IBM has spent the last five years to use its artificial intelligence tools to design HR initiatives that assess employees and prepare them for internal mobility and career advancement.
The company is recreating its activities from the manufacture of computer fleas and the sale of low -end equipment to cloud computing, technological services and cognitive solutions, and wishes to stimulate its talent pool to support this change.
The importance of aligning the skills he will need to achieve his objectives on his commercial strategy cannot be underestimated. IBM’s workforce increased from 426,751 employees in 2010 to around 350,000 today. However, whether it loses employees or adds more (company managers cannot say how many workers will be added when IBM is finalizing its acquisition of $ 33 billion from the Open Source Red Hat software company), the emphasis is placed on improving the expertise of employees.
“Our greatest area of opportunity, while we are waiting in advance is the growing management of skills and skills,” said Obed Louissaint, vice-president of talents, Watson Health & Employee Experience at IBM. Watson is IBM’s technological continuation of AI services, applications and tools.
To succeed, Louissaint said that the HR service is associated with commercial divisions through IBM to assess the necessary skills, which has the expertise among the current basin of company employees, the number of employees with certain necessary skills and which must be trained to fill the skills difference.
“We have modernized the way we think of jobs,” said Louissaint. Since business managers believe that AI and automation will modify all jobs in one way or another in the next five to 10 years, the company uses technology to use information on IBM workforce.
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Louissaint said that around 50,000 IBM employees are registered in the company’s blue correspondence program, which uses predictive analysis to generate a job list currently available according to the location, the remuneration note, the role of post, experience and other factors.
Once an employee has opted for the service, he receives weekly notifications to see potential job matches. So far, 1,500 IBM employees have moved to new internal jobs.
Another program supported by AI called Cognipay helps managers make better remuneration decisions by evaluating performance data, which other employers pay for similar jobs and what is demand for similar skills. The analysis also includes the planned internal demand for their expertise and voluntary attrition of employees with the same skills.
Following managers acting on Cognipay’s recommendations, the attrition of IBM estimates was reduced by 50%.
IBM AI and Watson Analytics are also used to feed MyCa, the virtual career advisor behind the company’s career Watson of the company, an IBM program that helps employees identify skills gaps. Citizens Bank uses Career Coach for his own employees to suggest new jobs and recommend training, videos to watch and equipment to read according to the professional interests of employees.
According to IBM estimates, tools like Cognipay, Blue Matching and Career Coach saved the business more than $ 100 million last year. Total economies are calculated by counting the expenses that IBM has avoided in the supply and recruitment of new talents, hiring and training new employees, as well as the costs associated with the value of workers who would likely have left the company because they do not envisage career progress.
In fact, IBM IBM deployments have revealed the inadequacies of managers’ exams, which are often subjective and do not give a precise image of the employee, said Louissaint. For this reason, IBM has abandoned the annual performance examination in favor of assessing skills among employees on a quarterly basis.
“We have gone from an annual performance note to a coaching framework where we give employees comments on a continuous basis and an annual assessment in five dimensions, which are skills, commercial results, responsibility for others, customer success and innovation. It is more of the development of talents than an annual evaluation,” said Louissaint.
In conversations with IBM HR leaders, Ben Eubanks, Shrm-Scp, Senior Analyst at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, a human capital research and advice company, said they told him that they were using IA tools. “They seem quite satisfied with the way things are, and they believe that AI withdraws many human biases that are inherent in HR decisions,” he said.
He added that the recent extensions and contractions of the company’s workforce created a net emphasis on implementation and reskilling workers. “One of the decisions they made a few years ago were that they had to be clear about the skills that counted and this is one of the reasons why their objective is to focus on conversation of skills,” said Eubanks. “If I have advice to the IBM team, it would be to make sure that in the middle of the conversation around the AI, they focus on not losing the human room. I have the impression that they kept a finger on this pulse.”