What is Employee Wellness?
Employee wellness is the idea of fostering the well-being of employees to bestow a positive gesture toward employees’ physical and mental prosperity.
There are various kinds of programs that are designed to robust employee wellness in an organization which include:
- Employee Assistance Programs
- Regular free Health checkups
- Healthy meal parties
- Yoga programs
- Mental health awareness programs
- Standup comedy shows for employees
- Happy Hours
- 10 Glass a Day water challenge
- Team Excursion
- Marshal arts sessions for female employees
- Gym subscriptions
- Allocated extra amount for purchase of Sports items
- Company sports
- Flexible Working Hours
- Encourage work break
- Providing Spa and rejuvenating coupons
- Rewards and recognition activities
- Friday fun activities and more
Employee wellness programs are the initiatives that employers implement to support and improve the physical, mental, and emotional health of employees. This as a result would further keep the employees satisfied hence enhancing retention as well as productivity.
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Role of AI in Employee Wellness
Artificial intelligence in employee wellness has a significant impact since it automates the entire wellness process and provides a 360-degree analysis of employees’ lifestyles along with providing vast solutions by predictive scrutiny to enhance employees’ well-being.
Let us take an insight into the role of AI in employee wellness:
1. AI as a Stress Tranquilizer
AI helps in tranquillizing stress by providing vast resources associated with employee wellness. Alongside, the AI can detect the probable burnout or anxiety in employees early by analyzing patterns in their behaviour and communication analytics, hence enabling timely interventions to resolve the same.
Employees irrespective of their job roles get swamped in work which causes burnout if not synced in alienation with various affecting factors such as:
- Employees’ mental health
- Proper Time management
- Work pressure
- Adequate working hours
- Healthy Work Environment
- Appropriate wearables
- Availability of opportunities
- Recognition
- Income and more
AI recognizes the areas that cause burnout and anxiety in employees through its statistical analytical algorithm and enables employers to make improvements in accordance.
2. Time Management
Time is the most precious asset for any organization. Inadequate allocation of working time or mismanagement of time can cause fatigue in employees. Hence resulting in exhausting the physical and mental health of employees and affecting the overall productivity of the company.
AI automates routine tasks by enabling smart scheduling of meetings, priority tasks, deadlines, and workload distribution. AI in payroll helps streamline the lengthy process, making it easy, and more convenient to process. It also sends notifications to employees before the prior arrival of deadlines to assure the completion of work in an organized way without hurtling.
It assists the employees to stay on track with their work with adequate recommendation facilities to foster the quality of tasks and enhance productivity. The continuous learning process ensures that AI tools become more effective in helping individuals manage their time better.
3. Easy Access
AI enables employees to access wide sources of resources shared by experts and researchers for reference which as a result upgrades their knowledge, uplifts confidence, and keeps them away from confusion caused due to complexities.
In addition, the AI-powered chatbot provision keeps an employee distant from stress by enabling virtual assistance and support instantly without delay.
The open AI resources are made available to employees for free which motivates them to learn new trends in their field of work as well as leverage them with additional information of their interest hence satisfying their cognitive urge of learning.
4. AI as Knowledge Enhancer
Artificial intelligence through its analytical algorithm and extensive knowledge-sharing platform, enables employees to share as well as get access to shared resources, which helps them get massive information regarding the required areas of necessities and iron out complexities.
Alongside, AI platforms provide a common forum where counterpart employees can share their experiences and challenges faced to give an insight into the trending tasks and the challenges associated with them. This would also help the employees get pre-prepared and nourish their skills to optimum.
It provides relevant information along with personalized support from mentors and experts in real time. This helps them accomplish their assigned tasks on time, and avoid the accumulation of pending tasks and delayed timelines.
5. Personalized Wellness Recommendations
Another important role of AI in employee wellness is it personalizes the wellness recommendations for employees as per their necessities and grey areas of their performances.
AI can analyze individual employees’ data such as health metrics, activity level, performance pace, achievements, work habits, and complexities faced in each task on the basis of which personalized well-being programs can be designed by the management.
It keeps the employee interested in work as well as the company culture and ethics elevate leading to surging of quality deliverance by the employees.
