How AI Can Help Businesses Survive the Shift to Remote Work

Remote work has become a long-term business strategy, but the adjustment has impacted employees in different ways. Stay-at-home employees working longer hours find themselves on the road to burn-out. As more organizations craft remote work policies, they need to tap AI-powered tech to make the ‘new normal’ the best it can possibly be. Ed McGuiggan, General Manager at Nuance Communications discusses how speech recognition technologies can automate routine tasks and redefine employee experiences. 

Remote work, it seems, is here to stay. Recently, some of the big tech firms famouslyOpens a new window announced “work from home forever” options. Forrester Research reports that companies are ramping up investments Opens a new window in cloud-based tools to facilitate extended periods of working from home. 

Certainly, working from home creates tremendous benefits for employees, from sparing people lengthy commutes to building in more flexibility to manage family and work-life balance. But it’s not without some trade-offs. 

While some people thrive in autonomous environments, others depend on team-based collaboration and human connection. At the same time, having round-the-clock access to your work can create an emotional and mental burden, and some employees have reported working even longer hours than before.

As we transition from short-term arrangements to long-term solutions, one expertOpens a new window cautions that organizations will need to “go a lot further … to optimize their remote work settings and enhance their business operations.” That is, doing remote work on a permanent or semi-permanent basis is going to require some level of investment to help make employees and their work products as effective as possible. 

This means going far beyond the technologies we now consider to be table-stakes, such as email, chat, video conferencing, and project management solutions. Now it’s time to think differently about how to overcome some of the inherent challenges of remote work and, ultimately, create an ideal employee experience.

Learn More: 5 Tips for Excelling at Virtual Project Management

Support Employees With AI-powered Technologies

Even when they’re willing to work longer hours, employees who are overextended or dedicating too much time to work can begin to find themselves on the road to burnout. Burnout, left unchecked, can lead to a broad range of health consequences, but tech leaders do have the power to help prevent it.

Start by considering how you can alleviate some of the more mundane tasks that may be valuable to the business but eat up a lot of time in the day: answering emails, creating reports, and filling out forms. Instead of typing and clicking our way through these documents, businesses can instead invest in an AI-powered speech recognition platform that enables employees to use the power of their voice to produce these important documents.

The right speech recognition platform can do more than support accurate transcription. When implemented correctly, you can leverage the AI built into your speech solution and integrated with your critical applications to create voice-powered commands that automate and streamline repetitive tasks. 

For example, your employees can create commands that voice-enable desktop navigation, including searching their documents, email, web, or video; starting and closing programs or windows; controlling the mouse; and even entering oft-used phrases and terminology into documents.

This type of solution works because the average employee’s typing speed fallsOpens a new window in the 40 words per minute range, but they can speak much fasterOpens a new window – as much as 150 words per minute (though some are historically and notably much faster). And, speech-to-text entries are about three times fasterOpens a new window than keyboard entries – and more accurate. 

Likewise, speech recognition technologies can eliminate barriers for employees with disabilities that limit their ability to use a keyboard and mouse. For all employees, eliminating (or reducing) the keyboard can also prevent fatigue and repetitive stress injuries. 

At the end of the day, AI-powered speech recognition can help employees complete their work faster and more accurately. This will ultimately give them more time and space in the day for the things that matter most, whether that’s strategic work priorities, a walk, and fresh air, or dinner with their family.

Learn More: Extroverts: Here’s How to Survive Remote Work

Improving Business Operations With AI 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations felt pressure to do more with less, to introduce productivity and efficiency initiatives that could lead to a healthier bottom line. In fact, as Harvard Business ReviewOpens a new window wrote, knowledge workers are only productive for about three hours every day—even before this pandemic exacerbated the interruptions and multitasking all too common to our days. As the economic implications of our current environment remain uncertain, these pressures carry more weight. 

Operational efficiencies mean something even more for organizations like professional services and legal firms that bill their clients back for time on projects. No client wants to pay their attorney for data entry; the client wants to pay for the high-value, strategic tasks. It’s in these spaces where dictation emerged as a popular solution to documentation and data entry burdens. 

Today, these technologies have evolved many times over, and AI-powered speech recognition does far more than simply capture the spoken word. Speech recognition that harnesses the power of AI provides better, faster, and more accurate record-keeping that introduces greater efficiencies into your operation. 

Efficiencies of time, certainly; but also people’s efficiencies. When you don’t need to dedicate effort toward transcribing and building documents, you can free employees to do the strategic work that not only generates revenue, it also creates meaning and fulfillment for your workforceOpens a new window . 

Creating Ideal Experiences for Employer and Employee Alike

As remote workers continue to adapt to new and often uncertain circumstances, tech leaders know there is plenty of work to do to create the ideal experience for employers and employees alike. The good news is that we are seeing a new era of innovation while the adoption of well-established technologies has accelerated — technologies that can, indeed, make the new normal the best it can possibly be. 

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