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.
It was more than twenty years ago. If those same cracks in our culture began now, AI could be just one component of the solution.
AI and culture don’t necessarily seem to be overlooked. AI is cutting-edge technology, while culture is deeply human and encompasses how people treat each other, treat customers, and interact with each other.
But some experts believe that AI is the right tool to solve the challenge my company faced many years ago: how do you get each and every worker to realize your culture?How to train them by providing them with greater communication and collaboration habits?
One such expert advocating for using AI to improve culture is Andrew Rashbass, a member of the van der Schaar lab, the famous artificial intelligence and device learning lab at the University of Cambridge. Rashbass is also the founder of ScultureAI, a tool that supports workers. in their virtual interactions, guiding them towards the core values that an organization needs to instill in its workforce.
Coaching has long been identified as a powerful force for organizational change, aiding corporate leadership, team effectiveness, and worker self-efficacy, all of which contribute to culture. A recent Harvard Business Review article described training as “a task that all managers deserve to perform at all times with all of their colleagues, in tactics that help define the organization’s culture and advance its mission. “”.
Individual training is also time-consuming and each leader can only train a limited number of people. While AI-based coaching may not be as effective as personalized coaching, Rashbass says it’s an 80/20 here. “Is there a way to get 80% of this price and increase it thousands of times?” », he says, adding that AI deserves to be considered a complement and not a substitute for personalized training.
Rashbass and his team developed ScultureAI, for example, to do just that. The tool draws on an organization’s core values, a procedure CEO Elie Rashbass calls culture coding, and uses that wisdom to recommend changes to team emails and collaborative chats in Teams or Slack. Distributed throughout the organization, ScultureAI can achieve countless small training moments every day, making a big impact, says Rashbass.
“Most organizations have no idea of the huge volume of instant daily transactions, and that’s where a lot of the cultural issues arise,” he says. “Micro-interactions, especially virtual ones, are the very fabric of organizational change. This is especially true in hybrid or remote workplaces (like my company), where workers interact largely through the virtual domain.
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.
Using AI in anything in an organization, adding culture, presents an apparent challenge. “Trust is the AI elephant in the room,” says Adam Holtby, an expert in painting experience, office transformation and the long run. term of the paintings, as well as an analyst for Omdia, an advisory and generational group. “Decisions made using data or knowledge generated by AI will have to be made with a detail 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.
It goes without saying that executives deserve to do their due diligence before implementing an AI tool for culture (or any other use, for that matter), ensuring the tool has safeguards that are not accepted as true with problems. Holtby recommends that leaders prioritize the security and privacy of knowledge, as well as compliance with moral standards. Furthermore, he adds: “From a knowledge perspective, it is vital that workers perceive what knowledge is collected and how it is used. From a broader strategic perspective, it is also vital to involve workers in the progression and upcoming implementation of any AI system.
Culture has yet to play a major role in discussions about how AI can influence the workplace, but perhaps that will replace it soon. After all, culture plays an important role in the functionality of an organization. Culture is also an unusually arena of struggle: A recent Gallup poll found that only 21% of American workers feel strongly attached to their culture.
Obviously, leaders have a lot to think about when it comes to the intersection of AI generation and office culture. However, many leaders haven’t broadened their thinking beyond how AI can automate processes or productivity, Rashbass says.
“The enormous opportunities lie with other people who think more about genuine transformation: those who ask themselves what we can do now, what has never been done before, and who are trying to replace the nature of work, transforming what is possible.
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