Do Human Resource Departments Really Need Humans?

Opening Insights: Removing the ‘Human’ From Human Resources

In 2013 a study by Michael Osborne and Carl Frey from Oxford University’s Martin School identified 720 occupations that were at-risk due to automation, based on nine key skills.¹ The study found that by 2035, there was a 90% chance that Human Resource (HR) administrative jobs would become automated, however, HR managers, directors and officers were less likely to be replaced by robots.² Their study is quickly becoming a reality with the increase in technology innovations that take the “Human” out of Human Resources.

Let’s take a quick look at bots, one of the Artificial Intelligent tools set to change the face of organizations and HR in the coming years. As you read the section below consider the decision of Robert Oppenheimer who asked: not can I build this atomic bomb, but should I?

Informational Insights: The Rise of the Bots

We live in a world where people would rather text each other (through instant messages) than talk to each other.

Chat is a better medium than the phone for most people, especially younger people. But it doesn’t solve everything. An inarticulate consumer is going to be inarticulate over chat. A rep that’s having a bad day is going to be just as inflexible and unsympathetic in a chat. Changing the medium isn’t a silver bullet for customer service. Bots can help with customer service. They can gather information for the eventual interaction with a human rep, understand exactly what happened and what the consumer wants and even be empowered to solve basic issues, automatically.

Bots have been around a long time —  phone systems ask you to speak your account number, say what you’re calling about or push a digit corresponding to what you want. The difference is that, while those kinds of bots typically annoy customers, chatbots have the potential to have the reverse effect. The right balance of “bot” and “human” is going to be different for each company, and it depends greatly on the quality of the bot — and, of course, the quality of their human customer service reps. ³

What is a bot?

A bot is software that is designed to automate the kinds of tasks you would usually do on your own, like making a dinner reservation, adding an appointment to your calendar or fetching and displaying information. The increasingly common form of bots, chatbots, simulate conversation. They often live inside messaging apps — or are at least designed to look that way — and it should feel like you’re chatting back and forth as you would with a human.⁴

What a wonderful bot you are.

There are many bots out there today and even many more being developed. Here is a look at a few HR bots, staking their claim in the industry:

1. Amy from X.ai.
Amy is a digital personal assistant bot from NYC-based startup X.ai. Amy can:

• Review team members’ schedules
• Deal with the back and forth email tennis volley involved with organizing meetings
• Arrange the meeting
• Let the team know when a set time has been arranged
• Arrange meetings and appointments with clients

2. Troops.ai.
Troops slackbot, allows employees (salespeople for example,) to retrieve and access data from a CRM (Salesforce). Using “conversational” natural language input employees can:

• Harvest client or financial information
• Engage in usual CRM functions: email tracking, client contact (connection) reminder
• Provide real time feedback and responsiveness to potential clients

3. Talla.
Talla is an “all-in-one” machine intelligence powered assistant that acts like a “digital Swiss army knife.”⁵

Talla has three main functions.

1. Office Management, allows users to organize meetings with ease, assign tasks to different team members and plan their workflow based on their calendar and the urgency of deadlines.
2. Human resources, allows users to schedule interviews in seconds, manage the process of interviewing new candidates, and gather feedback for potential new hires from various team members.
3. Marketing Talla can monitor Twitter, suggest tweets for shared content and offer on the spot analytics to show what content is hot and what is not.⁵

The Talla bot operates inside enterprise group messaging software, such as Slack, HipChat or Microsoft Teams, which has increasingly become an alternative to email as a method of digital communication within companies. Employees send messages to the chatbot just as they would a human, and it uses language processing software to understand the message and respond accordingly. Some 1,200 companies have installed Talla, about a quarter of whom use the service regularly, said Talla chief executive Rob May.⁶

The cost of bots?

The idea behind bots within the HR setting is to make the employees’ lives easier, while freeing up employee time to focus on areas that really require the human touch. However, as the bots learn and evolve over time one has to question:

• Will the human touch be needed anymore?
• What is the long-term effect of bots taking over the “grunt” work?
• What are the potential costs and lost opportunities as a result of relying on bots?

Rob May argues that “What’s actually going to happen is you’re going to allow the human resources department to be more human by automating away a lot of their grunt work,” he said.

A chatbot can help an employee locate needed forms or poll the staff on preferred holiday party locations, for example. “HR spends a lot of time doing these low-level, monotonous tasks and not really being as strategic and engaged as they would like to be,” May continued. “What you’ll find is that more of the work that does not involve collaborating with or interacting with other humans is the kind of work that will be automated away.”

Possibilities for Consideration: Take a step back for a minute, and consider…

• If we rely on bots to organize, assess, discern and manage our lives and jobs, are we not merely becoming robots ourselves – not having to think or assess we just follow our calendars and move from task to task?

• The laziness of the millennial minds, who are dependent on spell checks and calculators…

Social media didn’t ruin millennials. Copious participation trophies didn’t ruin millennials. A bad economy didn’t ruin millennials. Spell check ruined millennials. Spell check is the original “Google it.” Spell check meant we no longer had to educate ourselves with those cumbersome dictionaries. An angry, red squiggle under a word just meant we had to click spell check and accept the change. No learning necessary. We relied on spell check like the crutch it is and continued to embrace technological improvements.

Then instant messaging came along and we couldn’t even be bothered to spell words out anymore. We created an entirely unique language. It started with simple shorthand, a BrB here or a G2G there transitioned into idk which morphed into LOL and before you know it we couldn’t even be bothered to say carpe diem because Latin is dead, JSYK.⁷

• The number of people who would rather communicate via text, chat or email is growing. The art of having a conversation is being lost. Ethically, is this “problematic social norm” something businesses will simply adapt to, or reverse?
• As a culture, we are becoming increasingly conditioned to trust technology more than ourselves or other people. With an increasing use of bots, what will happen to the level of trust within organizations?

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
– B.F. Skinner

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.
– Steve Jobs

We need to develop Human Resource systems and processes where trust is created and nurtured, where people are empowered to communicate, collaborate and create.

• ¹ Oxford Martin School September 17, 2013
• ²HR.Com December 01, 2016
• ³Techcrunch.com May 07, 2016
• ⁴Recode.net April 11, 2016
• ⁵Washington Post.com December 07, 2016
• ⁶Entrepreneur.com August 26, 2016
• ⁷brokemillenial.com June 12, 2013

Take a moment and examine…

• As you reviewed the material above, what stood out to you?
• What is the potential impact, economically and/or socially?
• What action is needed to stop or support this idea?
• You may want to consider whether you:
  • want to be aware of,
  • should become supportive of,
  • would want to be active in this topic?

Add Your Insight

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.
LEONARDO DA VINCI