Do you have a resource gap between embedded analytical tools and building a robust library of reports? 

You have a solution. 

Chasma Analytics offers you a collection of operational dashboards you can deploy now.  

Here’s How Chasma pre-configured dashboards enhance your human capital reporting. 

• Work with huge inputs of data without no roadblocks 

• Plan, track, and manage your learning activities and programs with multi-channel dashboards 

• Dig into deeper insights with machine learning capabilities for advanced trends, predictions and visualizations 

• Create user-specific personalized dashboards 

• Intuitive interface with simple navigation 

• Designed specifically for your HCM applications so you can avoid the cost of a custom solution 

Deploy Chasma dashboards and reports into your Microsoft Power BI platform and transform your raw data into insightful reports. 

Achieve reporting excellence in just days and become a data-driven organization. 

Fill in the form on your right to get your datasheet. 

Are you ready? 

How much time does your HR staff spend looking for information? How much time do they spend answering the same, repetitive questions, day after day? 

And…how much time do your employees spend looking for information before they give up and call your overworked staff? 

Chatbots are coming to HR, bringing you the opportunity to transform the way you deliver service to your people. 

…sending your virtual personal assistant to fetch the information you need instead of searching. 

…letting your chatbot answer up to 80% of your employees’ questions. 

…delivering improved services to the people you serve. 

How much effort does it take to manage registration, participation, and attendance at your chapter events or user group meetings? 

Are your organizers, instructors, and facilitators scurrying to manage check-ins instead of preparing to deliver a memorable event? 

You have a solution. Chasma Event.  

Chasma Event is a desktop and mobile event management app for organizations. The app automates invitations, RSVPs, details, and directions, along with resources for any size of gathering.  

Chasma Event also integrates with your SumTotal LMS to allow the management of instructor-led training events. The app eases administrative work by enabling: 

1. The provisioning of digital passes to manage event registration, attendance, and participation. 

2. The generation of event passes for Mobile Wallet or other digital passes. 

3. The provision of a map and directions to events on the mobile app. 

4. Integration with your SumTotal LMS to manage classroom training, seminars, workshops, etc. 

Lower your costs, eliminate administrative overhead, and organize memorable events with Chasma Event. 

Please fill in the form on your right to download the datasheet.

Chasma Connect is an integration marketplace that develops connections between your applications, but instead of treating each integration as a custom project, the connect team creates prefabricated plug and play connectors, integrators, ready to deploy into your applications. 

Now, you don’t need to spend weeks or months developing custom integrations for your HR application platforms. 

Take advantage of the Chasma Connect solution and learn how you can  

• eliminate errors in manual processes,  

• reduce data discrepancies across systems and platforms,  

• minimize administrative overhead and duplication of effort, and  

• improve the agility of your workforce.    

Connect your applications, create efficiencies in your business process and improve your organization’s productivity. 

Please fill in the form on your right to get the datasheet. 

Does your HR data live in different systems? Do you find it difficult to bring it together and make sense of it...and to build reports that tell a story?  

You must pull all the data you need and start manipulating wrangling spreadsheets or tabular reports. 

Even then, creating meaningful reports can take you days or weeks. 

Get control of your data. Bring all your data together and create holistic insights into your HR operations with HRBox. 

Chasma’s HRBox gives you the ability to use data from any of your HR applications to create visual insights and group them into dashboards your people can really use. 

• Develop a unified HR dashboard to keep your senior leaders informed of the metrics that are important to them. 

• Create multiple dashboards and control them with user security. 

• Share dashboards with anyone in your organization. 

• Aggregate data from different HR systems. 

Save your HR staff the pain of dealing with multiple applications and worksheets to analyze and understand your people and business needs. 

Download our data sheet to see how you create actionable business intelligence with a design tool anyone can use. 

Please fill the form on right to download the Datasheet on "Chasma HRBox"  

One of the greatest motivators in your workforce is the sense of accomplishment in getting useful work done. Bottlenecks and workarounds kill productivity and engagement.

Chasma Apps is a community of like-minded innovators who believe that technology should make work easier to do, not more complex. Together, we help you improve the user experience and adapt your technology to the way people actually work.

• Eliminate roadblocks that get in the way of productivity so your people can get things done.
• Improve workflow and collaboration to release the creative energy in your workforce.
• Reduce administrative overhead so you can focus on what matters.

Get the details on how Chasma Apps can help you extend the life of your HR technology.

Please fill the form on right to download the Datasheet on "Chasma Apps" .

Testing your cloud learning applications is crucial to making sure they are working well. It is a priority whenever you upgrade or have a software update. This ensures you that all the changes are working well without impacting existing business processes or configurations.

Manual testing is labor intensive and expensive.

But then, you can make your testing process consistent and accurate by automating it.

