“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership”.
– Amit Ray, AI scientist & author of “Compassionate Artificial Intelligence.”
AI drives evolution in enterprises’ reach and relationships with customers. It will replace humans for doing repetitive and manual labor tasks to increase productivity. The other facet of technology is enhancing soft skills, communication practice, and analysis by developing a trait called Emotional Intelligence (EI).
Undoubtedly, humans and machines conglomerate to simplify the process, operations, and service offerings. More profoundly, Artificial Intelligence enables employees to do better human work by improving one’s emotional intelligence. Also, understanding the emotions of customers to serve according to their psychic behavior.
AI algorithms help detect, analyze, and process your tone, pitch, eye contact, body language, and facial expression. It also influences other forms of verbal and non-communication to help adopt the right emotion at the right time with the right people. Tapping the virtue AI into customer conversations using any video, text, or audio medium helps find relevant patterns from complex data.
Thus, the potential applications of AI will go beyond the usual practice of understanding one’s emotions, roles & responsibilities. It further aims to extend the reach of the usual sales and customer service patterns. In short, automation reflected by AI at the workplace influences emotional intelligence of self and involves the ability to understand others’ emotions.
Emotional Intelligence as an Essential Quality in the Age of AI
Emotional intelligence refers to our ability to perceive, understand, and manage our own emotions in everyday life. Especially at the workplace, recognize several emotions and see how they affect your performance and capabilities. There are five distinct components of EI that you must be aware of:
* Self-Awareness
* Self-Regulation
* Internal Motivation
* Empathy
* Social Skills
From a glance, EI is an imperative trait applied in the workplace to the high clear conscience of one’s actions. Similarly, AI-driven customers data based on purchase history, feedback, reviews, and other forms of communication help you understand them better.
Seven traits and characteristics of emotional intelligence that employees must possess:
- Emotional stability to manage your emotions and tolerate stress at the workplace.
- Conscientiousness to stay diligent, hardworking, and control impulses.
- Extraversion is a trait that helps you be more open and better at fostering professional relationships.
- Ability to perform emotion-related behavior like expressing, empathizing, and combining emotions with others.
- Cognitive ability to control the overlap between IQ and emotional intelligence.
- General self-efficacy to cope with the demands of your job responsibilities.
- Self-rated performance review to enhance growth and productivity.
Emotional Intelligence is Set to Become Must-Have Skill in Next Five-Year
Reflecting the importance of emotional intelligence in the context of the evolving job landscape, organizations are changing constantly. Even, the demands of the employees are shifting. And all such changes are affecting people. This is where employees need to understand how the change is affecting them and what sort of emotions are coming out. They must become self-aware of their emotion and deal with them to highlight professional prowess and reign supreme.
“It is increasingly important to work on your emotional intelligence skills because most routine tasks could be automated tomorrow”. “Only those employees or people who rate highly on EI skills will have a higher chance of retaining their jobs, compared to the ones who just have their basic technical and digital skills in place.” [source: Capgemini]
Looking at the changing enterprise landscape due to adopting AI and automation, the demand for emotional intelligence will rise. Executive and leading officials need to develop EI because the routine, analytics, and logic-based tasks have become automated. Employees must take up more tasks that are not under the logical confinements of AI. Only then, the workforce can retain their jobs and perform well.
Employees must cope with change and become more adaptable. The best resort is to enhance the emotional intelligence skillset to be more competent and responsive, as they transition into roles and comfortably adapting the workplace environment.
EI Offers Significant Benefits to Enterprises and the Workforce
An enterprise culture infused with an emotional intelligence skillset helps to improve productivity, performance, innovation, and customer satisfaction levels.
Improve Leadership: A manager is someone who monitors different reports and takes care of several stakeholders who trust him and follow the lines of guidelines. An emotionally intelligent managing professional showcases strong leadership skills, listen to employees, understand their issues, empathize with the staff, and always inspires them to succeed.
Promote Positive Company Culture: An organization with a strong workplace culture attracts and produces better work. In fact, enterprises having an emotionally intelligent culture can increase the revenue by 33%. It is relevant to take some time to train the workforce in emotional intelligence skill that has a direct impact on the company.
Encourage Collaboration & Teamwork: An organization giving due importance to impart emotional intelligence learning to employees experiences better collaboration. The workforce with higher EI understands themselves, the emotions of other workers, and is not afraid in front of their peers. People with EI build trust among themselves that produces enhance productivity and seamless collaboration.
Better Customer Satisfaction: By improving emotional intelligence, employees can further match the emotional state of customers they communicate with. As a result, enterprise collaborators better serve customers with a personalized approach and improved decision-making skills.
AI and Emotion Intelligence in Action
Real-time examples of emotional intelligence in OrangeMantra while using the prowess of AI.
One of the leading digital transformation partners, OrangeMantra prioritizes EI development in its people. We rely on training and feedback mechanisms to nurture the desired emotional intelligence in professionals. Using different communication mediums, we gain insights while using persuasive and empathetic language.
In the early 2020s, as the pandemic forced global lockdowns, OrangeMantra too adopted remote work. But despite being a fully remote team, we never lost the connectivity and dynamism. Because we know how to best use technology to create a futuristic work environment. Emotional intelligence like empathy and social skills remain at the heart of our work culture.
Conclusion
Companies are exploring AI solutions to help meet customer requirements with a personalized approach. It enables teams to become emotionally intelligent to form better communications. Artificial Intelligence enhances employees to become self-aware and helps foster key work relationships. Emotional intelligence among the workforce results in increased efficiency, productivity, empathetic behavior, and job satisfaction. That’s why executives and organization leaders cannot afford to ignore it in a ruthlessly competitive market.
