Empathy Expansion Kit: AI and Employee Emotional Well-being Feedback Loops

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome to today's Empathy Expansion Kit episode in today's show. We're going to briefly explore how AI tools might support employee well-being by identifying stressors and facilitating emotional support mechanisms. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa.
A study in April said one in four companies use AI to support HR work right now, but 76 percent of HR leaders believe they will be using AI solutions in the next 12 to 24 months. Now, a lot of this may be related to things like hiring and payroll, but we're in the cusp of this really weird spot here where all these AI tools are just about on top of us. They're coming online and we're seeing some of this gathering data in the workplace here and analyzing different things. So what we want to dive in here is the good side of this. There's obviously this dark side of this bad ways these things can be used. It's a sort of dark mirror episode of employment.
We'll get into that maybe into a longer podcast, but we're talking about just the mentoring, the helping build love into your business. Can these tools help do some of that? Tullio, what are your thoughts here?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:44)
I think this is very exciting because if you really care about your people and your team, then you obviously want to find ways to be supportive, to be encouraging, and where appropriate, maybe lift them up when they're down.
How do you do that? Unless you have this continuous daily interaction which could come across like trying to micromanage people, it's a difficult thing to balance. It takes time and energy, and most of us don't know how to identify every little thing that's going on. So AI can really help tremendously look for things like sentiments or tonality, perhaps in email messages or even internal communication and things of that sort that could indicate that someone may be undergoing some stress or some challenges that is an opportunity to go and support them. And what I like about it is if everyone sort of opts in to this, it becomes a way to have someone, a co-pilot or a mentor or even a therapist, I guess, just supports you along the way. And it's private. So it's not like a boss or someone from HR is coming to me and saying, hey, you know, I noticed you a little stress.
It's more like the system saying, are you OK? How do you feel today? And maybe it's an emoji that someone types in and there's some supportive commentary that's provided. And it's totally personalized. That's what I like about AI, can personalize it. So imagine you have a team of hundreds of people. There's no way every HR practitioner could have every skill set needed to support 100 people. It's just impossible.
So someone might need a little bit more love in their interaction. Someone might need a little more empathy, someone might need a little more compassion, someone might need a little more patience.
And there's no way to have all those skills. So AI can do that very effectively. And I think it's super empowering if we create a model where employees can opt in so that they voluntarily will get this kind of support. It's private, kept between them. But there's also some components to it where there is a trigger for management or HR, not as an oversight kind of thing, but more of a supportive, loving thing to say, hey, we're seeing this sort of thing going on across the organization. Maybe there's a need for some training, some EQ training, some offsite events, something to get people together. These are all tools to help create more engagement, more cohesion and more collaboration amongst the team.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:27)
Yeah, I could see that with the, you're talking about, yeah, that being private, but I can also see the overall morale, like your score, right, your happiness score, or your, you know, there's probably a bunch of scores already out there for this. But you can see, you know, if you got 100 different employees and saying, hey, yeah, morale is kind of dipping here.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:51)
I mean, imagine you make an announcement, some change is happening, whatever's going on, and you can instantly get a pulse on the organization. How are people reacting to that? How are people feeling about that? And that can inform how you deal with the situation. So maybe you realize, oh, man, we missed the mark here. We need to be more supportive.