Supporting back to work initiatives with HR chatbots

HR chatbots can help you manage your workforce, whether in-office, hybrid or remote. Here’s how!

Senior Content Marketing Specialist

Tomislav Krevzelj

Senior Content Marketing Specialist

What is an HR chatbot?

HR chatbots are virtual assistants that are designed specifically to re-create human interactions with employees.

These chatbots serve two primary purposes:

  1. Improve communication: Employees (and even potential job candidates) can quickly get important work information.
  2. Improve efficiency: Your HR department can focus on the myriad tasks they handle daily instead of replying to flurries of queries from curious colleagues.

Keeping your workforce informed through a fast, single source of information keeps everyone on the same page. This replaces watercooler chatter and rumors as a source of “reliable” information that employees often look to when no other source is available.

During any times of change, HR employees have to answer the same sets of questions innumerable times. Even without change, your average HR worker usually is asked the same handful of repetitive questions several times a day.

HR chatbots address these common challenges every business faces.

And more.

Not too long ago, businesses worldwide faced a period of rapid change – a period that saw HR chatbots deployed to great effect.

Business challenges HR chatbots solve

Following the COVID pandemic, businesses faced the challenge of safely returning workers to the workplace. But with businesses operating in more than just one type of workplace, there wasn’t a universal approach towards ensuring employee safety that could work for all companies.

During that time, we listened to what our own clients had to say about the challenges they faced. We also learned lessons from own experiences managing our global workforce. It was a confusing and scary time, and business struggled with numerous questions including how to keep employees informed and engaged.

We discovered that one of the most effective ways to keep employees informed was to use a checklist of all the things they need to do before returning – and have a chatbot provide answers.

Building a chatbot is easy enough. There are powerful tools for all skill levels, and helpful step-by-step building tutorials.

With an HR chatbot, employees can ask any number of questions at any time of day over the most popular channels available – including WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, etc.

During this time HR chatbots helped answer questions ranging from health to work-related, and general questions. All advice provided by HR chatbots could be tailored specifically to the employee’s branch and location. In practical terms, this meant that if your branches in Scranton and Stamford opened on different dates, employees from each branch would receive information corresponding to their respective branches.

HR chatbots and employee engagment

A common challenge for returning workforces was helping employees feel engaged and providing them a platform for feedback.

HR chatbots are a useful tool for measuring engagement, since they can provide a conversational experience for employees to provide feedback. Morale, satisfaction, and productivity can be actively monitored using reporting tools that check the results of HR chatbot surveys.

Chatbots can conduct surveys, either through conversational AI chatbots or menu-based keyword chatbots before sending feedback to HR for consideration. They can also be used as a channel for employees to offer suggestions or voice concerns.

HR chatbot limitations – and how to address them

While HR chatbots can help provide employees critical information and collect helpful feedback, there are still potential limitations.

Employees dealing with this sensitive issue will want to have direct communication with their human resources representative.

For sensitive situations like this, it’s crucial to have a contact solution that facilitates human takeover – in this instance, management or an HR representative.

This will allow the exchange of sensitive information in a secure environment, ensuring employees are kept protected.

Your HR chatbot can be developed in a way that allows for HR personnel to seamlessly takeover chats of this nature and provide employees the critical, sensitive information they need.

Conclusion

HR chatbots help organizations streamline the return of employees to the workplace in an informed manner – and one that allows HR personnel to focus on more challenging tasks.

In addition, they can even enhance employee engagement by serving as a channel to measure how engaged your workforce is by collecting feedback in a conversational manner, giving your management teams the rich feedback to address challenges before they become problems.

Jan 5th, 2024
4 min read
Senior Content Marketing Specialist

Tomislav Krevzelj

Senior Content Marketing Specialist