Pick your poison: AI speeding up the pace of work, or shrinking the workforce?
Unfortunately, many companies are experiencing both of these transformations…and for employees it’s creating “the two-job job,” a recent Korn Ferry report found. The majority (61%) of workers feel like they’re juggling the workload of two jobs, and nearly half (45%) feel overworked and unable to deliver quality work.
“What’s happened is AI has been just thrown on top of my work, so AI feels like an additional thing I have to accommodate. So, the two-job job is probably an understatement for most people. It’s probably more like a three-job job,” said Roger Philby, Korn Ferry’s UK head of consulting and a global leader of the firm’s people strategy and performance practice.
What’s causing this? AI promised to increase efficiency and productivity, making work easier for humans. But, in many instances, it has increased workloads and caused mental fatigue, HR Brew previously reported.
“Many people are reporting just babysitting their AI agents or checking their work, trying to understand if it’s valid, if it can be submitted…and that’s not exactly what we were promised when we were told that AI was going to be helping us with our workload,” Leah Buck, employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm Why Work, told HR Brew.
In recent years, many companies have flattened middle management, reduced overall headcount, and introduced new technology without proper training, all in the name of rapid AI advancement. But it has left many employees hesitant to use the tech, and some of the HR pros responsible for helping workers also don’t feel well-equipped.
Many workers also feel frustrated that AI has stripped away the parts of work that they find enjoyable, Buck said, like creativity, problem solving, and human collaboration. When AI tools reduce these aspects of work, she said people can feel a loss of agency and autonomy.
“Humans were already sometimes frustrated that they’re not able to dictate how their role unfolds and whether it actually capitalizes on their unique strengths and talents,” Buck said. “We’re seeing that at hyperspeed now with AI.”
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What can HR do? It may make sense for companies to flatten corporate structures, reduce costs, and introduce new technology, Philby told HR Brew, but what they aren’t doing is redesigning roles and jobs to meet the demands and external factors changing the nature of work.
This is where HR can come in, Philby said. People pros can teach leaders and managers how to work with their teams and employees to redesign their roles in the age of AI to meet their company’s goals and align with their individual strengths and skills.
“How do we redesign the work such that the people can thrive in the job as it is today, as opposed to feeling overwhelmed in the job today because we’ve not redesigned the work. We’ve just added work,” Philby said.
Buck said she works with companies on “job crafting,” where employees meet with their manager and HR pro to outline their talents and capabilities and the projects they’re working on that can help them build these skills. She added that HR pros can help managers and employees in these conversations by asking questions like:
- When you talk to someone outside of work about your job, what description of what you do makes you feel proud?
- What colleagues or teams bring out your sharpest thinking? How can we help you collaborate with them more often or more deliberately?
- What high-value skill or project would you like to pursue this quarter but aren’t able to due to your current workload?
Many employees are being stretched thin amid AI transformation because companies didn’t take enough time or intention introducing AI tools and considering how work was going to change alongside them, Buck and Philby said.
“What we’ve seen in the past is that humans default to inertia rather than intentionality, and we need to be very careful with this particular technological advancement,” Buck said.