Eliminate the human error that plagues manual software testing with Chasma Quale - an automated testing solution that eliminates repetitive manual testing.

With a library of 10,000+ testing scenarios (and growing), Quale handles routine tasks so you can focus on critical, high-value testing.

•  Reduce repetitive, tedious manual testing.
•  Automate testing of end-to-end processes and integrations.
• Add your own recorded test scenarios to your library.

Fill the form on right to download the Datasheet on "Chasma Quale" .

Remove those barriers with Chasma Lexy.

Lexy is an app designed to make using your LMS as easy as chatting with a friend. She will relieve your learning and development staff and your managers of many mundane and repetitive tasks, reducing much of the administrative tedium that ties up so much of their time.

She will give your employees instant answers to many of the questions for which they now must contact you and wait for a response.

With Lexy, you can -

• Make your LMS as easy as having a conversation.
• Integrate Lexy into SumTotal or any other application to bring learning into the flow of work.
• Capture interactions between your learners and your LMS to help you improve learning delivery and service.

Download our data sheet on title "Chasma Lexy for SumTotal" to see how you can make an improved learner experience a reality in your organization.

Please provide your email address and we’ll send you a link to the data sheet.

Chasma Analytics offers a full range of analytical services, which includes day-to-day operational reporting for predictive dashboards. Chasma Anaytics’s workflow goes all the way from raw data through to analysis and visualization, without the delay of weeks (or even months) of implementation.

Available features include:

• Pre-configured dashboards that you can deploy immediately into SumTotal Advanced Reporting.
• Real-time visualizations of critical operational metrics, like employee cost versus performance.
• KPIs and the other metrics that matter most to your organization.
• Predictive models to drive decisions that capitalize on your people's potential.
• Data visualizations that help your executives make decisions at the speed of business.
• Advanced analytics to give you deeper insights into your workforce data.

Fill the form on right to download the Datasheet on "Chasma Analytics for Sumtotal Learn" .

1.    Implementing HR Software? Don’t overlook the testing budget.
2.    Why You Need to Automate Your SumTotal Update Testing.
3.    7 Benefits of Automated LMS Update and Upgrade Testing.

  Implementing HR Software? Don’t overlook the testing budget

In HR software implementations, testing is too often an afterthought. Shiny new processes and configurations get attention, and tedious grunt work gets treated, well… like tedious grunt work.

But testing is one of the most important functions, not only in your implementation but ongoing system management. The stakes can be high — from inaccurate regulatory reporting to a damaged company reputation.

You should include testing in project costs for the initial implementation and operating costs for the life of the software. After user acceptance testing (UAT), you will need to conduct regression testing for every software update. You should also perform weekly testing after system fixes and to test for security errors.

Automated testing

Fortunately, automated testing can be very cost-effective, and it has several advantages:

• It reduces the cost of labor-intensive manual testing.
• It eliminates the human error inherent in tedious, repetitive tasks.
• Many automated tasks, such as weekly security testing, can run unattended overnight.
• You can save and replicate test scenarios for automating periodic tasks like regression testing of software updates.
• By eliminating almost all repetitive testing, it enables your testing team to focus on critical test management tasks.

Manual Testing

Automated testing is not always the best approach. In many cases manual testing is more desirable and in some cases necessary.

Exploratory Testing. Manual testing is required when you are designing new processes and workflows. Hands-on testing validates workflow decisions.

Configuration Testing. Initial testing by the people who make configuration decisions gives them a first-hand look at the impact of their decisions and provides an essential training ground for the core team.

Scenario Scripting. Creating a new automated script requires a detailed step-by-step manual testing the entire process. Even though many testing tools give you the capability to record a test scenario and convert it to a script, that shortcut can lead you astray. What’s missing in a recorded script is validation. The process must check whether each sub-process stores the correct values in the right place. Use a recording only as a starting point for creating your test scripts.

Usability Testing. The purpose of usability testing is to ensure that the software is intuitive and efficient from the perspective of the user. The feedback you get from users will be invaluable in improving the user experience, and they may have suggestions for improvement that will make your processes more efficient. Involving people from your organization in usability testing also creates an opportunity for you to co-opt them as evangelists in your change management efforts.

Both manual and automated testing have an essential place in your testing strategy. Let machines handle the routine work so your people can focus on critical thinking and design.

Why You Need to Automate Your SumTotal Update Testing

Even the best organizations have a hard time engaging their end-users in learning programs. In a recent Aberdeen Group report Zachary Chertok wrote that 71% of best-in-class organizations have that trouble.

The Learning Engagement Disconnect

What typically happens is that management pushes out content through the LMS based on what they think is important, and employees go elsewhere to find content relevant to their interests and needs. Too often, management doesn’t know what employees need until the need arises, and then, it’s too late.

