An unhealthy and toxic workspace can resist workers from innovation and damage a company’s reputation. Entrepreneurs have a big responsibility to keep the working environment safe, satisfied, and positive so employees can be innovative and productive.
It’s crucial to understand how to focus on workplace health and the emergence of AI tools and technologies that affect health in terms of mental, physical, and social workers across different sectors.
AI promises to change the workplace’s operating way, but will it be a good or negative way in workplace culture? It is expected that an AI tool could be used to provide a healthier and accessible work environment with more production.
Hazardous to Healthy
Whether it would be a physical or mental toxic working environment, it can reduce workers’ well-being and the company’s production. Emerging AI technology can play a significant role in the upcoming several years and beyond.
AI can functionally adopt contemplative practices into employee support, the workplace, and improvements in communication. Health-focused strategies can dispose of employees’ well-being and the company’s target, vision, and values.
Nowadays, Companies are implementing more health initiatives to preserve employee’s and company’s revenue. According to the 2017’s study, research, and surveys of the American Psychological Association Center, 61% of America’s working employees have experienced chronic work stress.
Well-being technology in the workplace
Well-being technology in a series of workplace innovations is consolidated with workforce monitoring, digital platforms, trackers, and occupational safety and health technologies. Cloud platforms contain employee data regarding business and communication of an organization’s wellness programming into the digital infrastructure. Cloud platforms, trackers, and work-monitoring tools are interconnected with the help of AI. Emotional well-being technology is also increasing in workplaces, such as the Ginger.io app, with AI pattern recognition; it provides emotional counseling.
It captures employee information from either an automated tracker or an input. Some e-health companies offer a combined output of metrics and action plans with advice and guidance via machine learning. Companies use AI and natural language processing to capture qualitative data from different sources and analyze it. However, 26% of companies are trying to decrease the cost of fitness-tracking tools to help the employee in health and fitness tracking. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing, AI-enabled wearable tools can help to identify workers in the office who struggle with productivity and stress or happiness.
Cognitive insights
AI can identify patterns to improve working behaviors by accurately processing employees’ data, referred to as cognitive insights. Machine learning, especially deep learning, can be intimate with the human brain’s activity to recognize these patterns by identifying images and speech. It makes higher probable matches amongst the same company or person’s behavioral data, even in different formats.
Overall, cognitive insights can fulfill its insights for enhancing the job performance integrated with wellness technology to identify speech patterns and modes of working.
Cognitive engagements
Cognitive engagements allow us to interact with employees more than customers. Cognitive engagement provides the following benefits.
Intelligent agents can answer questions in an employee’s natural language to provide support.
They provide answers on topics like employee benefits, IT, and HR policy questions.
It helps to personalized and engaging communications between higher-authorities and other employees.
Health treatment recommendation systems allow companies to create customized care plans. It considers the health status of workers and their previous treatments.
Workplace relationships
AI can provide smoother insights for creating cohesive and innovative relationships between HR and employees. HR and CEOs can use Etch, which will provide insights to identify the roles, projects, and progress through each employee’s filtered data.
AI can also track via smart ID badges of employees throughout the office. And, how the employees interact and collaborate can be increasingly predicted using AI. As computers became popular, the habits of the employees have been monitored during their computer work.
HR and employees can build a smooth working relationship with more trust and AI insights. It allows improving the innovation and transparency in the workplace, including a healthier work culture.
Office design
Besides the wearable tech and workplace relationships, AI can also provide physical and mental health by designing the office. AI delivers an opportunity to create a space and personalize for providing better productivity, transparency, and safety. Along with AI, personalized and emotional well-being technology can determine an employee’s physical or environmental needs. Automated sensors into the offices could adjust the natural lighting throughout the day.
AI can remember to water plants using the Arduino Powered Watering System. As a part of modern office design, the biophilic craze plays an important role. The Office Workplace Productivity survey of Gensler suggests that AI is an essential technology to help workers work in their spaces with real-time data to understand whether they need to break or change their workspaces.
