Susanne Jeffery has spent her career at the intersection of people and companies.

She worked as an HR manager for Iona Technologies after it became the first Irish company to float on the Nasdaq exchange. During her time with United Airlines, she set up a European crisis centre in its Dublin office in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001. 

Jeffery spent seven years as HR director for Accenture in Ireland, before being appointed employee experience global lead with the international consulting firm, a role that saw her divide her time between Dublin and New York.

Since 2022, she has worked with PwC, advising companies on how to use technology to help optimise their HR function. Throughout her career, she has witnessed profound changes in the workplace, and in the relationship between employees and the companies that they work for.

The way Jeffery sees it, the pace of change has never been as rapid as it is today. 

“You have to look at the backdrop that businesses are operating in,” said Jeffery, a director in PwC’s workforce consulting team. 

“Geopolitical changes are happening rapidly. The repercussions of the pandemic are still there. There are technological advances. There is a focus on climate action. These are all huge changes. Business leaders are juggling all of these while trying to run profitable businesses and keep employees engaged.”

So, in this changing world, what can companies do to harness the power of their workforce? And where do emerging technologies such as generative AI fit into the evolving relationship between companies and staff?

The transformation journey

Earlier this month, PwC released its Irish Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024. Now in its fifth year, the survey polled the views of 1,000 Irish workers across eight industries.  

The responses were stark. One in four Irish workers surveyed said they were likely to switch employers in the next 12 months, while roughly the same number say their workload has increased over the past year. 

Two-thirds said the pace of change at work has accelerated over the same time, while 73 per cent say that the decision to stay in – or leave – their job will be influenced by opportunities to learn new skills.

“Employees are really telling us that they are feeling the pace of change,” said Jeffery, who said that companies needed to listen to what employees are saying.

Employees, she said, want to feel engaged and that they are part of the decision-making process. 

“Gone are the days when business leaders make decisions in the absence of consulting with their employees and talking to them about the change,” she said.

She said this could be anything from consulting about the type of generative AI tools that are used to engaging with staff about new initiatives in the workplace. 

“It is really about engaging employees from the outset and communicate, communicate, communicate. I can’t say that enough,” she said. 

The PwC workforce survey found that Irish workers are willing to embrace change. However, it also found that Irish respondents are likely to underestimate its pace and impact, with just over a third believing that technological change, including AI and GenAI, will impact their jobs to a very large or large extent in the next three years. This is compared with nearly half of global counterparts surveyed. 

“Employees want to learn and grow and embrace the change. That is a  real positive and I really want to emphasise that,” Jeffery said. “This is a good news message for employers – that employees understand that the change is happening. They want to upskill and learn and grow their careers to keep pace with the change.”

This is evidenced by the survey, which found that 76 per cent of Irish employees feel ready to adapt to new ways of working and almost 70 per cent are excited about opportunities to learn and grow in their role.

According to Jeffery, the message is clear: Employees want to upskill and develop and it is up to companies to help them do it. 

“The number of employees who are seeking those opportunities for learning and development is really stark,” Jeffery said. “And this isn’t something that’s really hard to do as a business or as an employer. So, it’s a real easy win in some way to provide employees with the opportunities to have continuous learning and development and those opportunities for upskilling. Because that then leads on to so many other things.”

Jeffery said this was especially the case in the area of new and emerging technologies. 

“Employees want the opportunity to be able to use technologies and we saw that in some cases employers are not providing the opportunity to engage with technology in the way that employees would like,” she said, adding that this could often be a crucial factor in whether a employee opts to leave or stay.

Leveraging new technologies

One year ago, PwC announced that it was launching a new GenAI Business Centre. Enabled by a collaboration with Microsoft, the centre is designed to help companies determine how to adopt new AI technologies into their operations. 

At the time, PwC said the investment comes at a time of  “huge opportunity” for businesses but also at a time when technology needed to be applied with great responsibility. The Irish centre followed over a €1 billion investment by the consultancy firm globally, through its relationship with Microsoft, to expand and scale AI and drive human-led, tech-powered transformation.

While most Irish employees acknowledge the opportunities around GenAI, the survey also showed hesitation towards the new technology. 

For example, one-third of Irish workers don’t think that there are opportunities to use the technology in their line of work, while 26 per cent don’t have access to GenAI tools at work. Some 29 per cent don’t know how to use the tools.

Meanwhile, 51 per cent believe that GenAI will increase their efficiency at work in the next 12 months, while 54 per cent say it will improve the quality of their work. Both numbers are lower than the international average in the survey.

“The reality is that GenAI is here. We’re using it in our personal lives and when we’re using things in our personal lives, we tend to expect it in our working professional lives also,” Jeffery said. “Where employees have actually had the opportunity to use GenAI tools, they’re reporting that actually it’s really efficient, it’s making their jobs easier, more productive. So, we know it has the benefits. Some of the barriers to adopting AI lie with employers.  Some of them lie with employees because there’s still that fear, I think, around how it’s used.”

The survey found that many people had reservations about incorporating GenAI in their workplace, with some believing it would increase their workload or could have a negative impact on their role. 

Jeffery, however, said it was important that both companies and staff worked together to harness the power of the technology. 

“We talk about this in PwC a lot with our clients – we have this concept of human-led, tech-powered, and in all of our conversations, we tend to focus on the technology, in this case, GenAI,” she said.   

“But GenAI is only ever going to be as good as the human interaction with it. There is that kind of adage that AI won’t take your job, but the person who can collaborate with it and use it effectively will.  So if I’m talking to employers, I’m really talking about communicating the benefits of GenAI, communicating what the tools are, what they do, importantly what are the guardrails around utilising it in a professional environment. But we also focus on the positives and bring employees on that journey to get rid of that fear factor.”

When it comes to getting employee buy-in on new technologies such as GenAI, Jeffery said it was demonstrating “use cases” and examples of where it can make a job easier. 

“It really is something that you can incorporate into your day, but unless people see that and see the benefits for themselves, there will questions around ‘how’s including it going to be useful for me’,” she said. 

It is also important that senior management show leadership on the issues by using the new technologies themselves, Jeffery said. 

“Our latest PwC CEO survey showed that when leaders have adopted new technologies like GenAI, they themselves have actually realised the benefits for themselves. But important in all of this is role modelling.  If leaders don’t adopt these things and this goes for anything to do with change or transformation, how can they really expect employees to do it on the ground?  So, that aspect around leadership is really important here,” she said. 

According to Jeffery, it is crucial to put the employee experience at the heart of the company if it was to engage employees to drive transformation. 

“When we talk about retaining employees and moving them away from thoughts of changing employers, it is about providing them with the best employee experience, and experience, as we know, is pretty much everything.  Really focusing on that employee experience is at the heart of everything,” concludes Jeffery.

The Tech Agenda with Ian Kehoe podcast series is sponsored by PwC.