Most L&D organizations have been using promotion through multiple channels to improve participation in learning programs (Table 1), but that doesn’t solve the problem.  We can personalize offerings based on job role or career progression, but that may or may not deliver what is required at the point of need. We can use technology to bring learning “into the flow of work,” but if we are not offering content relevant to what the worker is doing at that moment, they will look elsewhere or do nothing.

What happens in too many companies is that employees don’t get development and can’t see a path for professional growth, so they look elsewhere. To deal with the turnover, employers pour money into their recruiting efforts.

And where do they get the budget? Well, let’s just let those learning initiatives slide for another year or two.

Developing a Plan for Learning at the Moment of Need

People want advancement and growth, but companies have slowed down promotion from within, and don’t try to develop people to take positions that are vacated internally. People aren’t staying in jobs because we are not trying hard to keep them. But you can change that.

L&D is faced with two problems: first is knowing what is required at a specific place and point in time; the second is being able to deliver that learning instantly in a consumable form.

Chertok outlines multi-pronged attack on the situation. We can see how this high-level framework can help you develop a plan but will take a lot of assessment and planning to put it in place.

Unless your L&D organization is already a data-driven, well-running machine, this effort will take a long time, but, with a little help from your internal partners, you can get it done.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at Chertok’s recommendations.

Take inventory. Start with knowing what you have, how you develop or acquire it, how you administer it, and how your people consume it.

Easy to do your organization has kept on top of it, but difficult if you’re learning is fragmented, and L&D has little control or insight into what divisions and departments are doing to train people. You will need to form alliances and get buy-in on what you want to accomplish.

Consolidate content and program management. This may or may not be possible in your organization. If each business function has its own training budget, they may not even be aware there is a problem. Your alliances and partnerships can help you get it done. The right place to start may be in showing where duplication is draining resources.

Capture metrics. Most organizations are still measuring at Level I or 2 of the Kirkpatrick method. Moreover, Levels 3 and 4 are vague and largely unsupportive of the feedback we need to improve programs. The emphasis has been on learner feedback, but learner surveys do not provide objective measures of learning, nor can you determine the impact of that learning. And, according to Will Thalheimer of Work-Learning Research, Inc., the Kirkpatrick method is

            “antithetical to nearly 40 years of research on human learning, leads to a checklist approach to evaluation (e.g., ‘we are measuring Levels 1 and 2, so we need to measure Level 3’), and, by ignoring the actual purpose for evaluation, risks providing no information of value to stakeholders…

What will determine whether learning is effective and useful is whether learners can assess a situation, evaluate it, make the right decision, and take action, what we know as the SEDA model.

The most common way to use the SEDA model is to create realistic simulations for assessment. It is possible to create simulations for most situations without great expense.

Developing objective measures of learning results and impact seems to be a tremendous job, but only if we cling to the perception that we have to measure everything. We recommend measuring only the most mission-critical programs and starting with one small critical intervention. Once you have developed and captured effective measures and proved the value of learning, you can build on that success. It won’t take a lot of them to get noticed (and funded).

Think about the impact you could have with micro-learning coupled with mini-assessments using the SEDA method.

Socialize. If you don’t have it already, we recommend social networking and communication technology to make content available when the need strikes. By doing so, you will also encourage knowledge sharing and feedback, where workers can make their needs known at the moment of need.

If your organization uses Microsoft Teams make learning available there. Other ERP providers have social tools or are developing them. Independent providers like Slack also give you access to all the tools you will need to encourage knowledge sharing and feedback.

Atomize training options and components. This means breaking down content into micro-skills to facilitate short, consumable mobile learning delivery.

If you are like most organizations, your competency mapping and job descriptions aren’t ready for micro-skills. Start with one role, one job family, or one small business unit to develop a methodology and skillset for breaking down roles into micro-skills. It’s a new way of thinking, and the organizational change will take time.

7 Benefits of Automated LMS Update and Upgrade Testing

1. Drive learner engagement with user-centric training dashboards
2. 6 ways to improve learning engagement with learner-centric dashboards
3. How Dashboards Boost Engagement in Your SumTotal LMS

Drive learner engagement with user-centric training dashboards

As you know, the gaming industry engages users with rewards, leaderboards, progress indicators and rich graphics. Now you can apply similar techniques to learner engagement and hold learners attention from the moment they log into your LMS.

The motivation built at the start presses your learners to proceed further and learners feel like coming back for more.

You can customize your LMS training dashboard into an engaging learning hub with these elements-

Welcoming graphic- A welcoming graphic creates a sense of belonging that inspires learners to proceed further.

Progress Indicators- Alert the learners about where they stand with progress indicators for each of their current learning activity.

Calendar schedule- When you put the training schedule visible to your learners, they plan ahead for future learning and never miss attending the sessions.

