Leveraging Emotional AI to Create More Effective Back to Work Policies

Psychological hesitancies can be a direct barrier to employee productivity and company culture. As employees transition back to communal workspaces, is enough being done to measure personal exposure?

As face to face conversation, our most descriptive and reliable method of communication has been taken away from the working environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, finding new methods to evaluate team sentiment is a necessity for a unified culture. Many companies worldwide are frustrated looking for novel ways to approach vaccine and back to work hesitancy in-house. By decoding the emotional profiles of employees on a grand scale emotional artificial intelligence can offer a greater more efficient solution. 

Creating a Back-to-Work Plan With Employees

Divisive world events have recently led to new business operational decisions and actionable progression towards a more equitable society. The unique factors of business practices and culture create a messy dynamic in terms of socially responsible issues, such as an employer’s back to work response to COVID-19.

The pandemic has affected many individuals in a unique way, it is discriminative as front-line workers are most susceptible to spreading and attracting the virus while often living with large families in small family homes. These once acute measures of diversity that shape economic production and geographic differences, disproportionately affect target populations of African Americans, Hispanics, and rural individuals. This indifference is a reason why personalized responses must be considered in planning a transition back to the office.

Nevertheless, some eager corporations are implementing a swift transition to the office for individuals currently working from home, who are disproportionately at a lower risk of contracting and or spreading the virus. This action led by employers and has resulted in a dark space for corporations currently assessing non-essential workers’ risk analysis.

The complex disease requires a multifaceted rollout of people and information technology to recognize emotions regarding the transitioning back to the office. With too many variables to analyze manually for a large organization, Heartbeat offers employers the ability to categorize and create metadata labels to make sense of large data sets. Enabling organizations to create cohorts of susceptible individuals who show higher than average levels of hesitancy.

Communicating Changes in Corporate Policy in Response to COVID

Since the inception of the pandemic, we have helped corporations explore shifts in attitude, behaviour and mood for specific target demographics. Heartbeats emotion and analytics provides an invaluable lens on the shifting sentiment addressing the re-opening of certain communities and businesses.

By prompting questions that elicit a detailed emotional response, corporations can easily filter through metadata trends and can effectively categorize themes in response to individual policies. By compiling employee feedback regarding proposed policy changes, employees also feel a greater sense of responsibility and value within the organization by providing unique input. Some example questions to measure individual hesitancies could be, how do you feel about taking public transportation? how do you feel when taking the elevator? or how do you feel in group environments such as conference rooms or lunchrooms?

The statistics gathered have played an imperative role in helping our partners determine what policies should be implemented during different phases of the pandemic.

Emotional AI is uniquely positioned to help provide critical metrics which help save researchers and employers hundreds of hours, to develop deep insights on a granular level. The implementation of big data and analytics changes strategic communication in organizations and the role of communicators. Measuring employee hesitancies thus far has seemingly been hard, but it doesn’t have to be.