How AI Is Shaping Remote Work Strategy

The world has witnessed a dramatic change in the way employees used to work. With Coronavirus forcing more employees than ever to set up offices in their own home, businesses had difficulties in the first half of the year in adapting to these sudden changes. The second half looks much more organized. Now after working from home for more than one year and more, employees want to continue to work remotely.

Remote work has gained huge popularity over the past few years. Popular job platforms like Flexjobs confirm a remarkable increase in remote positions- starting from IT professionals to business executives to customer service providers. Tech giants like Google also confirm it will continue its remote work strategy until at least the middle of 2022. There is no doubt other businesses will also follow suit. 

Will office life ever return to the traditional process? Many businesses have already decided to continue remote work even post-pandemic. Remote work means the way of work will be more fluid and businesses will be less dependent on physical cues of face-to-face communication provided. At the same time, businesses require heightened integration of HR and remote work collaboration tools to flawlessly measure and maintain remote employee engagement and performance. Majority of the HR applications used by the companies are legacy based and siloes, making it impossible to identify signals of disengagement across various systems. Employees who have to use different solutions to accomplish their work will be less satisfied due to the overhead and lack of connected solutions. Using AI tools will help businesses to bridge the gaps with efficient work architecture which will eventually improve and increase employee productivity. 

In order to keep business growth consistent and to deliver the best service with less, businesses are increasing their investment in artificial intelligent solutions and machine-learning-based software. Businesses that have already implemented AI solutions to manage their remote work environments in the beginning phase are already getting the benefits of the system in terms of reduced costs and increased ROI. AI powered solutions will enable association of analytics and flag low-engagement of employees in remote teams. 

AI and digital workspaces are likely to empower monitoring work from home employees and help businesses to grow. Here are list of few business functions that AI-based solutions that business needs to manage their remote teams:

• Managing Remote Work with AI: Manager and HR professionals are required to tackle multiple tasks that let them comply with legal aspects for hiring as well as to maintain the policies issued by their respective companies. Finding and hiring the right employee can be a tedious and error-prone process when all of these issues are taken into account. When it comes to managing remote employees, the task becomes complicated for the managers to an extended level. Managers are always under pressure due to a business’ ability to monitor the productivity and efficiency of work-from-home employees. Fortunately, AI-based systems and machine learning are here to help businesses with solutions to monitoring employee performance in a non-invasive and correct manner. With the advancement in technologies, the modern systems are capable of using information to provide unbiased performance reports and deliver accuracy in every step that provides detailed insight about respective employee strengths and weaknesses on a step-by-step basis. Here the AI technology takes the lead and creates a level of inspection that is hard to reproduce through human management. The scenario is especially true for businesses that have a large number of globally distributed remote employees. 

With specialized AI powered monitoring tools, managers can easily know when their remote employees start to work, when they finish their work. The tool keeps the record of all work activities of individual employees and uses the work behaviours to measure employee productivity level.

• Collaboration tools: Virtual collaboration tools are imperative to enhance employee productivity. Collaboration tools allow remote teams to work together even when they are working from different locations.  The communication tools allow remote workers to conduct team meetings where employees can see each other through video calls, discuss important business matters, record the whole meeting for future reference and many more features. The tools also allow you to discuss with teams or individuals instantly, get their feedback and receive notification. All of these features and accessibilities helps to improve the service flow, save time, and enhance team productivity. So, you become more comprehensive, less intrusive.
• Improved efficiency in Hiring Process: Hiring managers know how difficult it is to find the right candidate for their business. The process of sorting CVs and finding fitting candidates is a time-consuming task. Recruitment is often a lengthy and tedious task, and when there are a lot of candidates, there’s always a chance that skilled candidates can get overlooked.  Artificial intelligence plays a pivotal role in internal recruitment. Computer programs are capable of automatic filter options where the program is able to pick out key attributes and desirable qualities in candidates. With this in mind, AI and recruitment processes are a match made in the future. It helps businesses save time and allow skilled employees to work for companies based on their qualification, rather than their proximity to the office. You may even use an HR software like Keka to provide great candidate experience before and after joining
• Real-time Support: For customer-centric operational fields, AI technology is enormously helping remote workers to quickly solve customer issues. For example, a customer agent raising a ticket for a customer to fill up request forms describing the issue. This information is saved and can be passed to the right department for future communication as well. The volume of customer interaction is drastically increasing, and with a flood of incoming tickets, agents can fail to understand which ticket to prioritize first. Here is where AI technology can help, the automated ticket allocation enables the representative to solve the most frequently occurring cases first. AI-based ticketing systems are programmed to ensure that every user gets a personalized response. AI powered real-time support is another best way to handle huge volumes of  customer cases and also gives representatives enough time to understand which issues are the most urgent. 
• Documents & Identity verification: AI and virtual assistant are on the top list of any businesses to provide a faster work process. Any business organization that needs to verify its customer’s ID or any other documents can use AI technology. Instead of manual check by employees, Al solution can quickly perform face-matching and signature validation for a digitized process, making it paperless operation and saving both time and cost.

As the number of remote workers are increasing gradually, technology will continue to adapt to these new systems of work. AI based tools are making it easier for businesses to manage remote work in a much easier way to make our lives a little bit easier. Different businesses can take the benefit of AI-based solutions to support and improve employee productivity, eliminate user frustration, and create better business outcomes.