Graphical display of courses- You can have a visual display of courses to help your learners resume training from where they left with just a single click.

To do list- Learners attend and accomplish tasks in time when you list them with due dates and  status of each task.

You can also have news and announcements, videos to give your learners a complete experience.

If you need help to make your LMS training dashboard into a center of interactivity, get connected with Chasma Editor - a platform that enables you to build engaging sumtotal learning dashboards in an instance and offer your learners, a learner-centered experience.

Chasma Editor helps you-

• Create dashboards and deploy them into your LMS in a few minutes
• Make training time efficient by putting all the resources at learners’ fingertips
• Enhance your LMS user experience.

Build engaging user portals and landing pages, sumtotal learning dashboards with no programming skills and drive better training outcomes.

6 ways to improve learning engagement with learner-centric dashboards

In today’s workplace where career development is a top priority, your learners need a learning experience with an easy-to-use interface—one that provides instant access to information and hassle-free navigation. 

More than 50% of L&D professionals cite poor UX among the biggest barriers to learning technology satisfaction. 

Your learners will not be motivated to log in to your LMS if you cannot give them an intuitive user experience and quick access to the resources they need. 

When your learners lose interest, their failure to fully participate reduces your training efficiency. IBM found that 84% of employees at the best performing organizations are receiving the training they need compared to only 16% at the worst performing ones. 

Learner-centric dashboards are an engaging way to provide relevant information to your users. Show them where their learning plans will take them, their progress so far, and where to focus their efforts. With learning they get the information in an engaging, compact format so they don’t need to decipher it to know where they stand. 

Here are six of our tips to help you design engaging sumtotal learning dashboards: 

1. User friendly Design to sustain learners' interest. Your learners may get distracted if your LMS lacks visual appeal. Creating an appealing user interface attracts your users and brings them back for more. 

2. User focused content for a personalized learning experience. Learners are best inspired when the experience is relevant and personal. Dashboards enable you to visualise user information like course offerings, training status and other relevant details specific to their personal interest.  

3. Simple navigation to accelerate learning. Try to remove every barrier to navigation. One-click access is best, but certainly no more than three. Think also about where you place links and icons. Put them where your people expect to see them. 

4. Accurate data and resources to meet learning goals. While too much information creates unnecessary clutter, insufficient information does not meet the learners needs. Choosing relevant information that aligns to the learning objectives is critical. 

5. Graphical view of information to enhance interactivity. You can also improve engagement by visualizing learner information. You can have the information laid out in the form of arrays, carousels, bar graphs, line graphs or and any other form that your learners like most. Involve learners in the design so you know what they want. 

6. Real-time updates to keep your learners informed. Your dashboard can also provide company news, announcements, and industry trends. Keep your news feeds fresh to maintain interest. 

Learner Dashboards Boost Learner Engagement 

Learner-centric dashboards can be a quick way to improve your learner engagement. They not only put information at your learners’ fingertips but make the overall learning experience efficient and meaningful. 

How Dashboards Boost Engagement in Your SumTotal LMS

Developing a learning organization of employees who make a commitment to life-long self-development is hard work. 

SumTotal Learn makes it easy for you to deliver any type of content to your users, but you need more than a user-friendly gateway to courses and resources. Your users need information on learning that is relevant, timely, and useful, whether they are learners, managers, administrators, or L&D professionals. One of the best ways to give them feedback is with a well-designed sumtotal learning dashboard tailored to their needs. 

Dashboards for Learners 

Your people need to know where their learning plans will take them, how they are progressing, and where to focus their efforts. They want the information in an attractive, compact format that they don’t need to decipher to get meaningful information. Here are a few examples of what you can do with learning dashboards: 

• Visual display of achievements like progress bars and badges to motivate them to achieve more. 
• Training schedules and calendars so they can plan their activities, with a to-do list that helps them complete assigned learning on time. 
• One-click access to learning resources, no matter where they are, inside or outside your SumTotal LMS. 
• Resources and quick links that put knowledge and job aids at their fingertips, so they can bring learning into the flow of work. 

• News and announcements. To make information timely and relevant, you need it to update frequently so it never appears stale. One way to keep people engaged is to provide blog articles related to their learning or their field of work. You don’t even need to write the content. You can curate it from reliable sources and push out email notifications when you add new articles. 

Dashboards for Managers 

Managers need to know the learning status of their teams, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they need to focus their efforts. For required learning, they need to know who might be at risk for a lapse in certification, with the ability to take immediate action right from the display. 

Managers would much rather view a dashboard then wrestle spreadsheets and tabular reports. 

Dashboards for Administrators 

Instead of running reports every time they need to see what is happening in your LMS, your administrators can save time and frustration with a graphical view. You could show them recent activity, compliance status, content usage statistics, and user evaluations. 

