operational resilience with AI

Improve your operational resilience with AI.

This article explores 2 ways in which all organizations can benefit from integrating AI into their operations to become more resilient. We chose to talk about Employee Attrition and Operational Intelligence because of the current business climate and the awareness that most business are 1) struggling to keep good people and 2) struggling to managing relevant data on their operations in real time, all the time. 

AI has evolved significantly in recent years, creating a hype cycle around the rich capabilities in output from LLM’s like ChatGPT, LLAMA and others. We have seen significant advances in output from image generation, music composition, text generation, and language translation. This evolution has created mixed responses including the fear of losing jobs to advances in process automation assisted by AI. 

As with most significant leaps in technology, fear of the unknown precedes widespread adoption. There is no doubt that AI will seep into all aspects of daily life making applications smarter, easier to use and driving improved experiences for users. 

Businesses who move early to leverage the new advances in AI, they will create better opportunities to optimize and automate internal processes, capture more accurate information around all operations and deliver better experiences for their customers. 

In this article we will focus on 2 areas where we see business struggle, where a transformational mindset and effort could be helpful in bringing meaningful change and improvement.

1. Employee Attrition
2. Operational Intelligence 

Maintaining a low employee attrition rate is a critical aspect of keeping a stable and productive workforce. Most employers are dealing with high attrition due to new attitudes towards work. The gig economy is real, and workers have learned to develop several options as alternatives to traditional model of work. In addition, remote work has provided options for workers to relocate to leverage alternate means of livelihood. At the same time, employers continue to compete for a static talent pool, making the job market highly competitive. 

We tend to follow traditional approaches for dealing with attrition in areas such as compensation, benefits, career development, rewards and recognition, work-life balance, work environment, surveys, DEI, etc. While these approaches are great, they don’t seem to move the needle these days for real results. 

The problem is, most of these approaches are employer driven and not employee driven. The voice of reason for the attrition levels we see these days speak to the fact that employees are exercising their voice of choice at the employment table, and for those who aren’t listening, the struggle to retain and find good people will only get worse as the choices for alternate work continue to expand. 

If you want to attract people who want to stick around and participate in your journey, you might want to consider the following as well: 

1. Share the Vision and ask for participation: Throughout the employee lifecycle, it is always a good idea to share a clear vision of why the organization is in business to do the things “we do”. The “why” can be scaled down to the task level, if need be, the point is to create alignment as to why both sides are engaged and provides a reason that guides intentions, actions, and outcomes. This action also serves to provide validation. 

2. Trust and Integrity: When leadership teams demonstrate integrity, trust is built, and when the staff gains trust, great people tend to stick around. 

3. Enable a great referral culture: People who enjoy what they do tend to rave about their jobs and the environments they thrive in. When the work environment stimulates personal growth, job satisfaction and a good work experience, a referral culture is easy to cultivate. A great referral culture is known to drive down costs related to hiring. 

4. Hire based on candidate persona: We write up a job requisition and go through an interview “process” that grades individuals based on how accurately they answer screening questions. Biases in screening, quizzes and the processes will only produce candidates equipped to align with those biases. Consider new approaches to get to know candidates and understanding the contours of their personas and how those personas fit within the organization culture and ethos first. Notwithstanding, candidates must still be qualified to perform the job they are applying for. 

5. Adapt the role to the person and get out of their way: Enable your staff to work with all the support they need and get distractions out of their way. Don’t be afraid to adapt the role and its processes as needed if there are ways to improve outcomes based on recommendations from staff. 

6. Understand loyalty: People demonstrate loyalty in different ways. Use surveys and conversations to understand what makes your people loyal to the organization. Learn to do this well and this might be the most valuable metrics you need to keep people around. 

7. Be flexible, life happens: Provide flexibility and accommodate personal time for the team. Flexibility around personal time is empowering, provides a sense appreciation, and improves loyalty.

Leverage data science to manage employee attrition by improving data collection around the traditional functions we already have in place and use our learnings about employee sentiment to evolve towards an informed viewpoint of the candidate’s individuality and persona in relation to the organization’s ethos. 

Introduce data driven on-boarding approaches that consider the unique requirements of the candidates’ engagement with the organization, and the current workforce, to deliver a meaningful model of the candidates likely experience after on-boarding. 

Use AI to generate and illustrate models based on ongoing feedback and changing circumstances to simulate and modify the workplace experience, so that employees are motivated to stay because of a true sensing of trust and belonging.

Operational intelligence is gained when businesses constantly engage in collecting, analyzing, and utilizing real-time data from operational systems and processes to gain insights, make informed decisions, and improve overall business performance. 

Businesses that have learned to do this well, tend to be more agile, efficient, and responsive because they have quick access to the relevant data needed to optimize operations, enhance experiences, and drive innovation. 

What matters now is to consider how AI’s impact will evolve how operational intelligence to transform business operations in the future. These are a few areas we think are important to understand for possible adoption:

1. Cognitive Assistance: As business systems become more integrated with AI capabilities to create sophisticated capabilities to assist human decisioning with context-aware recommendations, explanations, and scenarios; thereby enabling informed choices.

2. Adaptive Learning: AI systems are increasingly better at learning from new data and adjusting their models and algorithms accordingly. This adaptability may enhance their accuracy and relevance in predicting outcomes and suggesting actions. Integrating these newer and faster learnings could impact business operations in ways we can’t yet imagine, but getting started now with basic learning systems in tandem with problematic operational areas is a great place to start getting value from AI. 

3. Holistic Insights: AI services can be leveraged to converge data from various sources across the organization, including devices, social media, services, customer feedback, and others to provide a comprehensive 360-degree view of operations, leading to more accurate insights.

4. Autonomous Innovation: Associating automation with service delivery capabilities driven by insights from AI systems, businesses will be able to uncover new opportunities for innovation and growth. New levels of innovation could be reached through the autonomous development of new products, services, or business models based on emerging trends.

5. Converged Collaboration: Collaboration between departments across organizations and stakeholders across industries can be converged while maintaining controls across channels for security, identity, and intellectual property. With access to real-time data, it becomes easier to align goals, share information, and work together to achieve common objectives progressively.

In considering these 2 focal points, it is easy to see how businesses can engage in a significant step for transforming their operations towards a more resilient posture that embraces the benefits of AI to retain staff while leveraging data more effectively to uncover powerful operational. 

In tandem, integrating AI systems early opens the door for faster and more responsible innovation cycles while maintaining a more human focused and collaborative environment for all.

Reach out to Origo today to discover how we support businesses like yours on their transformation journey.

Isaac Inkumsah, CEO

Origo