In terms of safety, AI monitors the employees’ movements and speech patterns to recognize the danger or hazard for their safety. AI-powered devices like Orion Lab’s Panic Bot would notify the teammates automatically if any emergency occurred.
AI Advantages
AI promises to change the workplace’s operating way, but will it be a good or negative way in workplace culture? It is expected that the AI tool could be used to provide a healthier and accessible work environment with more production.
Decreases Human Error
Human factors play a huge role in workplace safety. Fatigue and stress may cause accidents. In the US, nearly 40% of workers are fatigue sufferers. AI cannot get stressed, unwell, or tired, which is a significant benefit that can decrease the cause of accidents and run the work within safety. In other words, AI safety makes the scale down of human factors in the workplace.
AI-SAFE (Automated Intelligent System for Assuring Safe Working Environments), launched in 2018, helps detect cleverly the correct PPE wearing for each working area using video footage, innovative algorithms, and machine learning. It determines whether employees are wearing the correct PPE or not suitably dressed. AI-SAFE sends a restriction alert if it found any worker in an improper dress in a working area. AI safety reduces risk.
Undertakes dangerous tasks
Although drones are not AI implemented until now, technology advances are trying to incorporate AI quickly by operating them to make decisions. A human can be replaced by drones to investigate dangerous situations and report valuable data. Also, robots can do the life-risking tasks that may result in the replacement of humans.
Construction site drones can gather data like humans do and also analyze them. The use of drones is rising by 239% in the construction industry between 2017 and 2018. According to one survey, drones are used to report over 50% of construction sites to improve safety. As a result, roof inspections become more efficient and safer that is most important.
Tracks Worker Location and More
Industry advancements are working on AI-powered wearable devices to track workers’ locations. Recently, wearable tech changes to EHS. Employers can use wearable tech for safety purposes extensively. The primary functions of Industrial wearables include
Tracking worker location
Overseeing vital signs – heart rate and blood pressure
Alerting to environmental risks
Issuing information to remote workers
Reducing the chance of musculoskeletal injuries
Improving staff training
Monitors Workplace Harassment
A happy worker is a productive worker. But, 81% of women workers have experienced sexual harassment in their workplace in the US. In 2019, AI was used to identify workplace harassment. AI can examine by scanning work emails using natural language processing to spot inappropriate phrases. It sends alerts if it finds any improper phrase. AI can discover unequal promotions and wage gaps by crunching data. AI can bring an equal and diverse workforce by recognizing the worker’s voice who is speaking the most in meetings, which provides business benefits.
Workplace Automation
Automation makes results in job losses in the workplace. We’re not at that stage to value the AI to bring automation in each industry enormously. AI is predicted to impact on transport and logistics industries alone. A human gets tired and needs breaks, but a machine-learning robot doesn’t need rest. So, it can effectively increase productivity.
AI disadvantages
Besides the benefits provided by AI in the workplace, it delivers some disadvantages.
Job losses
AI in the workplace results in mass job losses. However, the opposite result may come out. According to a Gartner report, AI could generate up to 2.3 million jobs by 2020. This varies for each industry, such as the number of jobs that may increase in the public sector, healthcare, and education. At the same time, in construction sites and manufacturing units, employees may face job losses.
Costs
AI technology comes at a considerable price. For individual development, basic AI can reach up to US 300,000 dollars, which is massive.
Lack of awareness
AI is not fully errored free. In Tempe, Arizona, a woman was hit by a driverless Uber car just last year while crossing a road. Autonomous systems like robots and driverless cars are taught by virtual training that doesn’t match real-life environments. So, AI still needs improvement.
A healthy employee is a happy employee. With AI’s assistance the workplace together brings the best qualities of each worker. The AI-powered tool is used to reshape the worker’s feel to operate and produce the work quality. However, there are still problems in AI which need to be worked out. Notably, the worker’s safety and productivity are undeniable. What do you think?
So, that’s all. We make sure you will get to know how AI can improve health and productivity by this comprehensive information. If you like our content, then share the article with your friends, family members, etc. If you want to ask any related questions, comment below, as we are trying to provide better to you. Follow my blogs further if you liked this piece!