SumTotal Dashboard Tools 

SumTotal LMS provides widgets you can use to customize your LMS landing page, and Advanced Reporting gives you a number of data visualizations. 

However, creating a dashboard is a do-it-yourself project, and if you really want to provide the most relevant information, you will need a more robust tool. If you don’t already have it, SumTotal can make it available for your data and design needs. 

Make Your SumTotal LMS the Center of Your Learning Ecosystem 

If you want your Sumtotal LMS to become the place to be if you're going to improve yourself, you need more than powerful learning content delivered to your users on demand. You need to make the total experience one your users will appreciate. 

Well-designed learning dashboards that provide useful and relevant information can boost engagement in your LMS and help you further your progress on the road to a learning organization. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

1.  3 Ways a Chatbot Can Improve the Onboarding Experience
2.  How chatbots can improve HR communication and drive efficiency
3.  Chatbots in HR: Not Just for Self-Service
4.  How AI in HR can save time and drive efficiency
5.  Are You Ready for your HR Virtual Assistant?

     3 Ways a Chatbot Can Improve the Onboarding Experience

O.C. Tanner’s report on onboarding shows that one in five employees leave a job within the first 45 days. Most of the disengaged employees shared that they received little or no proper training during their onboarding. Not having an onboarding process in place can negatively impact both the employee and employer.  

In a survey of HR managers by job site CareerBuilder, 16% said poor or non-existent onboarding lowers their company’s productivity, 14% said it brings on greater inefficiencies, and 12% said it leads to higher employee turnover.  

Lower employee engagement leads to lower confidence among employees, lack of communication and trust within the organization and missed revenue targets are among other negative impacts of not having a consistent on-boarding program.   

Ben Peterson, CEO of BambooHR reported “nearly 90 percent of employees decide whether to stay or go within their first six months”. 

While a poor onboarding can confuse and disappoint your new hires leading them to quit, a well-planned onboarding program can increase your employee productivity and boost organizational potential.  

A 2007 study from the Wynhurst Group found that newly hired employees are 58 percent more likely to still be at the company three years later if they had completed a structured onboarding process.

Onboarding can transform your new hires into fully productive employees. It needs to be an interactive process, building trust in the organization.   

Refocus Your Employee Onboarding with Chatbots 

Your managers, teams and HR staff can often confine within their roles and tasks when your new hires have questions.  It may not be their intention to ignore them, but it can cause disappointment.  

A chatbot can be always available. It can handle your communication process during onboarding, answering questions like -   

How do I request a personal time-off?   

What is pay cycle schedule? 

How do I submit my time sheet? 

Personalized training path to achieve learning goals 

Chatbots can guide your new hires through their onboarding training plan. They can also help them manage their calendar and guide through resources.  With a chatbot, your new hires don’t need to stop what they are doing and search for information. They can ask the bot and get what they want.    

A sustained line of communication to engage your hires 

The biggest gain from chatbots is a smooth path to communication. Chatbots can respond with quick answers and just-in-time access to support resources. This creates an interactive and engaging experience for your new hires and keep them engaged.  

Reduce the time your new hires need to assimilate into your culture   

Your new hires need to understand organizational policies and look for answers to their common questions.  

You can save a lot of time for your employees and HR by redirecting their questions and challenges to a conversational bot. These bots can improve your employee experience and reduce your workload.  

Engage and Retain your new hires with Chatbots   

Chatbots do more than communicate. They can engage your new hires, support their development, and sustain their motivation. 

How chatbots can improve HR communication and drive efficiency

How much time does your HR staff spend looking for information? How much time do they spend answering the same, repetitive questions, day after day?  

And…how much time do your employees spend looking for information before they give up and call your overworked staff?  

Amidst the daily routine of attending to tasks, achieving targets, coordinating with managers and peers, your people can find it hard to get instant answers or respond to queries.  

This can slow down your communication and demotivate your people. 

Deploying a chatbot can make your HR process more efficient by handling many tasks and requests formally handled by humans. In areas where rapid communication, instant answers, and the availability of resources drive the user experience, chatbots showed great promise in removing communication bottlenecks. 

Chatbots are a special kind of virtual bots that use voice or text to simulate human interaction. 
There are countless ways to implement them, limited only by the imagination of their designers, but generally they fall into two types. The primary difference is whether they are driven by rules or intelligent algorithms.                                          

Rules based bots 

You can design a basic chatbot to provide programmed answers to specific questions. They are cognitive computing in that they can recognize input and give an appropriate response, but they are not intelligent.  

Rules-based bots are easy to train, sometimes requiring only that you upload questions, keywords, and responses, but they don’t learn from their interactions with humans.  

These kinds of bots can save your HR staff’s time by answering many of your employees questions they often handle. They can also simplify interacting with your applications interface. 

