If you work in an office you’ll know we’re deep into performance review season. But how would you feel if you found out that your boss had used AI to write your yearly appraisal? I know I’d be pretty annoyed to learn that AI was deciding whether I was worthy of a raise this year.
AI use by employees is becoming commonplace, but it's also being adopted by managers. A recent survey by Headway of 1,000 managers found that 33% had used AI to write feedback or prepare a performance review, while 31% had turned to AI to resolve team conflicts. A further 27% had used AI to help write uncomfortable conversations they needed to have.
That may sound like a lot, but the figure is actually down a bit from 41% admitting they have used AI to draft or revise a performance review in a similar survey from a year ago, but still high.
The ease AI
For managers, the appeal of using AI is easy to understand. Faced with having to write several performance reviews each year it can be a real timesaver to dump the work onto AI, however the risk is that what should be very personal performance feedback is being outsourced to a bot.
Managers' AI use is not stopping at performance reviews, either. The survey also found that 57% of managers have already scripted or rehearsed a difficult conversation before having it using AI.
Thalia-Maria Tourikis, a qualified health coach and burnout prevention and recovery expert at Headway, commented:
“When encountered with a difficult conversation, one might think that using AI can help organize their thoughts. However, you should not give up that interaction to automation. When human emotions such as trust and empathy are involved, it is best conveyed when written by a person. The perfection of AI reads as superficial and doesn’t have the same impact.”
A sliding scale
Bosses using AI to help rate employee performance isn’t the only threat from AI that workers face, there’s also the threat of being monitored by AI. Owl Labs' State of Hybrid Work survey spoke to 8,000 workers worldwide, which found that 58% of employees believe their employer has deployed AI-based monitoring tools.
The Headway survey doesn’t make it clear whether managers are using AI to simply improving their grammar, or change the occasional word for something better, or wether their actually generating the text of the performance review entirely using AI. There’s a big difference between these two extremes and one involves much more cause for concern than the other.
It’s especially concerning with performance reviews because these are often link to financial compensation. If your performance review makes a difference to your annual salary, and wether you deserve that raise or not, then finding out that it’s really AI deciding your future rather than your human manager would be especially galling.
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