2020 has been a very difficult year for many employees and I think there is no real need to explain why. Between feeling of isolation, increased pressure, difficulties related to experimenting with telework, their mental health was put to the test.
Companies have understood the urgent need to take care of the mental health of their employees. But what no one had anticipated is that in order to achieve this, employees trust robots more than people, and to their manager in particular.
This is all the conclusion of one that I urge you to download and of course I will comment on in this article.
2020: dose horribilis
To begin with, let’s share an inventory that will not surprise anyone: 2020 has been a very hard year for employees. For 70% of them, it was the worst year of their professional life.
The pandemic and its impact on the world of work has of course had consequences in terms of stress, isolation, work-life balance, lack of socialization, etc.
But I also note with interest that 40% of them say they face daily stressors in the workplace, such as pressure to meet performance standards, the routine and tedious tasks and the unmanageable workloads.
This puts the factors that I will qualify as managerial and operational at the same level as the most important mental factors. But we’ll talk about it again.
If we add to this that:
- 35% of teleworkers say they work 10 hours more than before per week
- 78% of employees say their mental health has been negatively affected during this period
- 85% of employees say their mental health problems at work have had an impact on their home life
we understand the urgency of addressing the situation on the part of employers, especially since at the end of the day 40% of employees say their productivity has decreased and they are making worse decisions at work.
Robots better placed than managers to solve mental health problems
So of course you might as well get straight to the point because this is the key figure of the study: 82% of employees believe that robots will better support their mental health than human beings.
We did not expect another conclusion from a study dedicated to the impact of AI on work, but I will refrain from accusing it of opportunism: already in 2015 I echoed another study showing employees’ preference for robots to the detriment of their manager, and in general, this Oracle study follows on from a number of weak signals that we have been seeing for some time.
We could stop there, but the biggest lesson from the study is why employees believe in the potential of robots.
So yes, employees prefer to talk to robots about their mental health problems because their opinion is not biased and they provide quick answers to their questions. Which is very interesting, if you read between the lines.
Indeed, the fact that a robot does not judge and keeps your secrets for him (although…) is seen as an advantage over a human and this will not surprise anyone. But what also matters for employees is to have answers to their questions relating to their mental healthe. And there I think their reasoning is quite pragmatic: rather than talking to a manager who will not know what to answer me or will have had a hasty training to give me basic answers, you might as well talk to a robot who will have had the same information or even a more detailed analysis.
Less hugs, more solutions
The employee seems to have a very practical conception of what he needs. He doesn’t just wanna talk he doesn’t want an ear to listen to him, he wants answers, operational and concrete feedback.
And it goes much further because when employees are asked what they expect from a robot, they say, among other things:
- help them prioritize their tasks
- complete tedious administrative tasks
- reduce their workload
- find them the information they need
It echoes. We can read among other things this:
“Do I want meditation lessons? Yes. But do they move the cursor over the things that matter, that will actually change the way an employee feels ? Non ».
or
“All you have to do is ask your employees for what they need. They will tell you: I need to work fewer hours. I need to be paid enough to pay for child care and groceries and to meet my needs. I need more resources at work to do my job. I need to feel safe when I need to take time off. I need not to be afraid of falling behind ”.
This is a point that I was led to note on subjects related to the employee experience and which logically comes up when we address the subject of mental health in a pandemic period: there is a real gap between the approach of some experts and many companies, and what the collaborators want.
For some, we are in calinotherapy. Employees need to talk, to feel good and therefore, once they have finished working, something must come to compensate for the impact of work on their mental health.
For employees, this is not enough. We must not compensate for what affects them negatively but remove the causes. They want their work to be changed, not for its negative effects to be offset. They want us to drill the glass ceiling that separates initiatives that touch the periphery of work from those that form the heart of the workflow. This is in line with what I emphasized at the beginning of this article: more than really “mental subjects”.», the employees complained about matters really linked to the working conditions and modalities of work.
And more than the obvious interest in robots, this is what I will take away from this study. Employees no longer want a “soft” treatment of issues related to mental health which, according to my favorite expression, amounts to “ build a sauna next to the torture room ». They want us to really take care of what’s going on in the torture room.
L’expert:
Bertrand Duperrin is Head of People and Delivery for Emakina, a digital agency present in 13 countries. Throughout his career he has worked at the crossroads between technology, talent performance and organizational performance. Previously, he held director positions in the world of Management Consulting or in software publishing. He is also passionate about the travel industry in general and the airline industry in particular.
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