Are your colleagues lousy at communicating with each other? A chatbot could help, specifically one called . Developed by the London-based HR company Saberr, it asks about workplace dynamics and provides the team with reports. A unit within the UKās National Health Service is trialling it, as are 10Ā companies, including Unilever and Logitech.
When Coachbot arrives in the workplace, staff have to introduce themselves to it.
āTeam members start by saying hello to CoachBot, and are then asked about who they are and what they do,ā says Tom Marsden, Saberrās CEO. After 10-minute sessions to identify problems and delve into grievances, āCoachBot then creates a plan to try to improve the teamās overall performance,ā he says.
Advertisement
Engaging its services costs Ā£8 per month per employee. One early adopter is Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust, which specialises in mental health. The trust is now using it for 30 staff members over a 12-month period to see if it helps improve outcomes for patients and employeesā perception of the effectiveness of their teams.
Bite-size coaching
āIt has great potential for us because it offers bite-size coaching that the teams can work on at a time that suits them,ā says staff member Jess Lievesley. āIt means we donāt have to take days out of service for long courses, and if we need to move things around due to patient needs we can do so without incurring extra cost.ā
Questions Coachbot asks include āIs your team productive?ā and āDo you trust each other?ā This questioning eventually leads to CoachBot identifying some team-wide and individual goals that it will keep tabs on. If they arenāt being met or team morale is low, CoachBot suggests activities to try to improve things. These come straight out of āmanagement scienceā, and include options like changing the way meetings are run or recommending the team plays a board game together.
Thereās some evidence that people may prefer to divulge their woes to a chatbot. In one study, members of the US army were more likely to admit to mental health issues, using illicit drugs or drinking alcohol when talking to a chatbot than in an old-fashioned written questionnaire. If this extends to office politics, people may be more willing to speak their mind to CoachBot than via other means.
But donāt expect too much beyond that. āOne of the key skills of any [human] coach is to pick up on the emotional aspects of a group ā something which a bot is probably not so good at doing,ā says at Cass Business School in London.
Even if the technology develops, not everyone is convinced that it will ultimately be beneficial. āI think it could be successful in a rather cruel and sinister way because it will force people to record every little move they make,ā says at Stockholm University, Sweden. āIf it turns out that when this data is processed that a person is not performing as efficiently as they should, they could be left out of a team,ā he says.
āThere is also a real danger that a coachbot could actually get in the way of doing the job,ā says Spicer. āThis would happen when employees spend more time interacting with the robocoach than each other.ā
This could also mean that managers are lulled into complacency and fail to do their jobs properly. Marsden says thatās not their intention. āWeāre not trying to replace human conversation,ā says Marsden. āWeāre trying to augment it with better information.ā
