How to Improve Dynamics with AI for a Smart Workforce: Meet Jules
The Challenge of Workforce Dynamics Today
Soft skills are increasingly important in the workplace. AI strategies can help an organization hone in on the set of soft skills that drives employee success and the ways to measure and assess those soft skills in job candidates and employees.
In addition to being among the strongest predictors of personal and professional outcomes, soft skills guide how we interact with the outside world and react to different events and situations. Understanding one’s soft skills can give us a huge leg up in finding the best way to engage with a person and find the most effective way to communicate with them.
People have an incredible innate ability to make quick judgments about other people based on very little information. The biggest role in this process is how similar they are to us. Of course, as we get to know someone better, we learn more and adjust our interactions. However, people are complex beings, and the truth is that even a lifetime together with a person doesn’t equip us with a perfect understanding of who they are and bulletproof knowledge of how to interact with them.
At our workplace, we usually have far less than a lifetime with our managers, reports, and colleagues. In fact, we may know very little about them, especially in a remote work environment. Yet, we need to interact with them all the time, and I would argue that we are not very well-equipped to do so. This often leads to conflicts, personality clashes, and toxicity — all factors that lead to team dysfunction and high turnover.
To alleviate these kinds of problems, for decades, large organizations have been conducting workshops and training and using different tools (like DISC) to profile team members. These trainings come and go, but they rarely have the desired impact. Employees get back to their daily grind and quickly forget what they have learned.
Introducing Jules, Cangrade’s AI Copilot
Cangrade is proud to offer a transformative solution to guide dynamics in the workplace – Jules, an AI Copilot that’s the first of its kind.
As part of Cangrade’s soft skill assessment process, we collect a complex set of talent intelligence that contains 50 different personal attributes. The combination of these attributes is unique for each person, in the same way as their DNA is. In the past, our main use for this data was to learn about job success patterns and to create a model to predict it.
But there is another extremely valuable way this talent intelligence can be used. Using this data in conjunction with Generative AI can lead to impressive results. By putting it in the context of a specific question or situation and providing the necessary safeguards against unsafe or inappropriate workplace practices, it’s now possible to get insight into the best way to manage interactions with a candidate, employee, manager, or peer. Jules will help you find the right tone, the right approach, and the right strategy to achieve your desired objectives while avoiding hidden pitfalls.
Let’s say you are a recruiter, putting together a job offer for a finalist candidate. The candidate seems hesitant and is potentially considering a competing job offer. What is the best strategy? Should you try to get the candidate excited about your company? Increase the offer? Talk about growth opportunities? These are usually unanswerable questions, so recruiters often don’t attempt to improve the odds. But this no longer has to be the case. At the drop of a hat, recruiters can get the best-customized strategies for any situation as if it were coming from a world-class I/O psychologist with a deep understanding of the candidate in question.
When it comes to managing teams and communication between team members, the need for informed professional advice is even higher. Each of us can probably come up with countless examples of different challenges in our day-to-day with our colleagues, bosses, and reports, like:
- Jordan has been less responsive in team communications and has missed several important deadlines for submitting their sales reports. What should I do?
- Ashley is struggling with teamwork in a group project. How can I help them collaborate better?
- Ari needs upskilling in negotiation. How should I train them?
- What is the best way to communicate with Arturo?
- I’m considering Terry for a promotion to team lead with 5-10 direct reports. Do you think they’re ready?
Having a ready-to-go assistant at the tip of managers’, recruiters’, and maybe all employees’ fingers to answer these questions will fundamentally improve communication and dynamics across the board to achieve better results.
But of course, several questions should be answered about Cangrade’s AI Copilot, Jules, before we ask anyone to trust it with critical workplace advice.
- Is this ethical?
It has always been our view that AI technology poses many ethical risks. In order to eliminate these risks, AI makers need to take a proactive approach to building the necessary checks and balances that prevent AI from exhibiting unethical behaviors or leading to unethical or illegal outcomes. Cangrade has a history of leading the industry with its patented hiring bias removal from AI hiring.
Jules presents a challenge different from AI hiring algorithms, but Cangrade continues to be committed to keeping it as ethical as any other part of its talent intelligence platform. Every request to Jules is run through a number of filters to ensure that the question fits the norms of ethics and professionalism. It will refuse to answer requests deemed unprofessional, inappropriate, or irrelevant.
It’s also not unreasonable to ask if this kind of unique insight, using psychometric information about a person, can be seen as manipulative or exploitative. The answer to this question has everything to do with Cangrade’s commitment to ethical norms. The way Jules is instructed to respond is to prioritize improving the outcomes for all parties, rather than gaining an unfair advantage to the AI Copilot user. This gives us high confidence that this tool will not just help in specific situations, but will fundamentally improve the relationship between the involved parties.
- How about privacy?
Data privacy and security is a top priority for Cangrade. Beyond any regulation or cybersecurity standard, we recognize every individual’s fundamental right to online safety and freedom from violation of privacy. Our privacy policy provides assurance that any user data Cangrade collects is not shared with any 3rd party, and can be fully disclosed to the user or deleted by their request. We also stay on top of cyber threats and have a clean record of data security breaches.
When it comes to Jules, we ensure no identifying information is ever used in the interaction with the LLM. The information used in these interactions is completely generic, and it’s impossible to infer anything from it about any specific individual.
Suppose a user of Cangrade’s Jules chooses to be completely discrete about their questions and not have any record of their interactions recorded. They can easily take the response offline and delete any record of it from the system. This kind of user action results in actual record erasure, not just making it unavailable for presentation.
- Does it actually give good advice?
Barring bad assessment data or an inappropriate question, the advice Cangrade’s Jules’ generates is on par with a high-level I/O psychologist with deep, personal familiarity with the employee or candidate in question. There is no magic here. Just very relevant data, put in the right context, combined with Generative AI’s ability to find general trends and connections based on everything it has learned from a massive amount of content from different sources.
It may not be a silver bullet solution for all recruitment and employee management problems, but it will certainly help make people-related decisions much better informed and provide valid guidance to reach the best outcomes in handling various team challenges.
If you are interested in learning more about how Jules works and experiencing it first-hand, contact us today at info@cangrade.com or request a demo here.