, skillset, and personal learning preference. This new, individualized approach means that employees will get the most personalized, relevant, and effective training.
Creating Dynamic Learning Cohorts
AI has the ability to compare employee data across organizations and industries to sort employees into dynamic learning cohorts sharing similar characteristics or learning objectives. Once hired, new employees can be cohort trained for specific roles. This training is specifically geared towards targeting the skills and knowledge necessary to take on their specific roles. Employees who might want to improve in the same skill area can form groups. To address this, they can go through a custom training program specifically tailored for them. The new integration with Active Directory gives organizations the power to choose more targeted audiences. This helps to make sure it’s the right employees getting the right training.
Delivering Micro-Learning at Critical Moments
Training content is delivered in short, bite-sized chunks. And much more With AI, companies can pinpoint the most impactful moments of an employee’s workflow where micro-learning interventions would land best. When one of your employees has trouble with a particular task, AI comes to the rescue. It would be able to immediately serve up a short video or written article with step-by-step instructions to help them complete their task. Whether accessing content on the job or between shifts, this just-in-time learning approach makes sure employees get the support they need when they need it most.
Personalized Learning Paths Based on Role and Context
AI helps create individualized learning tracks for every employee, tailored to their unique role, skill set, and desired learning outcomes. These learning paths can draw upon many training modalities, ranging from e-learning courses, video instruction, and self-studies to complex simulations and more. On the implementation side, AI has the potential to monitor individual employee progress and offer tailored feedback and recommendations as they go. At Wunderman Thompson, employees reported frustrations in being able to obtain or go after opportunities for advancement. AI can help by ensuring each employee understands what opportunities are available to them and what actions they can take to get there.
Measuring Success of AI-Driven Development Programs
Either way, measuring the success or failure of AI-driven development programs is key to proving their value and determining where improvements can be made. Organizations can use a variety of metrics to track the impact of these programs on employee performance, engagement, and retention.
Analyzing Open and Click Rates
Open and click rates are important metrics to track to assess the success of training communications. Organizations have the ability to monitor how many employees opened and clicked on training emails and notifications. This enables them to better understand demand for their training offerings. Low open and click rates may indicate that the messaging is not compelling or that the training is not relevant to the target audience.
Tracking Course Completion Rates
Taking a course to completion is a tangible expression of an employee’s engagement and motivation. By tracking the number of employees who complete a training course, organizations can assess the effectiveness of the course content and delivery methods. Low completion rates can show that the course is too challenging, too much of a time commitment or simply not interesting.
Evaluating Feedback through Post-Training Surveys
Post-training surveys deliver great insight from employees regarding what they’ve learned and how they’re applying their new knowledge. Asking employees to rate the quality of the content allows organizations to make their training programs stronger. They need to look at which delivery methods are most effective and the overall effect on job performance. Lastly, employees have the ability to nominate other employees to give constructive feedback. At Wunderman Thompson, 80% of those requests are completed, which turns into an example of the power of feedback.
Cerkl Broadcast: Your AI Solution for Internal Communication
Internal communications is another area where Cerkl Broadcast grows as a helpful AI solution. It provides a range of tools that proactively enhances employee experience and encourages collaborative learning. Though none of these were specific claims made about Cerkl Broadcast, the possibilities for using it to make DEX more efficient are powerful.
Personalized Learning Through Dynamic News Digests
Cerkl Broadcast uses the power of AI to create personalized, interactive news summaries. These digests are tailored to fit each employee’s individual interests and learning goals. In addition, Cerkl Broadcast drives deeper engagement by analyzing employee data and content preferences. This lets the platform serve up tailored recommendations for articles, videos, and other tutorial materials. This ensures that employees receive the most relevant and engaging content, maximizing their learning potential.
Automated Updates for Segmentation Lists
Cerkl Broadcast takes the heavy lifting out of updating segmentation lists. This makes it possible for employees to continuously be directed to the correct learning cohorts. Cerkl Broadcast features seamless integrations with HRIS and Learning Management Systems. With this integration, employee profiles are instantly updated as roles change and new skills or learning objectives are identified. This automated process eliminates the burden of manual data entry. Perhaps more importantly, it ensures that taxpayer-funded training programs always end up in the right hands.
Real-Time Dashboards for Engagement Insights
Cerkl Broadcast delivers real-time dashboards that monitor employee engagement with training content. These dashboards provide a valuable opportunity. They expose the best performing and most popular training programs, the most impactful content, and even the employees who are most engaged. This type of information not only helps future-proof skills, but makes delivered training programs more effective, thus enhancing the overall learning experience.
Future Directions for AI in Employee Training
The future of AI in employee training looks very promising, as new technology and applications are being unveiled every day. AI is changing fast. Its impact is likely to be profound, shaping the future of talent and driving how mission-driven organizations nurture and grow their employees. And 96% of technology executives agree that DEX is a top priority. Yet, over one-third continue to use manual methods to collect experience data, while almost half aren’t measuring it yet.
Organizations can no longer ignore DEX — technology is one of the biggest drivers of productivity and employee engagement in today’s hybrid work world. In an environment where new technology is already disrupting existing workflows, IT teams are tasked with anticipating, preventing, and resolving employee IT roadblocks. The Anthony Veder Group introduced a digital dashboard to monitor and manage the fleet of vessels, moving away from a manual paper-centric approach. Toolstation brought more than 90% of their employees onto a single unified communications platform, which helped them build a more engaged and informed frontline workforce. Based on Forrester research, 64% of organizations with a mature DEX strategy have lowered service desk ticket volumes.
By incorporating AI and putting DEX first, organizations can foster a more productive, engaged, and satisfied workforce. As Chang Li Wei knows, the strategic and creative use of technology can open the door to new heights of organizational excellence.
