From health to productivity: How bots are changing the way we work

The global lockdown has not only changed the way people work but also the entire employee experience (EX). The expectations about EX is now significantly higher and organisations are turning to smart tech to attain it.

Employee experience is key since it can change culture by focusing on things that only people can respond to - like trust, pride, meaning and purpose. What’s most important here is ‘people’. Employees can affect the changes an organisation needs to make as it continues to navigate through the pandemic.

But technology has a role in this too. Facebook, in a blog posted on Workplace, has written about how organisations have used tech to bring people and teams closer by creating new ways to collaborate. And according to the blog, some of the most exciting use cases revolve around the use of bots.

The blog titled ‘How using bots can help boost your Employee Experience’, Kristin Marschhauser writes that workplace bots can help people perform a variety of tasks more efficiently and seamlessly. For example, the DocuSign e-signature bot. It allows people to send and sign documents easily and securely through a simple bot.

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Bots can also help solve HR challenges timely - something that Mercado Libre has been doing. Workplace bots have also helped the Mercado Libre team perform day-to-day tasks like providing unbiased interview feedback to potential candidates in real time, and to schedule several Quarterly Development Sessions with team members.

RHB Singapore have been using Workplace bots to automate and manage mundane administrative tasks, like the scheduling and booking of meeting rooms and handling of FAQs. Tasks are now error-free and RHB employees can spend their time much more efficiently on areas that affect the bottom-line, like delivering enhanced customer experiences.

Another example is WW. WW is a wellness company dedicated to helping people live healthier lives, started exploring the use of bots on Workplace to communicate with their staff more effectively. They worked with a Facebook partner, The Bot Platform, to develop an employee recognition bot named “Ripple” that encourages peer-to-peer nominations and promotes corporate values and behaviors.

Closer to home, Panasonic India also used the Huminos COVID-19 bot to simplify one-on-one communication on Workplace chat, share FAQs on the pandemic, and gather information through surveys.

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Clarins UK created a new digital productivity bot for their field and office teams in the UK which they called the Clarins Assist: People Directory. Employees can simply open the bot using Workplace Chat and search for the key details of any Clarins UK individual working in an office or field role simply by searching by their name. 

The bot then retrieves their job title, desk phone, mobile phone, email address, department and location/floor. The bot also enables employees to make direct calls to the Head Office Reception Desk and IT Service Desk as well as providing them with the list of Fire Wardens and First Aiders easily.

While all this sounds easy enough, bots can also help remote workers by asking employees questions about their hardware, internet speeds and home working environment to ensure employees were adequately set-up for long-term remote work. It significantly speeded up the process and ensured the teams at Moneypenny had the essential tools they needed to deliver excellent customer services for their customers.

Bots can also be used to schedule smart surveys and collect real-time feedback that can give a company an insight into how the employees are doing health-wise. And also mental well-being.

Moneypenny used bots for this purpose too, using a ‘How are you doing?’ bot to check on employee well being and gauge their work-life balance. Clarins UK created a bot that reminds people at 6:00 PM local-time to finish work for the day and retain a healthy work-life balance.