Investments in technology are often made in the hope that they will help to produce productivity improvements within the organization.  Research from Georgia State University suggests that this is often the case, but if organizations want to secure a competitive advantage in terms of hiring and retaining the best employees, they may wish to focus more on employee health and wellbeing than on new tech.

“Automation and AI that complement labor can increase productivity, raise earnings and increase demand for skilled workers,” the researchers say. “Many see this technological relationship as a positive one, but our research shows it is not uniformly good according to several measures of worker well-being.”

Mixed picture

The researchers explored the literature to try and understand the impact AI and other automated technologies have in the workplace.  They used a longitudinal dataset to examine the impact on stress, job satisfaction, insecurity, and overall health over a 16 year period.

The results suggest that AI investments can be linked with lower stress but can also reduce worker health and have a negative impact on job satisfaction.  The authors ponder whether this might be because of the impact of the technology on the nature of the work and on any surveillance introduced courtesy of the technology.

“These results do not support the most optimistic view of technology’s impacts as a complement to workers,” the researchers say. “Even the decrease in stress appears to be reversing in recent years, and these effects were concentrated on the highest-risk workers. That demands special attention.”

Not certain

Suffice to say, these negative outcomes are by no means universal and the authors are at pains to point out that they’re neither guaranteed nor predetermined.  Instead, much depends on the nature of the jobs and the culture of the firm, as well as the specific choices made by managers, and even the wider socioeconomic and socio-technological factors.

As a result, simply training workers in the hope that they’ll either out skill technology or effectively complement it is probably not the answer to this dilemma.  Instead, the authors urge managers to consider investments in the round rather than simply focusing on productivity.

“In turn, managers, firms and policymakers can avoid assumptions of technological determinism and exercise their agency meaningfully by shaping work conditions, technological adoption and the regulation of automation and AI in the interest of worker well-being,” the authors conclude.