Artificial intelligence with advanced capabilities has rapidly gained prominence in various sectors and has grown much faster since the release of ChatGPT. Within a few years, AI has been solving problems that require Human intelligence such as the analysis of large documents, identification of serious medical diseases, intelligent removal of weeds from farmlands, much more. Nearly 75% of knowledge workers has been using Generative AI in their routines highlighting the fact that usage of these GenAI saves them time for critical parts of the work while keeping them creative [Source]. Human Resource Decision makers study highlights 38% of them have been using AI tools in their daily routines while 61% expects AI to have a positive impact on their work in next 5 years. There could be various applications of AI in HR Sectors as highlighted in previous article on AI & HR , While performance Management being one of the best use case of AI in HR. With less change in the HR processes, Performance Management can affect and deliver higher impact to business with higher productivity and continuous growth of Employees capabilities.
Performance Management is one of the crucial parts of the HR process which involves delivering constructive feedback to workers for their continuous improvement and better performance. This involves a deeper and timely understanding of employees’ performance over different projects and parts of the business, Recognition of their contribution to work culture, and Happy clients. Delivery of good and thorough feedback is important but very hard due to business commitments and the busy schedule of Management. the Annual performance review has been foregone through changes with timely feedback from management and a high focus on learning and development. With the introduction of AI in performance Management, it has become extremely effective for communicating thorough feedback to employees on a on timely basis while improving other aspects of performance management.
AI Applications in Performance Management:
- Developing powerful goals
Setting of right productive goals is a crucial part of performance and growth. There are different components to establishment of effective goals, First, Personal Goals. Personal goals set up the personal growth of the person which guides them in their personal space. These goals are crucial and are driven by self-motivation of individual. In Business setting, these goals should also be aligned with team and business goals. Making best use of team capabilities and skills for overall growth is important while keeping personal goals. These goals should be powerful enough to leave long lasting effect on individual while these should be neither too easy nor extremely difficult.
AI with its capabilities can track the capabilities of different individuals in a team. This not only helps the business in making best usage of experts but also helps individuals in setting up of right goals. AI can help suggest achievable goals considering useful resources in doing so. - Monitoring Employee Performance
A great Performance Management is only successful with correct monitoring of employee’s performance. With an AI-enhance performance monitoring system, Businesses can easily monitor employees progress company-wide and track individual performance. As Employees make a change to their goals, AI can keep track of new performance metrics and alert them if they go off-track to meet target growth metrics for them. With which, Employee can easily make a necessary decisions and immediate actions, look for causes of the issues and take support from other team members. - Managing performance review cycles
Having a timely performance review is essential whereas due to time constraints in business and prior commitments, Managers might miss the review cycles and have yearly review. AI can help in doing so by sharing timely review to employees in a better manner, schedule a regular cadence or cycle for review with managers and maintain formal and information evaluation cycle, helping them guide into right direction. Formal Review focuses on the professional growth of the individual, AI can helping formulate the right feedback, delivering the same in polite manner. - Skill Gap Analysis
With its capabilities to analyse and keep track of different data sources, AI can help in identification of skill gap across different teams. It is crucial part of the high performing team to have expertise in different areas and not just abundance of few skills. AI can quickly analyse the performance data and find the skills gap within team or individuals which can help them improve as a team.
For example, your team might be highly skilled in Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service but might lack in Google Cloud Platform. Depending on skills of individuals, AI can team up GCP experts with Azure Experts together for a continuous growth and team with vast expertise. - Better Feedback
Giving customised Feedback specific to each team member could be challenging. This is one of reasons why performance review process can be time-consuming and likely the reason why only 5% of employees are getting helpful feedback. AI tools can quickly aggregate performance data, including recognition received from colleagues. While entire performance review feedback is meant to be shared and written by human, AI can enhance and reduce the time in formulating the right feedback for employees. This reduction in time spent on feedback can help managers spend less time to generate more personalized feedback while meeting other business commitments and maintaining a healthy culture. - Predictive Analytics
AI’s capability to analyse large amount of data at human speed make it a great tool in performing predictive analysis of the employee’s performance. AI can measure the employee’s performance in real time basis & predictive analysis to predict the future state of employee performance can help in alerting them in right manner with suggestion to get on track. Not limited to performance of Employees, AI can help in predicting performance of business sectors. HR team is responsible for a variety of task and one of them is maintaining a healthy team culture and continuous availability of employees for new and ongoing projects. AI can help HR team identify availability of various employees and reduce employee’s retention by providing right projects to employees on right time. This also ensures better usage of human resources of the company while maintaining good performant team.