Algorithms based bots 

Algorithms drive the intelligent chatbots. When you add AI to chatbots, you get an entirely new experience. A smart chatbot can ask clarifying questions to get you to the right answer. you can train them to recognize speech or text patterns that show emotion, so it can “know” when an employee needs should reach a human. Sophisticated algorithmic chatbots can also be developed to learn from their experiences to provide better service. 

How Chatbots can streamline your HR process and bring HR into flow of work 

Chatbots in HR can help automate many of your routine repetitive HR tasks and free up your time for critical tasks like having one on one conversations with candidates and drawing insights to improve communications. 

• In recruiting, a chatbot can act as a real-time medium of communication and engagement. It responds to routine questions immediately and reaches out to a human right away when necessary. 

• Chatbots can be trained to offer suggestions for your employee training based on an individual’s career development plan or find recommendations for a new learning path.  

• Chatbots can support your employee onboarding with constant communication offering instant access to crucial resources they need to get accustomed to workplace culture. 

• You can also turn your employee feedback surveys into friendly chatbot conversations that make process interactive. 

• A chatbot can also save your HR staff's time by answering the common questions your employees will have during the open enrolment process. 

• Chatbot can help your employees find important resources right when they need them, serving as a quick resource finder.  

As chatbots grow into maturity, they will make both your HR group and the people it serves more connected and productive.  

Let chatbots handle your drudgery and create efficiencies that can improve communication and performance in your organization.

Chatbots in HR: Not Just for Self-Service

Chatbots are making their way into HR. At the beginning of this wave of change, we predict chatbots will change the relationship people have with HR technology. As the application of this technology matures, it will fundamentally alter the relationships people have with each other.     

The Fundamentals of Chatbots 

Chatbots are software robots that enable technology to interact with humans on human terms. With a well-trained bot, users can say or type what they need, and the bot will locate and provide information, answer questions, and take any action you train them to do. These virtual assistants can be trained to handle repetitive tasks that would typically require users to log in to an HR application, remember how to use it, and adapt unique their human needs to preconfigured lists of values designed for clean reporting. 

With these capabilities, we understand why many organizations choose to apply bot technology to HR self-service as a first effort. It has a profound impact on the user experience, and it makes HR more efficient by handling many tasks and requests formally handled by humans. The quick return on investment makes it easy to build a business case. 

However, there is much more to chatbots than efficiency. As chatbots grow into maturity, they will make both your HR group and the people it serves more connected and productive. The underlying technology in chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has a significant impact on operating costs, but it also shifts human effort from routine tasks,¹ allowing them to focus more on building human relationships that foster creativity and innovation. 

How Chatbots Will Change Relationships 

How do these efficiencies in communication translate to higher value-add activities, and what are those activities? We explored three situations where we see significant gains. 

Chatbots in Recruiting 

Communication with job candidates influences how people feel about joining an organization. In a 2017 study, IBM found that only 57% of candidates said they were kept well informed during the hiring process, and only 63% were very satisfied with the candidate experience. Applicants who had a good experience were 38% more likely to accept a job offer.  The study also found an impact on attitudes toward the company and subsequent sales^.2 

Chatbots handle many of the routine communications that recruiters can often forget, like acknowledging applications and resumes, sending reminders about upcoming tasks, scheduling interviews, and even administering assessments. The big bonus here is that they can help overcome the lapses in communications that make applicants vulnerable to being snatched away by competitors. 

What’s the value-add for recruiting? 

Recruiters have more time to work with hiring managers. According to research by Bersin by Deloitte, that relationship is the most influential predictor of talent acquisition performance.³  

Recruiters have more time to work with prospects and candidates. The most effective recruiters are those who build relationships with potential employees. Top candidates are much more likely to want to work for an organization where they have a positive relationship with people in it. 

Chatbots in Learning and Development 

L&D has gone through some rapid changes in the past few years. We have new delivery modes in e-learning, instant video, and micro-learning. Adaptive learning driven by artificial intelligence promises to take learning on the job to a level of effectiveness we could not even imagine just a couple of years ago. 

All those changes have brought with them a new world of complexity to both L&D staff and the people they serve. Chatbots hold the promise of making that complexity manageable. 

Even without AI, chatbots can reduce the complexity of learning for the end-user. Instead of searching through catalogs, course lists, YouTube, the intranet, and who knows where else, users can tell chatbots what they need, and a chatbot will deliver. 

Chatbots can be trained to offer up suggestions for learning based on an individual’s career development plan or find recommendations for a new learning path. They could also handle many more time-consuming repetitive and mundane tasks, like managing an individual’s training calendar, locating resources, and producing reports. 

Support libraries for administrators can become conversational helpers instead of inanimate lists of technical material. They can even be trained to manage routine, repetitive tasks. 

