Slack SVP of Research: HR must set the tone on AI, but leave the specifics up to teams
UNLEASH sat down with Christina Janzer to dig into the latest Slack Workforce Index all about AI and HR. Does HR have a seat at the table?
Research Insights
Slack surveyed 10,000 workers globally - while there's a productivity boom, there are other benefits like less stress, lower burnout and higher satisfaction at work.
But employers aren't quite getting AI right to reap these rewards.
Here's what HR teams, and organizations more generally, need to prioritize, according to Slack's SVP of Research Christina Janzer.
There is huge potential for AI to drastically improve productivity.
According to Slack’s latest survey of 10,000 global desk workers, out of the third already using AI, 81% saw a productivity boom.
But the figures that excited and surprised Slack’s SVP of Research and Analytics Christina Janzer is “the impact that AI can have on the employee experience”.
In an exclusive interview with UNLEASH, Janzer shares that she was not expecting to see that “people who use AI are more passionate about their jobs, they have better work-life balance [and] they have better overall satisfaction”.
Slack’s report showed that AI users’ work-life balance was 18% higher, they were 24% more satisfied at work, and 23% better at managing stress, and 29% more likely to say they feel highly passionate about their work.
Central to why AI can help with burnout, according to Janzer, is because it avoids frustration of “doing tasks you don’t care about”. These repetitive tasks don’t give employees meaning or value at work, and they aren’t a good use of people’s time.
The issue is that, unfortunately, Slack’s report found that what employees did with the time they got back from AI was just ‘more admin’ or busy work – “for me, that’s such a big wake up call” for leaders, notes Janzer.
Unless they course correct now, they are going to struggle to truly reap these productivity and employee experience rewards of AI.
What’s HR’s role with AI?
UNLEASH was keen to find out what Janzer thinks HR’s role is in this new era of AI-powered work.
She says that HR leaders, and all leaders, can really move the needle on training and encouraging people to experiment with AI – “that part is so critical, and most people are not paying attention to that”.
The key is “giving people that time and space to learn about this new tool, to experiment with it, to get their hands dirty”, and ultimately, have the time to get comfortable with this new tool (and start to use it in their workflow).
In fact, Janzer shares that when the team at Slack experiment with AI they find it is a culture builder.
“Everyone participated in this experiment together, they learnt something together, they share their experiences with one another”, and that build connections at work.
Christina Janzer, SVP of Research and Analytics, Slack.
Janzer is clear that while HR has a huge role on setting the tone on AI – aka encouraging and enabling people to experiment, providing the tools for them to use, and some guidelines and guardrails around use – the actual specifics around AI use need to come from individual departments.
For instance, how marketing teams and research teams use AI is going to be completely different.
It’s important to give every line of the business their own space to figure out how can I effectively use AI” – “it wouldn’t make sense coming from HR, or the CEO, it has to come from the subject matter experts”, concludes Janzer.
Her closing message to HR leaders on AI is that now is the time to step up; “if they do, then we’re going to be in a world where people’s jobs are better and they’re more productive”.
We’re a little way away from achieving that right now, but it’s all in our control – “we need to get attention on the right thing”.
