CHRO Leadership Must be Vigilant in Talent Retention and Using new AI Methods

CHRO leaders globally continue to reaffirm that attracting and retaining talent remains their biggest challenge, even with workforce shortages subsiding and employment rates holding.

The US unemployment Rate is 4.20%, compared to 4.30% last month and 3.80% last year. This is lower than the long-term average of 5.69%. In comparison, Canada's Unemployment Rate is 6.60%, compared to 6.40% last month and 5.50% last year. This is lower than the long-term average of 8.03%.

A recent Grant Thornton’s survey of more than 600 HR leaders confirmed that board members need to maintain their focus on oversight of staffing issues to keep their organizations trending in the right direction. At the same time, HR departments are focusing on training their workforces to use fast-emerging AI tools — while simultaneously incorporating AI into their own operations.

HR leaders said that behind employee retention is their No. 2 priority for the next 12 months (tied with employee attraction) is training and development.

It’s not difficult to see why training and development has accelerated due to advancements in AI, in particular generative AI.

AI presents opportunities for enormous improvements in insights and efficiency across the entire industry spectrum, but it’s emerging and changing so quickly that management, in many cases, is struggling to guide employees to use AI effectively and safely.

Nine out of 10 respondents to Grant Thornton’s CFO survey for the third quarter of 2024 said their organizations are already using generative AI, or they are developing use cases for the technology, and 54% of CFOs (a six-quarter high) say their boards have taken an active role in understanding generative AI governance. Meanwhile, 77% of HR leaders survey respondents said their organization has an AI strategy in place.

Our SalesChoice research also shows that although AI strategies may be in place, the effective selection of the right AI use cases and being able to sustain a successful new operating practice with strong ROI remains a dark horse on the AI highway. Even Goldman Sachs is raising major concerns about betting on GenAI, given its high operating costs and disappointing returns which is often less than 5%. The Goldman summer research report GenAI: Too Much Spend: Too Little Benefit is a worthwhile gander.

What is most concerning is the endless trend of continuing to lose employees due to their work/life balance not meeting their needs, further validating well-being remains a significant concern in the workplace for both management and employees. The work/life balance challenges indicate that maintaining mental and physical health remains a problem for many employees.

This is an area that demands board attention because the solutions are complex.

During Covid-19, SalesChoice partnered with Purolator a leading logistics and transportation company, and the Ontario Center of Innovation (OCI) to build a powerful new product called MoodInsights, which uses generative AI to intelligently categorize employee concerns and tap into mental health and well-being issues leveraging powerful analytical dashboards that correlated diverse hyper-parameters such as increasing claims, accidents, # of sick days, etc. to get a stronger daily pulse on new pathways to improve mental well being. In the next month, we will start to announce a major new release and channel relationships to help close these gaps which are so acute and simply not improving.

We have found that HR Executives and VPs of employee engagement recognize that their annual employee surveys are conducted on an annual basis simply are too slow. In addition, an employee annual survey is a lagging indicator. It is also less known but academic research has confirmed that more often than not over 60% of survey data is inaccurate or no longer relevant. Actioning process improvement teams on highly erroneous or irrelevant data is a waste of precious resources and time.

Surely there are better ways of modernizing an organization.

With this backdrop, we are starting to see a renewed uptake of energy to apply generative AI tools, and for CHRO's to hold a healthy degree of skepticism to ensure their AI use cases will resonate with their corporate cultures or business maturity.

Everyone is recognizing we are living in a time where speed is paramount and building generative leadership (real-time insights) is now possible with new ways of applying generative AI methods.

Simply summarized, "happy employees are far more productive and their turnover rates are much lower. "

To learn more about our AI solutions like MoodInsights or appreciate our HACE (Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement) DEI AI approaches, reach out to us and book a demo or check out our research on Forbes.

SalesChoice has also recently developed a complete Generative AI solutions lab, so when you are ready, we are ready to guide you forward with our Advanced AI services.