How You Can Leverage AI Insights to Improve Workplace Culture

Workplace culture isn’t just a buzzword. It’s what shapes the entire employee experience. Organizational culture drives employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. 

The problem is, some of the most important cultural friction points — like poor communication, a lack of trust, low performance, or high turnover — can go unnoticed until they begin to erode your organization’s bottom line.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to help you spot the subtle shifts in trends and patterns that can signify potential problems within your organization’s culture. Platforms like RapidBee and Pulpstream are helping HR leaders identify and address hidden cultural problems by analyzing trends in sentiment, engagement, and behavior.

Ready to learn how you can leverage AI insights to enhance your company culture? Read below to discover what makes it so difficult to spot potential problems — and how AI insights improve workplace culture.

The Hidden Layers of Workplace Culture

Workplace culture is the sum of shared values, behaviors, and social dynamics that shape how employees interact and perform while at work. It influences everything from team collaboration to employee retention — and it’s also something that is notoriously difficult to measure.

That’s because cultural issues are often subtle. Even though your human resources department may be tuned in to employee needs, the work environment, and overall job satisfaction, they may not notice a drop in morale, especially if it manifests in an unexpected way, like a spike in absenteeism or through disengaged survey responses.

Traditional HR methods like annual evaluations or suggestion boxes often fall short when it comes to detecting subtle cultural issues. These types of feedback, while useful, often only provide surface-level information. They often fail to reveal ongoing trends or root causes, especially in larger organizations.

That’s where AI enters the picture. It offers you the ability to analyze vast amounts of data so that you can see the bigger picture.

How AI Insights Improve Workplace Culture

With recent advancements in machine learning and AI technology, there are now a variety of AI-powered tools that can help business leaders make data-driven decisions. In the realm of HR, you can leverage it for data analysis to connect the dots among vast datasets including sentiment, engagement, behavior, and performance metrics. 

So what are some specific use cases when it comes to improving your workplace culture? Read below to learn how you can leverage AI tools to support cultural improvement initiatives.

Gauging Sentiment and Engagement

Understanding how employees feel about their work and workplace is key to building a strong, healthy culture. Employee sentiment reflects morale, trust in leadership, and perceived inclusion. Engagement measures how invested employees are in their roles and in the organization’s success. If either drops, performance, retention, and overall culture can suffer.

These elements can be difficult to quantify. Engagement and sentiment analysis should include metrics and behaviors such as:

• Employee satisfaction scores
• Net promoter scores
• Survey participation and completion rates
• Qualitative feedback in the form of written comments
• Engagement behaviors including goal completion or feedback frequency

In addition to measuring these different metrics and behaviors, it’s crucial to also track trends over time. Declines indicate that you need to find what is causing the decline — then implement a solution to reverse it.

This is where RapidBee provides a powerful AI-driven solution. With its survey designer, you can create employee engagement and 360 surveys that will capture both quantitative and qualitative data in real time. With high-level analytics, you can reveal the trends and insights needed to truly understand what is driving sentiment and engagement within your organization. Using AI, you can transform employee feedback into custom recommendations tailored to your organization’s needs. 

Performance Management Data as a Culture Indicator

Performance management data offers a revealing look into the overall health of workplace culture. Look for patterns in how employees set, pursue, and achieve goals, and monitor the ways in which they’re supported along the way. Negative trends or poor metrics in these areas can signal deeper issues: Unclear expectations, for example, or something that is causing problems with morale and motivation, like a lack of trust in leadership or uneven recognition across teams.

Keep an eye on the following metrics and indicators:

• Goal progress and completion rates: Low or inconsistent progress may reflect unclear priorities or disengagement.

• Feedback frequency and tone: Infrequent or overly critical feedback suggests poor communication, problems with morale, or a lack of psychological safety.

• Skills development and training completion: Low participation rates or poor scores can indicate insufficient growth opportunities, disengagement with the training programs, or a lack of motivation. 

• Employee turnover following poor reviews: This often indicates that underperformance is being punished rather than coached, which leads to frustrated employees turning over.

RapidBee can help you identify and address problems in these areas through a comprehensive AI-powered performance management system. The platform leverages automation for continuous goal setting, real-time feedback, and structured, automated reviews, which reduces repetitive tasks for HR professionals and team leaders. 

On top of that, with these tools, you can track goals, identify employees who are falling behind, and leverage AI to examine performance data. This will give you actionable insights that allow you to make informed decisions about the most effective ways to improve your workplace culture.

What You Can Learn From Behavior Trend Tracking

Despite the fact that employee behavior is one of the clearest indicators of workplace culture, it’s also one of the most overlooked. Sentiment and engagement surveys can reveal how your workforce feels, but behavioral data reveals how those feelings translate into action. Trends in attendance, leave requests, disciplinary actions, and workflow participation can all uncover deeper cultural issues like burnout, a lack of trust, or poor communication.

Here are the metrics to track, and what they say about your workplace culture:

• Absenteeism and tardiness: Spikes of absenteeism or tardiness among particular teams or time periods indicate low morale, stress, or disengagement.

• Frequency and type of leave requests: Increases in medical or mental health leave sometimes reflect burnout from heavy workloads or a high-pressure culture.

• Disciplinary actions: Patterns may point to management inconsistencies, unclear expectations, or toxic dynamics.

• Employee turnover: High turnover, particularly in specific roles or departments, often reflects cultural breakdowns.

Pulptream’s platform offers a suite of employee relationship management tools designed to allow you to create streamlined, equitable disciplinary processes and performance improvement processes. With these tools, you can help employees set goals, identify skill gaps that need to be filled, and create tailored performance improvement plans. 

On top of that, Pulpstream’s AI will help you track employee performance metrics so that you can spot patterns and take corrective action to improve workplace culture. For example, if AI-driven analytics reveal consistent skill gaps in one area, this can signal poor training or onboarding processes, which is a source of cultural friction that you can smooth out.

Improve Workplace Culture With the Right AI Applications

It isn’t always easy to identify and address friction points within your workplace culture. However, with new technologies like machine learning and generative AI, you can analyze vast amounts of employee data to spot the hidden patterns that could be affecting the employee experience. 

There’s no need to implement complex AI systems to accomplish this feat, either. Between RapidBee’s survey tools and performance management system and Pulpstream’s employee relationship management tools, you can make AI implementation easy. 

Ready to learn more? Get a demo to see RapidBee and Pulpstream in action.