利用人工智能决策：组织精简时的客观性评估

美国各地的高级企业官员现在都着急烦恼得很。2023年的经济环境不确定，但有一件事却是肯定的——更多的裁员正在来临。仅在2022年11月各公司就宣布了8万多人的裁员，其中包括美达、亚马逊、推特等科技巨头以及百事可乐、高盛、福特等传统企业。

Downsizing is one of the most difficult things that leaders ever have to accomplish. How many should you let go? When should you do it? Who stays and who goes? What severance do you offer? How do you protect your diversity targets? How to maintain trust and productivity in those who get to stay?

裁员一直都是管理层必须完成的最困难的事情之一。你应该让多少人走人？你应该什么时候做？谁留下、谁离开？你要提供什么样的遣散费？你要如何保护你的多元化目标？如何保持那些留下来的人的信任和生产力？

Let too many go, too fast, and you could damage service and execution. Let too few go, too late, and you might lose money. Let the wrong people go and you may just create internal chaos. Getting this wrong can have enormous consequences on profitability, productivity, brand reputation, and stock price.

让太多的人走人、走得太快了，你可能会破坏组织的服务和执行力。让太少的人走人、走得太晚了，你可能会亏钱。让错误的人走人，你可能会造成组织内部混乱。这事情如果搞错会对盈利能力、生产力、品牌声誉和股票价格产生巨大影响。

That made me think—could AI assist with this problem?

笔者因此在想，人工智能可以协助解决这个问题吗？

Throughout the recent years of aggressive growth, AI helped HR departments source, screen, and interview candidates, and even to reduce bias in hiring practices. IBM and others used AI to predict which employees were about to quit. Attraction and retention were the names of the game.

人工智能在最近几年蓬勃发展，可以帮助人力资源部门寻找、筛选和面试候选人，甚至还可以减少招聘中出现的偏见。IBM和其他公司利用人工智能预测哪些员工即将辞职。在这里主要是吸引和保留人才。

So what about layoffs? Are there any AI tools that help guide corporations’ decision making? As it turns out, there are, and I’d like to share with you five ways that AI can make “organizational rightsizing” work to the advantage of both the employer and employees:

裁员能不能也用上人工智能呢？有没有人工智能工具可以帮助指导企业的决策呢？事实证明是有的。笔者想在这里与读者分享五种方法，其中的人工智能可以令“组织精简”达到对雇主和雇员都有利的目的。

## **Rightsizing your organization: 5 ways AI can help**

组织精简：利用人工智能做决策的五大法宝

### 1\. Performance Evaluation

1、绩效评估

When layoffs are called for, department managers are often given headcount quotas and told to choose who to cut. But for managers in the trenches, every department member seems essential. Without sufficient tools and experience to guide their decisions, the process can be chaotic and highly destructive to morale.

部门经理在需要裁员时通常会拿到一个人数配额并被赋权选择裁减谁。但对于身处前线的管理人员来说，部门的每个成员似乎都至关重要。如果没有足够的工具和经验指导他们做决定，这个过程可能会乱套，这对员工士气具有很大的破坏性。

AI can offer objective performance evaluation to help managers decide who stays and who goes. AI software startups like GoFusion Perfacto and Entomo use data from employee productivity, attendance record, and other KPIs to help separate the star players from the rest on the basis of objective performance metrics.

人工智能可以提供客观的绩效评估，可以帮助管理者决定谁留下谁走人。诸如GoFusion Perfacto和Entomo的人工智能软件初创公司现在可以利用来自员工生产力、出勤记录和其他关键绩效指标的数据，可以基于客观绩效指标帮助将明星员工与其他员工区分开。

This approach provides department heads a justification for their downsizing decisions, freeing both leaders and teams of the worst ills of purely subjective decision-making.

这个方法可以为部门负责人提供裁员决策的理由，进而使领导者和团队都摆脱纯粹靠主观做决策的弊端。

### 2\. Skills inventory

2、技能清单

When put under pressure to downsize, it is human nature for managers to make decisions biased towards short-term needs. Retaining the talent most critically needed for your organization’s core business activities today makes sense in theory. But when that happens across the board, it can leave you unprepared to take on your most important future-facing strategic initiatives.

管理者在处于裁员压力下时做出偏向于短期需求的决定是人之常情。而在理论上，保留你的组织里核心业务活动最急需的人才却更有意义。但如果全盘照着做，就可能使你不能准备好承担那些面向未来的战略举措。

AI can help take inventory of your organization’s skills distribution, compare that to predictions of what will be needed in the marketplace, and identify where skill gaps exist so that you can factor that into your decision-making. Tools like eightfold.ai and Seekout boast what they call “talent intelligence,” combining insights about staff skill with marketplace and organizational needs to make data-driven talent decisions. This enables the C-suite to consider the talent management requirements of the entire organization, not just that of individual departments.

