6 AI use cases for companies with hourly workers

1. Employee training

Compliance training is required regardless of the employee type. One aspect of training in which AI can help the HR team is in making sure courses only include material that a certain employee needs to know.

For example, AI can determine what courses hourly employees must complete and if hourly employees can skip some.

The CHRO’s subordinates can also reference employee training data if the company is looking to fill full-time positions. An hourly employee who is caught up with their training and has sought out extra learning opportunities could be a good candidate for a full-time job.

2. Hiring

AI can potentially help with hiring hourly workers. For example, AI can help review resumes and summarize interview notes.

However, AI bias in recruitment is an ongoing issue. CHROs should make sure their company’s recruiters are aware of the problem and taking as much action as possible to prevent it, and CHROs should also make sure that recruiters are completing tasks that should be performed by humans. For example, a human recruiter should decide whether to move forward with a candidate.

3. Onboarding

Onboarding employees is a very important process regardless of the employee type. However, onboarding may be simpler for hourly workers than salaried employees.

An HRIS’s AI capabilities can help ensure that only required tasks for hourly workers are assigned to new hourly hires and their managers. For example, an hourly worker may only need to fill out compliance forms and complete mandatory product training.

4. Scheduling

Scheduling hourly workers can be a difficult task, especially for organizations with 24-7 operations. For example, a company may restrict hourly workers from working overtime. Hourly employees may also have scheduling conflicts that a company must work around, such as school hours.

A manager can use AI to schedule hourly employees in a way that meets both the company’s and the workers’ needs. AI can also review any schedule changes and ensure that the changes aren’t breaking any rules for hourly workers. For example, if an employee calls in sick, AI can only recommend employees who will continue to meet established guidelines if they work that shift.

5. Employee engagement

Organizations must keep hourly workers engaged as well as full-time employees. A CHRO’s subordinates can use AI tools to simplify the process of measuring engagement.

For example, AI can summarize long paragraphs of feedback from employee surveys and create charts and graphs of employee feedback data.

6. Performance management

Not every organization includes hourly workers in the company’s formal performance management program, but AI can still potentially provide managers with some ways to evaluate the performance of hourly workers.

AI can compile feedback from employee recognition tools, manager notes about employee performance and customer reviews to create a report about an hourly employee’s performance. AI can also include in the report information such as the number of courses that the employee has completed and number of customers assisted to provide further insight into a worker’s performance.

Eric St-Jean is an independent consultant with a particular focus on HR technology, project management and Microsoft Excel training and automation. He writes about numerous business and technology areas.