What are the best practices for using AI to analyze and improve employee engagement surveys?

The most popular AI tools (CHatGPT and Edge) can't accurately answer many basic questions about human psychology where the answer is well established. My favorite test is "Are men or women more prevalent in the lower 1% of IQ?" The answer is "men," but both engines provide equivocal statements that don't answer the question and try to explain how IQ works, that it's not a perfect measure, etc. Why would I trust AI to advance our thinking on engagement when it seems unable to correctly identify well-known facts in this field?

I agree, but also cringe with the thought that AI might still provide a somewhat inaccurate or a biased outcome. For now, the AI tools are not ready yet or perhaps the neural networks are not trained in such a way yet to provide deeper understanding of emotions and sentiments of those employees in a consensus.

Treat AI like a team of brilliant interns and you’ll quickly see the value for employee engagement surveys. Use it for automating decisions or implementing interventions and you’ll quickly regret your life choices. AI is fantastic when supervised and used to augment and accelerate your best practices, not replace them. Scouring the data for patterns, coming up with ideas/suggestions, and personalizing reports and messaging are just a few ways it can dramatically improve the work while adding value.

One of the concerns that AI may be able to address is that employee engagement has been measured now for about 20 years and with 20 years of interventions we are not seeing substantial improvement. So the question that AI may help us address is whether we are using the correct measures or not. A switch in measures may lead us to more effective interventions.

AI could make recommendations about wording of questions to ensure they aren’t double-barreled or leading. It could also suggest questions that are aligned to your business and talent strategy.

AI like ChatGPT can assist you in analyzing data from your employee survey, specifically with the comments section. The comments from employees can have common themes that you don’t want to miss. If you take all the employee comments & drop them into ChatGPT, you can then ask it to search for common themes. Once it provides you these results, you can follow up by asking it for recommendations to address these common concerns or requests. You can then ask ChatGPT to create talking points to use during the group discussion sessions with the employees. When using any AI, it’s recommended to inspect what you expect. Don’t just copy & paste!