Do you like Micro Managers?
Of course not.
Then why do your organization’s managers and supervisors act like micromanagers in responding to HR-related questions? Right now, most organizations have a de facto system where employees ask their supervisors questions about how an administrative process works. Employees are inclined NOT to initiate the conversation for fear of judgement and rebuke.
Let’s look at the simple situation of organizational procedures that could be in a standard employee handbook.
Handbook?
Probably the worst answer to a question is “it is in the employee handbook.” That makes the employee feel dumb. And it is possibly not even true. Besides those of us in HR roles, very few employees truly understand the employee handbook.
The supervisor doesn’t want to take time out of their “real work” to research the employee’s question either.
We try to train people in procedures for the company. However, deep down, we know the best learning is doing, and most training is not retained until the person performs the action. Most questions are not asked during the training class because employees don’t know to ask it. Questions come up later.
Dangers in Answering
When the supervisor needs to stop what they are doing to research an HR question, it forces a conversation with their employee, which is not directly related to their department or work processes. This, generally, distracts from the line of business work efforts that need to be done.
There are inevitably questions from the supervisor, which may stray into inappropriate areas during the conversation.
Micro-Reinforcement – From HR to the Rest of the Organization
Few of us would disagree that ongoing, continuous reinforcement of training is a good idea.
If it does not distract or interfere with normal work processes, line of business manager would almost always agree.
This is where the concept of micro-reinforcement shines!
Having a question and answer system employees can use, which interprets the intent of the question and responds with the appropriate response, makes a lot of sense. The focused and targeted answers to employee questions reinforce prior training and the procedures and policies in the employee handbook.
Targeted responses to specific questions which were covered in some previous training – that is micro reinforcement in action.
Not Another Chatbot
You can’t just toss your employee manual into a chatbot. Nobody will be happy with that.
Everyone has experience with customer service chatbots on websites. Sometimes those are effective if there is a real person on the other side engaged in a real conversation. Having a real person also takes away from the potential cost savings of automating answers.
If there is no person on the other end, the chat is not as effective, and the answers are often too generic to satisfy the questioner.
There is a middle ground where excellent quality material is on the backend of a micro reinforcement style question and answer system.
Your employee manual will need curation to be effective in such a system. What is printed in the manual is suitable for a manual, but it will not work with a question and answer format. Employee manuals with all the required wording are going to be inappropriate and too wordy. Someone will need to redact and summarize sections.
From those section the questions can be derived. This might sound like a manual process but AI can be applied to extract out key words and phrases. Those then form the basis of the planned questions.
When an employee asks the question and answer system their question, the most relevant response is presented back to the employee.
Better yet, you can set the answers to have links to appropriate sections of the employee manual.
This requires some work on the part of HR to distill out the meaningful part from the employee manual. The result is a more direct answer to questions with the link to the required, formal section. AI can help speed the process of deployment considerably while still preserving the intent and meaning.
Evolving Over Time
One of the great things about a question and answer system is the ability to track what kinds of questions are asked.
Employees rephrasing questions show that the question and answer pairing needs some work.
Trends in different topics might indicate issues arising in the organization.
For example, there will likely be more questions about health insurance during an enrollment period. Looking at the nature of the questions can indicate certain areas or offerings need more explanation.
Seeing trends in what is not expected is more valuable. If there are a lot of unexpected questions coming from one location or department, that should be investigated.
Be the Leader
As HR professionals, you can take the lead in micro-reinforcement. Successfully, deploying a system over the employee handbook gets every employee the opportunity to interact with a smart question and answer system which reinforces prior training. Establishing this functionality positions HR to be the leader in training on business processes and work procedures.
Micro-reinforcement becomes a part of your companies’ culture. You can lead the change.