The Commonwealth Bank has started using AI in its employee surveys to analyse and interpret feedback from its more than 51,000 staff.
Culture and people executive manager Matt Hull said that the bank is using the technology to better understand its workforce in numerous ways, including to process individual staff comments at scales previously thought impossible.
Speaking at a customer event for survey software specialist Qualtrics, Hull said that each time the bank ran a survey across its entire workforce it could be left facing the daunting task of analysing staff comments numbering in the tens-of-thousands
“Because we’re asking multiple free-text questions – not everyone responds to them – but we could end up with about a hundred thousand unique comments. The manual analysis on that is nigh on impossible,” Hull said
“AI is doing a tremendous job for helping us to distil that down into key things that our leaders can actually work with.”
The bank has also been using AI to deliver surveys, incorporating adaptive or “conversational” follow-ups to its survey questions to gather additional context to employee responses.
“We’ve been using AI to make the survey more dynamic and to help us get richer comments from our people,” Hull said.
“That’s helping us a lot because there’s not much we can do when we ask people ‘what could we improve?’ and someone just says ‘my team’ or ‘my leader’.
“We’d really love the opportunity to [ask] ‘what about your leader?’ That AI functionality helps us to do that automatically.”
Hull said that AI not only increases the speed that the bank can generate insights for its leadership but also increases accuracy, eliminating biases that might creep in when humans selectively cherrypick data from surveys.
Hull said that one of the key problems that the bank is trying to address through its employee engagement programs is a “gap” between generating insights and delivering actions.
AI appears set to play a role for the bank here, with Hull revealing that the technology would get a guernsey at the stage of executing on findings.
The bank, he said, is using AI to suggest actions leaders can take based on the surveys.
However, he emphasised that humans would keep a firm hand on the wheel when it came to making final judgements.
“The AI tools are exactly that: they are tools to support our leaders and our teams to make better decisions. None of those are replacing the human judgements,” he said.
Hull said that the bank’s next step is to work on ways to use AI to automate the process of ensuring that business leaders were executing on findings of the employee engagement insights.
The bank is still in the early stages of understanding how AI can help automate the process, but Hull said it might take the form of a continuous feedback loop providing “constant follow-up”.
Overall, said Hull, AI is helping the bank’s leaders save around 3000 hours in total for each of its groupwide yearly survey cycle.