What’s the value-add for learning? 

Finally, we can bring learning into the flow of work. What employees need information, learning in the moment, or a refresher on a new procedure, they don’t need to stop what they are doing and search for what they need. They can assign that task to a virtual assistant who will never tire of being helpful. Your people can spend their time learning instead of searching for what to learn. 

Chatbots in Performance 

The transition from annual performance reviews to ongoing conversations about performance is a long-term culture change project. Anything we can do to facilitate the conversations can be a benefit to both employees and their managers. 

Knowledge workers can spend up to 40% or more of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs. Imagine how you could help them by providing a virtual assistant that has indexed every resource in your content repositories. 

What’s the value-add for performance? 

How about reminders for busy managers? Think about a virtual personal assistant the will do this: 

• “It’s been over a week since you talked with Brenda about her project. Should I make an appointment for you?” 
• “You asked me to remind you to discuss training progress with your team this morning.” 
• “Jack’s report was due yesterday.” 
• “Your team meeting is tomorrow. Let’s develop the agenda. You can dictate it to me.” 

Imagine how your managers will feel when they can view any employee profile, any report, and their management coaching resources merely by asking for them. 

The Limitless Opportunity of Chatbots 

The examples given above are only a few of the possibilities for chatbots to improve communication and performance in your organization. Employee self-service is an excellent place to start, but we encourage you to move on to more sophisticated and productive applications as you can. The possibilities are endless. 

How AI in HR can save time and drive efficiency

The moment you log into your office mail, you see subject lines like…

Immediate requirement in Sales team
Immediate update required for new hire training
New Compliance Deadlines this month
The Coffee Machine is broken!

Before you can get started, a manager calls to ask you about recruiting status on his engineer requisition.

Many times you miss parts of the conversations as you always have a mobile to your ear and eyes on an email on the monitor.

You turn your head to see a colleague at your desk wanting to chat - which ends with ‘Good Day’. This so-called ‘good day’ actually ends up with many regrets like forgetting to inform a manager about a skype interview schedule, falling back on priorities, tough times with your boss, going home late, and failing at your personal promises.

Your day ends just when you felt it had started. You hardly find time to work on building strategies that elevate your culture and engage talent.

Is more time all you need?

What if you had a tool that not only saves you time but also enhances your effectiveness - a technology tool that can wisely handle your routine tasks like recruiting and onboarding activities, monitoring training and compliance, and coordinating with managers and staff to communicate on updates.

Enhance efficiency by implementing AI in HR

Artificial Intelligence - where we make machines work, think and react much like humans, can be a boon if adapted well to your HR processes.  

And the fascinating fact about AI is, the more you work with it, the better it learns and adapts.

AI can effectively manage the day-to-day activities of your HR team and here are few ideas to help you start thinking about it.

How AI can help Recruiting improve candidate profiling

Implementing AI in your recruiting processes saves time. AI can help you identify the right candidate profile that matches your skill set. While you let your machine deal routine repetitive tasks, you can work on critical things like having one on one conversations with candidates and drawing insights to improve communications.

While you onboard, reach out to your New Hires with answers to their questions - before they ask

During the process of onboarding, you have to coordinate with the new hires right from day one until they establish strong relationships with peers and managers. Many times it is hard to reach out to every new hire and provide instant guidance.

This is where AI can help you. You can deploy an AI-based virtual assistant that will tackle new hire queries and offer answers so you can focus on tasks that need human intervention.

In your training, let AI recommend the right courses for your employees

AI can analyze the kinds of training that have been successful to make better recommendations for your employee development plans.

Achieve smoother communication flow

With AI, you can train your machine to respond like the way you do. Your employees need not wait for answers. They can get instant help with their questions.

AI will give you the gift of time to focus on elevating your company culture and improving the employee experience. Not only that - your AI will provide spontaneous service by finding answers much faster than a human can.

Are You Ready for your HR Virtual Assistant?

Chatbots have arrived in HR, and we are celebrating. After three decades of chasing the user experience dream, we may finally have someone (or something) that won’t complain about doing “HR stuff.” 

Before we automated HR, we had armies of people who made a living doing the tedious manual work of handling employment and payroll transactions. For the employee, requesting vacation time was a matter of scratching a couple of dates on the paper form and handing it off to a supervisor, who handed off to the HR clerical staff. From the employee perspective, taking a day off meant saying “Hey Boss, I need to take my kid to the doctor on Friday,” leaving the manager and HR to handle the administrivia.

The Quest for HR Efficiency

The first wave of HR automation made HR more cost-efficient. The army of workers became much smaller, and fewer people made a living doing tedious computer and manual work.

Then came self-service, when HR pushed the work out to employees and their managers.

