The AI-Powered Manager: Leveraging Tech for Enhanced Employee Productivity
An MIT study found that AI can boost a highly skilled worker’s performance by 40%. With a statistic like that, it goes without saying that AI is a valuable tool to be considered throughout your organization. AI can help you be a better people leader by offering personalized employee support and alerting you when your team needs help or has a win that requires a reward.
Choosing solutions that actively use AI and aren’t just using the label in their marketing. Look for things that truly automate basic tasks rather than simply guiding you through them. Security is also a consideration; any AI solution you look at should wall off your company data and not use it to train its own AI or Large Learning Models (LLMs).
Will AI Replace Managers?
In every profession, some functions will be replaced by AI. But the AI should supplement the manager’s job, not make it obsolete. Consider high level reporting, for example - how many automated reports have you had to customize because they don’t take certain datasets or metrics into account? That customization and human touch is not likely to end with AI. Reports should be easier to generate since you can train models to understand your unique preferences and pull custom data automatically.
Despite AI being sold as a replacement for many job functions, this simply isn’t true when you start poking under the hood. The translation industry is just one example. They are about a decade ahead of the rest of us when it comes to embracing machine learning and automation. While AI tools have increased translation quality and sped up workflows, outputs still need to be checked by a certified translator.
Can AI Improve Manager Effectiveness?
AI has the potential to significantly enhance managerial effectiveness, too. Employee productivity tools like Prodoscore can provide guidance on where managers should focus their energy, offer tips for coaching employees and help speed up various tasks. It can help analyze employee performance data, identify skill gaps, and even recommend personalized training programs, fostering a culture of continuous improvement for managers and employees alike. AI can also automate routine tasks.
All of these benefits also free up managers’ time for higher-value activities like strategic decision-making and brainstorming, mentoring, innovation, and building relationships, which too often end up on the back burner.
Keep Security Top of Mind
If you haven’t started using AI tools yet, the best place to begin is in your productivity suite. Microsoft has Microsoft Pilot, and Google offers Gemini for Google Workspace. Both are much more secure solutions than going directly to ChatGPT since they firewall your company data, where ChatGPT does not - a big potential security risk you can’t take.
Both solutions work natively within either Microsoft Office or Google Workspace to help you create summaries for meetings, write emails with a specific tone, schedule meetings, and so much more. Spend some time with the tutorials for both tools to upskill and train your staff.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself and your staff with these tools, talk to your IT department about banning ChatGPT use in the organization to reduce security risks. Both Pilot and Gemini have the same capabilities, if not more, so ChatGPT shouldn’t be missed.
If you implement these tools in your productivity suite, you’ll be well on your way to a significant team-wide productivity boost. Once that is implemented, look for additional tools that offer AI capabilities for human resources, accounting, marketing and other job functions.
Monitoring AI Tool Uptake and Productivity
Once you start using AI or any technology tool, you’ll want to monitor its use by employees in your organization. You can do that with Prodoscore, which will tell you who is using which tool and how. This will help you coach employees with low AI uptake to get more comfortable with it, and give you a template for what technology solutions your high performers are using. Prodoscore is an employee productivity monitoring solution that can enable you to make data-driven decisions about your business.
