Intelligent automation of interpersonal relationships in Human Resource work

HRM (Human Resource Management) is a female-dominated professional category that reports perceived stress in working life to a large extent. As business partners with both strategic responsibility for personnel matters and operational support for line managers, HR departments increasingly use refined autonomous systems and AI in key processes such as recruitment, training for new employees, further training for employees, employee surveys and decision-making. Introduction of digital tools, AI and automation can enable increased flexibility and balance between work and private life, but also increase the experience of a deteriorating social and organizational work environment through reduced opportunity to define work, that one's own profession is put out of play, change in social norms, experience of vulnerability, fear and increased surveillance.

This change reflects the digitization of society and the organization at large, but the HR department and its employees are rarely an arena for understanding how the introduction of AI and intelligent automations affects the work environment. In light of the knowledge that exists about the consequences of autonomous technologies for the work environment, in the form of a perceived deterioration of the work environment at higher organizational levels, and given the central role in the introduction and use of AI that human resource scientists play, there is a need to understand how this professional category itself relates to these technologies.

The purpose of the project is to, through qualitative studies, explore the readiness for the introduction of, and the state of knowledge around, AI in HR work in Swedish companies today. The project addresses two practical areas: how HR professionals feel that their own work is affected by the introduction of AI in operations and how HR professionals approach the assessment of how the work of others will be affected by AI.

Project objective

The goal of the research project is to contribute to an improved state of knowledge regarding both practical issues (tools used, how and why) and how the use of these affects an already stressed but engaged profession.

Studies such as Raisch & Krakowski (2018), Andersson et al (2022), or Lebovitz et al (2022) show that professionals need to understand the technology they work with in order to use and utilize it. The same is highlighted in reports such as Cajander et al (2021). Today we see how intelligent automation is implemented in a number of different contexts to streamline and improve working life and is expected to be part of interpersonal collaboration in organizations (eg. Raisch & Krakowski, 2018; Wilson & Daugherty, 2018). The practices within HR work are centered around interpersonal exchange, both in the individual relationships between different employees and in the relationships that make up the organization. By examining the implications of the use of intelligent automation for HR as a profession, a basis can be developed for understanding the technology in a way that promotes the human in our organizations.

Another important aspect is that HR is a female-dominated professional category where one in four feels very stressed at work and one in five has difficulty sleeping due to thoughts on the job (JUSEK, 2017). Stress is a central cause of rampant sick leave rates; in Sweden, approx. 32,000 people, of whom women make up an overrepresented proportion, are diagnosed annually as exhausted, while approx. 200 die due to acute stress (Saleh, T., Gustavsson., M., & Belfrage., L, 2016; Försäkringskassan, 2020). For that reason, new regulations on organizational and social work environment (AFS 2015:4) were introduced in March 2016, which regulate questions about knowledge requirements, goals, workload, working hours and abusive discrimination (Arbetsmiljöverket, 2022). One of the reasons for this increase in stress-related ill-health is the increased digitization which, by facilitating communication and the flow of information at work, fragments both the working day (Wajcman & Rose, 2011) and tasks (Andersson et al, 2022). As discussed in Andersson et al (2022), increased use of AI and fragmentation contribute to the disappearance of the human element in work; the people at work are treated equally with the technologies they work with.

In light of the fact that the impact of intelligent automation on people's work environment is under-researched (Cajander et al., 2021) that the knowledge that exists about the consequences of autonomous technologies for the work environment (Sullivan and Gershuny, 2018) and collegial collaboration (Wilson & Daugerthy, 2018), and given the HR department's role as responsible for the interpersonal in organizations and the high level of perceived stress among its employees (JUSEK, 2017), there is a need to understand how HR employees themselves relate to these technologies.