It starts with trust: Using AI to drive workplace wellness

As cliché as it sounds, if organisations want to deploy AI as a legitimate driver of workplace wellness, they must first build a foundation of trust that uses it as a focus for improved employee wellbeing, not monitoring or surveillance.

As AI integration continues to steamroll through the Australian workplace, different systems and programs are being levied as potential areas for implementation. One of those is workplace wellness, which has been communicated as a landing spot for AI, with many believing it can be a great service towards improving workplace wellness across Australian organisations.

HR Leader recently spoke to Logicalis Australia’s head of employee experience, Scott Brown, and Gartner’s vice president of research and advisory, Aaron McEwan, regarding the process through which AI would be implemented in a wellness context and the possible pitfalls that are already arising in this context.

Brown explained that it’s a process that is going to take time, as health data historically is something that tends to lag, regardless of the process that is used to acquire it.

“If you think about [it] historically, wellness data and information tends to have a lag to it, and we tend to treat the outcome, not the symptoms along the way or the warning signs,” Brown said.

“So, for us to be in a position where we can identify those quicker, opposed to just either receiving employee information or engagement data … this is something that gives us the ability to address things in way more time-bound and with live information, opposed to kind of treating the symptoms at the end.”

Brown believes that it’s a space where AI can thrive, if implemented in the right way, with the correct mindset of uplifting employees.

“I think people look at AI, and they see [it] as a threat as well as an opportunity, and when you think about it in the wellness terms, the ability for AI to play a part in pushing employees or identifying either risks or opportunities for employees in that wellness space and being able to suggest and address those issues quickly, that’s hugely important, hugely advantageous, and not something that we’ve been able to do quickly,” he said.

Speed was a major theme of Brown’s analysis of how AI can be a driver for workplace wellness, continually highlighting how what has previously been a slow and rigorous process in terms of garnering data, can now be a rapid activity.

McEwan also believes there’s a huge opportunity for AI to really be a force for change in the wellness space.

“There’s a huge opportunity for organisations to use these tools to help recognise when people are at risk of burnout, to even design jobs in such a way that they are more sustainable, and to implement things like what we refer to as proactive rest, which can help offset some of the risks of burnout and mental health challenges within the workplace,” McEwan said.

Although both experts clearly outlined the positive aspects that AI integration can offer the wellness space, it has the potential to drift towards a very exploitative monitoring and surveillance tool used against employees rather than to uplift them.

“It comes back to the trust issue. There are restrictions around how organisations can use the data that they collect on employees, and legislation around the world in relation to workplace privacy is becoming increasingly tightened,” McEwan said.

“So, first of all, organisations need to be aware of what they can and can’t do with the data that they collect. The second thing is this trust issue. So, employees generally do not trust their organisations to use that data in the right way.”

“The point I’d make is that employees are willing to share that data with their employers as long as it’s being used to improve the employee experience and help them manage the challenges that they face at work. Otherwise, if it’s just a bunch of AI agents spying on employees, that doesn’t bode well.”

Not going about this the right way could be extremely detrimental for the organisation as a whole, as it can directly diminish trust between employees and employers. Then, this process that was originally supposed to operate as a workplace wellness initiative has now developed into a business detriment, driving a wedge between the two parties.