ReportWire

Tag: staff training

  • Steal Citigroup’s AI Training Rule to Ensure Successful Adoption at Your Company

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    As AI capabilities evolve swiftly and continuously, some big corporate names are weaving the technology deeply into their day-to-day operations. Salesforce is a leading example, with the sales software company already claiming it’s saving it $100 million a year. But report after report suggests that few of these AI integration efforts include one final, critical step like the one the global bank Citigroup is taking. It’s now mandating that most of its workers learn how to properly prompt AI systems.

    The decision was announced last week in a LinkedIn posting from the bank’s head of technology and business enablement, Tim Ryan, HRDive reports. AI prompt training is now required for all workers who can access the bank’s AI tools — about 180,000 people. Apparently, if you’re already well versed in AI prompts, the training will last only about 10 minutes, and beginners should expect it to take about 30 minutes. That’s not much time, but the training is clearly not intended to be comprehensive or a deep dive, which would waste hundreds of thousands of hours of workers’ time. Citi’s approach is to give everyone a light introduction that boosts the average employee’s ability to use AI.

    The bank reportedly doesn’t require its staff to use AI, in contrast to other AI integration efforts — in April 2024, for example, Moderna’s CEO hit the headlines when he told staff he expected them to use AI at least 20 times a day. Citi’s intention is to make the most of AI’s promise to tackle basic mundane tasks and free workers up to work on more productive parts of their jobs. The system has been prompted over 6.5 million times during 2024, Ryan said. That would equate to about 36 prompts for every employee.

    Prompt engineering is at heart a simple idea: it’s learning how to choose and then reshape the questions you ask of an AI chatbot in order to steer it toward producing exactly the responses you need. Think of it as being like tasking an intern to build, say, a template Powerpoint presentation for you — give them a general idea, then look at their first effort and refine your instructions so they ultimately include all the elements you’d like. AI tools require a similar process, and sometimes requires the user to provide very carefully chosen language. 

    For some experts, prompt engineering could morph into a whole career, and prompting may become as much a part of the average workday as sending emails or Slacking your coworkers. Earlier this year, Slack’s chief marketing officer predicted that staff would soon be talking with AIs in the office more than they talk to their colleagues.

    This may seem like a bleak future, but it’s undeniable that learning to properly use an AI system is one way to ensure your company sees a return on its new, buzzy tech investment. But many reports suggest that when companies roll out AI they simply aren’t informing their staff how and when to use it, nor offering appropriate training. At best this means leaders may be missing out on some of the worker efficiency and productivity boosts that the tech can offer, and at worst it could lead to a one of their employees leaking sensitive company information out by say, entering secret fiscal data into a third-party AI system.

    What’s the lesson here for you and your AI-using workforce?

    It’s simple. If you haven’t already invested in some training time, you should. AI is already powerful enough to simplify certain tasks, and as AI agent technology improves it can even take on typical time-munching office tasks like automatically filling in digital timesheets or helping workers file expenses claims — necessary, but unproductive uses of their precious work hours. 

    The other thing to remember is that AI training shouldn’t be a one-shot affair. The tools are advancing so quickly that you should plan a regular schedule to refresh your workers on the latest tools that are on offer.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • How Career ‘Ghost Growth’ Can Hurt Your Business 

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    It’s easy to feel like just a small cog in a very complex machine when you’re a low-level worker. Employers try to counter this feeling of having a limited career horizon by promising raises and promotions — a hint that you won’t remain a small cog for long, and there’s a bigger and brighter future for you if you just stick with it and grow with the company. But a new survey shows that many of these promises ring hollow, and the majority of American workers have experienced what’s called “ghost growth,” where their employer has promised advancement of one type or another, and then simply failed to follow through. There are lessons to be learned from this for your company, primarily how to avoid damaging employee morale.

    The data, from San Francisco-based resume platform MyPerfectResume, found that fully 65 percent of U.S. workers surveyed said they’d suffered ghost growth at one time or another. Essentially this means that two in every three workers have been promised advancement, and may have been handed expanded duties or authority, but without any meaningful changes to their jobs, such as significant pay raises, HRDive reports.

    Digging into the details, the study confirms that 78 percent of the 1,000 workers questioned said they’d been assigned new duties without getting a raise or promotion. Over half said they’d been promised promotions that never materialized, and over a third complained that they’d been given an increased workload as part of this process but had not been given a raise. Only 15 percent of people said they’d received a raise in the past year that matched their ever-growing duty list. And 35 percent — more than one in three people — said they’d never been properly compensated for additional workloads.

    This phenomenon seems incredibly prevalent, which may explain why two in three of the survey respondents blamed their employer for taking part in “growth theater.” You can think of this as being like greenwashing (promising some eco-friendly credentials that are associated with a particular item or business process, in order to boost sales and the company’s image, even though there’s no meaningful benefit), but for career growth. Basically an employer goes through all the big-gesture motions of promising to help their staff’s career paths without actually intending to go through with much of it. This could look like offering training to a staff member who’s been given new, expanded responsibilities ,but then failing to promote them to a new job title or boost their salary.

    The damage this bait-and-switch can cause is significant. Survey respondents noted how emotionally damaging ghost growth can be, with 53 percent saying it “looks like” their career is progressing, even as it actually doesn’t feel like it. And 49 percent of people say they’ve reached a plateau in their career and, as the report notes, “their company is trying to mask it with superficial opportunities.”

    Promising someone recognition of some sort and then not following through can harm trust and, ultimately, even drive staff to look for work elsewhere if they feel they’re being exploited by their employer, or if their extra duties are burning them out. Nearly 7 in 10 people in the survey said they’d considered quitting due to ghost growth issues, and nearly 3 in 10 people had actually done so.

    Losing these frustrated, disaffected employees can hurt a business beyond the departure of trained personnel and their expertise. It has an actual cost, from repeating the recruitment process, which increases the price tag through the extra time and effort required. This might be one reason why ghost growth happens, of course: conscious of their bottom line, and faced with a an important employee’s departure, some managers may be tempted to share out that person’s duties to their remaining colleagues, but not reward them accordingly.

    What can you take from this for your company?

    Simple: if you’ve promised your workers some form of support along their career journey, you should follow through by actually helping them to advance and compensating them accordingly. Tangible benefits like higher pay, or even a clear path to promotion and leadership roles, supported by upskilling and placing your trust in them are good ideas, HRDive notes. This is supported by MyPerfectResume’s data, which found 27 percent of employees saying they’d like higher pay to go with expanded duties, and 18 percent said they’d feel they’d “grown” if they were offered better work-life balance. 

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    Kit Eaton

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