AI can also analyze fitness regimens, diet plans, and prevailing mental health, addressing the specific needs and preferences of each employee which makes it convenient for the organization to channel the employee wellness programs appropriately to suit the mental, physical, and emotional needs of their employees.
6. Virtual Fitness & wellness challenges
AI has a major role in employee wellness which include the virtual fitness sessions and challenges conducted by the top fitness enthusiast.
Employees can opt for favourable and required fitness programs as per their interests, health conditions, and convenience which keeps them rooted in the activities to maintain sound physical and mental health.
AI also analyzes fitness regimens and frames recommendations in accordance with employees’ physical and mental needs.
These AI tools can engage in empathetic conversations, offer resources for stress and anxiety elimination, and even identify potential mental health issues by analyzing language patterns.
7. Real-time Health Assistance
Unlike conventional approaches, AI enables employees to converse one-to-one with expert doctors and health professionals to get their health-related queries resolved in no time.
With advanced AI the conversation between the employee and the health professional remains end-to-end encrypted hence eliminating the chances of data leak.
Mental health issues in particular are stereotyped as mental illness for which individuals suffering from mental health traumas refrains from seeking doctors’ advice which affects their professional productivity.
With the contained security and extensive safety, individuals can reach out to various psychologists virtually without having to meet them personally and can get polymorphic options to seek the best counselling at their convenience.
8. Prior Health Monitoring & Prevention
Wearable AI devices like smartwatches and health-tracking apps equipped with AI track heart rate, activity intensity, sleeping patterns, and overall activity statistics which help employees understand their physical health and encourage them to make healthier choices that would robust their immunity.
AI can also analyze potential health threats for an individual as per the heart rate, and activity tracking, and by such early detection, employers can intervene to provide their employees with preventive measures for enhancing employee wellness.
9. Quick Assistance
Quick assistance by AI is one of the vital roles that benefit employee wellness. Some of the major assistance provided by AI include:
- Instant Health Information
- Around-the-clock availability
- Instantaneous Feedback- regarding health, work, tasks, or other factors that need mentorship or recommendations.
- Mental Health Assistance
- Language Assistance- Necessary for encouraging a diverse workforce
- Emergency resolution of queries and issues.
- Quick data scrutiny and more
AI not only streamlines the accessibility of content to employees but also makes it reachable to them within no time.
10. Predictive Analysis
AI algorithms provide predictive analysis of current trends of employees by giving an insight into the statistics of employees’ lifestyles, identifying current energy checks, dynamic program adaption, behavioral insight, and collecting integrated data associated with employees’ health.
This, as a result, notifies employees about their prevailing physical, mental, and emotional health and recommends dietary plans, healthier lifestyle ways, convenient exercises, meditational techniques, recommendations of experts and devise ideas to deal with stress as well as anxieties.
AI in HR also analyses the stimulating factors that instigate an individual to participate in wellness programs hence enabling employers to frame more appealing and appropriate employee wellness programs that would enhance employees’ interest and would also benefit their health.
11. Advanced Wearables
Many people have already started to use wearable technology to stay updated on their health. Watches nowadays come with inbuilt sensors that can detect a person’s heart rate, their activity throughout the day. Studies show that including wearables in the workplace can help in interpreting employee emotions.
With the help of wearable technology, employees will know when they are feeling anxious by their increased heart rate, and they can automatically disconnect a bit and take a breather. This will help improve employee wellness in the workplace.
The Gist of it!
The bottom line is enhancing employee wellness in the workplace is both a moral as well as a financial stickler for companies. Now more than ever, there is an urgent need to start paying attention to employees’ mental needs as well. Thus, with the help of AI, a company can create a positive and healthy atmosphere in this cut-throat environment.
It is not only essential for the physical, mental, and emotional capabilities of employees but it also fosters the work culture, ethics, and overall work ecosystem in a company. This yields in elevating qualitative productivity in work and enhancing the organizations’ image in the agora of businesses.
Alongside it is highly essential to strike a balance between AI-driven data as well as human intervention in employee wellness to make sure there is accuracy as well as empathy in the framed employee wellness programs.