They hated it. Managers and employees flooded HR with calls about how to handle transactions, so a cadre of administrative worker arose to handle the tasks for everyone in the business unit or workgroup because people balked at learning how to use the software.

With the growth of cloud platforms, talent management platforms, payroll, and time and attendance, competition drove the effort to make those systems easy enough for anyone to use.

Why People Are Not Overjoyed about the New User Experience

People still hated it. Organizations deployed wave after wave of new systems with a lot of “change management” and hype, only to see the enthusiasm dissipate over time.

The trouble is that nobody who already has a job to do in the organization wants to do “HR stuff.” We don’t know anyone who becomes joyous at the prospect of applying for Family or Medical Leave. We have never heard anyone say, “I’m so happy! I get to fill out my online timecard!” or “I love doing those development plans!”

In practice, we just want to get the HR stuff done so we can get back to what we like doing.

The Tedium Is Still with Us

Today, instead of those vast armies of clerical workers, we have skeleton HR staffs populated by professionals and semi-professionals. They spend up to 30 or 40% of their time answering questions from managers, employees, prospective employees, and ex-employees about how to manage their transactions or where to find the information they need to do it.

Virtual Assistants Have Arrived

Relief is here. Cognitive computing, natural language processing (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI) are working with text and voice messaging to create virtual assistants in our personal lives. Millions of us are using Cortana, Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

We want the same experience at work. HR technology providers are responding, but small startups and niche providers are moving faster. Chatbots and text bots are currently used primarily in customer self-service, but they are moving quickly into HR, among other areas.^[1]

Now is an excellent time for companies to get in on the ground floor of HR virtual assistants to improve their productivity and to influence the direction these products take.

Recommendations

Before you jump into the mix, there are four things we recommend for you to think about as you prepare for your virtual assistants.

1. Evaluate solutions for compatibility with other emerging technology. A virtual assistant that stands alone will become an administrative burden. A textbot or chatbot should be compatible with others used in business including Cortana, Siri, and Alexa for Business. It should easily integrate into your HR software platforms, and be fully compatible with collaboration software, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.
2. Work with other cognitive computing initiatives across your organization to build a shared lexicon.
3. Make it easy for users to report issues and suggestions by integrating the function directly into your virtual assistant. Automate the information-gathering for analysis so your users will be more willing to help.
4. Be transparent. Tell your people what you are doing, what information you are gathering, and how you will use it. And, while it almost goes without saying, it is better to say it – don’t pretend it is not a robot.

Sign up for more of our conversation about virtual assistants and the future of work. We look forward to hearing of the success stories of having assistants who are happy to do that “HR stuff” we all hate to do.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Many organizations have difficulty making full use of the reporting and analytical tools embedded in their HR applications.

The reason, is that vendors don’t provide the reports and analytics you need - they provide the tools for you to build them, and many companies don’t have the knowledge and resources to do it.

Chasma Analytics fills that gap with preconfigured data visualizations and dashboards that give you instant insights into your operations.

A robust reporting library can take months to build, but you can have Chasma reports and dashboards up and running in days.

• Get control of your compliance tracking and reporting..
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• Improve business agility and make faster decisions with data visualizations.

Get the details on Chasma’s data-ready visualizations and dashboards.

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Chasma Editor helps you improve the user experience without expensive upgrades and customization.

• Put the resources your people need at their fingertips
• Improve workflow and collaboration
• Increase employee engagement and productivity

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How much time does your HR staff spend answering simple, repetitive questions from employees, prospective employees, and ex-employees?

How much productivity are your losing – time you could be spending on:

• Developing leadership development programs to create a sustainable organization?
• Helping managers retain valuable employees by having one on one conversations about their career aspirations?
• Adapting your compensation and benefits plans to the realities of the modern workforce?

Download our data sheet to see how you can improve productivity in your HR team and throughout your organization.

Please provide your email address, and we’ll send you a link to the data sheet.

Chasma Editor helps you improve the user experience without expensive upgrades and customization.

• Put the resources your people need at their fingertips
• Improve workflow and collaboration
• Increase employee engagement and productivity

Get the details on how you can use Chasma’s drag and drop Editor to deploy user-friendly employee portals and landing pages.

Please submit details in form on right and we’ll send you a link to the data sheet.

With a vision of interconnected systems that help people work more efficiently keeping the business empathetic, human and personable, Chasma is bringing you an innovative collection of solutions that can maximize your people efficiency. 

Chasma suite includes -  

• Sleek, modern apps that tightly integrate with your enterprise platforms 

• Prebuilt connectors to integrate your applications without the need for expensive development 

• Analytics Dashboards and visualizations that give instant insights into your data 

• Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing tools to bring efficiencies in your HR business process 

• Automated solutions for your software validation, software license management, and enterprise event management