How to Improve Corporate Culture with Artificial Intelligence
Contrary to press-propagated blames on rapid industry changes, unforeseen circumstances and uncontrollable crises, most business failures boil down to poor corporate culture. Interestingly, how corporate culture is perceived has changed just as rapidly as industries have evolved in recent times.
In the 20th and early 21st centuries, assessment of corporate culture focused almost entirely on how businesses treated their customers. For instance, the dent in Blackberry’s culture was caused by the company prioritizing its smartphone technology over customers’ needs. Meanwhile, how customers interact with technology was changing.
More recently, corporate culture has more to do with how companies manage communication internally than with their public relations. This is even more critical to a company’s survival because employees’ access to mainstream media has loudened behind-the-scene activities.
Top management has awakened to this reality. Now, appropriate internal measures are taken to enhance external outlooks. Some of these measures include DEI and ESG programs.
Amazing enough, the effect of these efforts goes beyond an enhanced outlook. The attraction of stellar candidates for employment, public reputation and the eventual survival of companies are loosely hanging on this “corporate culture” thread.
Uber is one of the recent major culprits of a poorly managed workplace culture. Its internal affairs, characterized by unhealthy competition, inappropriate communications and streams of sexual harassment have escaped the lid of its workplace like vapors from a heated kettle. The results?
A stock price that remains below its listing price even almost three years after its IPO. The loss of over 200,000 users and a 27% negative perception of the brand are also troubling repercussions of the company’s unmanaged corporate culture.
It’s hard to entirely blame these tech-based businesses, however, for their poor corporate ways of life. Before now, it was almost impossible to accurately measure the cultural wellbeing of a workplace. Remember, “what is not measured, cannot be improved.”
With the advancements in AI and the development of automated feedback software, companies can now quantify and measure various elements of their corporate culture, including emotions, sentiments, trust, care and others.
But, how is that even possible?
For propitious businesses, the workplace culture is imbued by the expression of appropriate emotions. Positive emotions (e.g. excitement, enthusiasm, hope, care, etc.) are encouraged while negative ones (e.g. anger, contempt, greed, etc.) are reproved.
However, overexpression of positive emotions could be as detrimental as the complete absence of those positive emotions. So, ensuring that the atmosphere within your organization is measured and well regulated is essential for success.
Quantifying these emotions will make it ten-fold easier to regulate. Sadly, studies show that measuring emotions has been one of the most disturbing problems for both scientists and entrepreneurs. But it doesn’t have to be.
Research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review explained that AI-powered facial recognition software can improve emotional measurement in the workplace. As remote working becomes a vital part of our professional lives, these facial recognition capabilities are being integrated into intelligent meeting assistants to track and analyze the sentiments of meeting participants.
Currently, these technologies promise to do more than recognize, quantify and measure facial expressions.
