One hallmark of a good HR person is knowing the names of as many employees as possible. Thanks to emerging technology, it's also now possible to be on a first-name basis with many technologies that are making the HR department more efficient and productive.Buck, Sofia and Alice are just a few of the fresh faces that are bringing high-tech solutions to a high-touch profession.

“Advisors tell us that their clients are expecting best-in-breed administrative services for specific HR needs, but also need hub experience providers that can bring it all together,” says Scot Marcotte, chief technology officer for Buck in New York City. “To that end, we're seeing an explosion of service providers offering tools to integrate services and create that single experience. We know employers need this capability to help their employees make sense of the complicated HR and benefits administration landscape.”

BuckConnect

Marcotte's company recently introduced BuckConnect, which aggregates all of a company's health, wealth and career programs and delivers them by internet or mobile device.

“It creates a one-stop-shop for both the individual and the organization,” Marcotte says. “Buck offers health and welfare, defined benefit and incentive administration services that seamlessly integrate into BuckConnect for clients who choose these services.

“We realize, though, with thousands of potential vendors in the HR space, no single provider can offer it all. To make it simple for the individual and coordinated for the organization, HR needs a single hub experience. That's what BuckConnect is all about.”

Employees use machine-learning-enabled decision support tools to securely access, transact and manage their benefits package and receive individualized plan support throughout the year to help them achieve personal goals. This individualization is a strength of BuckConnnect, Marcotte says.

“We believe that it can't simply be about tying these services together in one pretty wrapper to make processes easier,” he said. “If we simply make it easier for employees to take online learning courses that don't align with their career goals or pick benefit plans that aren't right for their health and wealth needs, or go through a performance review without coming out with any actionable areas for improvement, the individual and organization are no better off.

“We have to ensure that each individual is getting the right training, enrolling in the right programs and receiving proactive job guidance so we can deliver productivity value to the organization and individual value to the employee.”

Spoke

Few things waste the time and resources of HR professionals more than repeatedly answering the same question for multiple employees. What if artificial intelligence could handle mundane topics and free up time to focus on those who demand a personal touch?

“Our platform found that 49 percent of requests have been asked before and 15 percent are word for word,” says Josh Anish, director of marketing for Spoke in San Francisco. “If AI can handle the repetitive questions, then the staff can focus on the questions that require a human response. At our core, we are a ticketing system, with both HR people and the fragmented, on-demand workplace in mind.”

The benefits include greater transparency and faster responses to employee questions.

“By its nature, HR is transparent; but some questions, such as a raise request, are not,” he says. “The average time to respond to tickets is six hours and 30 minutes. With Spoke, the time is two hours and four minutes. Spoke saves time and money by answering the 49 percent of questions that are the same, over and over again.”

EVA

Meetings are a fact of life for every organization. All too often, participants are too preoccupied taking notes to fully engage and then develop appropriate action steps. This is where EVA comes in.

Voicea is a voice collaboration platform powered by an enterprise voice assistant named EVA. It takes commands, performs actions and captures highlights in meetings to share them and create actionable recaps. This frees attendees to focus on the conversation, knowing EVA will capture and share whatever is highlighted.

“Our CEO spent several years working at Oracle,” says Cory Treffiletti, chief marketing officer for Voicea in Mountain View, California. “He noticed in meetings that executives with Oracle, Microsoft and other big companies that executives spent a lot of time focused because they knew someone else was taking notes.”

EVA is user friendly, and companies usually see positive results the first time they use it, he says. One tangible benefit is an average savings of six hours a week in processing meeting notes and follow-up, and having one central record of proceedings improves accuracy. Less tangible, but perhaps more valuable, is facilitating meetings where participants are fully engaged.

“How do you quantify the value of being focused in a meeting room and fully putting the brainpower to work?” he asks.

Sofia

Employees are used to engaging smart devices such as Alexa and Google Home to receive instant responses to their questions. That's why it can be frustrating to be limited to submitting employment questions only during business hours and often having to wait for someone in HR to research the answers.

Sofia, a new technology from Businesssolver in Seattle, offers a solution that not only satisfies employees, but also frees HR professionals to focus on other tasks.

“Sofia is a virtual assistant that is available 24/7 to provide just-in-time information to make decisions,” says Sony SungChu, head of applied data science for Businessolver and innovator of Sofia. “It can answer questions such as how to find the best medical plan for my family or how to replace a lost insurance I.D. card.” Sofia can also help with such mundane chores as onboarding new employees, who can simply take a photo of required documents and send it in for verification. The time savings for HR staffs can be significant. Over the past year, Sofia saved more than 300,000 hours and handled more than 45 percent of all chat volume, according to the company.

“It's almost like having a personal valet for employees,” SungChu says.

Alice

What can be better for employee morale and productivity than an unexpected raise? How about one that costs the employer nothing?

Alice enables employees to deduct expenses such as commuting, child and adult care, and some medical expenses from their taxable income. “If you have eyes, teeth and kids, these are the things that you can spend pretax on,” says Avi Karnani, cofounder of Alice in Brooklyn, New York.

The technology is directed at hourly and low- to middle-income employees who are less likely to have access to pretax benefits. Employers can integrate Alice into their existing payroll system to automatically track the pretax spending of each employee and deduct that spending from paychecks.

AIMEE

Although working smarter, not harder, can be a cliché in the workplace, AIMEE from Kronos in Lowell, Massachusetts, helps managers and employees do exactly that. AIMEE provides solutions for all company personnel, including enhancing employee engagement, retention and performance for HR; personalizing schedules for employees; and analyzing absences, open shifts and schedule changes for managers. Advanced business volume forecasting improves scheduling accuracy by as much as 20 percent, according to Kronos. ”The introduction of AIMEE delivers the benefits of artificial intelligence across the entire organization,” says Bill Bartow, vice president of global product management for Kronos.

Expect more names and capabilities in the future as technology continues to reshape the HR profession.

“HR is a human business and is all about relationships,” notes Treffiletti. “Technology helps organize the sheer volume of information that HR must deal with, from hiring and retention to building the corporate culture. Remember, technology doesn't replace the role of HR. But it does augment it.”

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