人工智能可以帮助盘点你的组织的技能分布，并将其与市场需要预测进行比较以及确定哪里还存在技能差距，以便你将其纳入决策。诸如eightfold.ai和Seekout一类的工具提供了他们称之为“人才情报”的数据，可以将关于员工技能的见解与市场和组织需求结合起来，进而做出数据驱动的人才决策。这就使得首席管理人员能够考虑整个组织的人才管理要求，而不仅仅是个别部门的要求。

### 3\. Retraining potential

3、再培训潜力

Layoffs mean fewer employees, each wearing more hats. Organizations get restructured. Functions become consolidated. And the staff who remain often must take on new roles and learn new skills as a result. AI can help identify those staff who are better candidates for reskilling and suggest how to help them expand or change their roles.

裁员意味着更少的员工，每个人将要承担更多的工作。组织被重组。一些职能被合并。留下来的员工往往必须承担新的角色及学习新的技能。人工智能可以帮助识别那些更适合重新学习技能的员工，并就如何帮助他们扩展或改变自己的角色提出建议。

HR software like Pymetrics and Workday have tools to analyze soft and hard skill data in your existing workforce, along with certifications, performance record, past projects, and clearances, to identify the strongest mobility or role-expansion opportunities. They sometimes even include personalized course recommendations and training modules, so that you have a clear path towards reskilling staff.

像Pymetrics和Workday一类的人力资源软件提供了相应的工具，这些工具可以分析你现有员工的软技能和硬技能的数据，以及证书、业绩记录、过去的项目和许可等等，进而达到确定最强的迁移或角色扩展机会。这些结果里有时甚至包括个性化的课程建议和培训模块，因此你可以有一个明确的路线进行员工技能的重新培养。

### 4\. Bias avoidance

4、避免偏见

When times are good, it feels easier to pay sufficient attention to the organization’s sense of equality. But when the pressure of layoffs comes, that resolve may begin to fray. How can you be sure that decisions are made fairly, objectively, and in accordance with your organization’s equality objectives? How can you protect your organization’s commitment to diversity and equality?

在世道好的时候，足够地重视组织的平等意识会感觉更容易些。但面临裁员的压力时，这种决心可能会开始动摇。你怎样才能确保决策是公平的、客观的以及符合你的组织的平等目标呢？你如何才能维持你的组织对多样性和平等的承诺呢？

AI can help here as well. Onwards HR, for instance, contains an “Adverse Impact Analysis solution,” which analyzes data across departments and keeps HR and legal teams informed of potential bias in the pool of employees short-listed for dismissal.

人工智能在这方面也可以提供帮助。例如，Onwards HR包含一个“不利影响分析解决方案”，方案可以分析各部门的数据并令人力资源和法律团队了解那些解雇员工名单中的潜在偏见。

### 5\. Offboarding

5、对离职员工的支持

Even for staff who must be let go, AI can play a role. Helping your employees transition is not only the right thing to do, but it is important for protecting your organization against reputational damage, both from outside and from within.

人工智能即使对于那些必须被解雇的员工也可以发挥一些作用。帮助你的员工过渡不仅是正确的事情，而且对于保护你的组织免受来自外部和内部的声誉损害也很重要。

AI can help identify the roles and companies that furloughed employees should seek out, and support them in obtaining the skills they need to successfully obtain new employment. FutureFit AI, for example, compares employee skills with hundreds of millions of others. Then, using real-time labor market data, it recommends career moves and proposes learning paths to help laid-off staff achieve success—all with AI.

人工智能可以帮助被解雇员工定位自己的角色及确定下一步的求职目标公司，还可以为他们获得成功获得新工作所需的技能提供支持。例如，FutureFit人工智能可以将员工的技能与数以亿计的人进行比较。FutureFit人工智能然后可以利用实时劳动力市场数据推荐职业发展、提出学习路径、帮助下岗员工获得成功——所有这些用的都是人工智能。

AI from companies like BlueJ Legal can even help you determine the optimum amount of severance pay to offer your outgoing employees in accordance with age, role, length of service, and litigation case law,

BlueJ Legal等公司的人工智能甚至可以帮助你根据年龄、角色、服务年限和诉讼案例法来确定应该提供什么样的离任员工最佳遣散费。

To be clear, I am not advocating for handing over layoff decision-making to AI wholesale. While it might be nice to fully delegate the dirty deeds of downsizing to AI, humans are still needed to handle layoffs strategically and empathetically. But used properly, AI can certainly support leaders in one of the hardest decisions any of us ever has to make.

我要明确说明一下，我并不主张将裁员决策权完全交给人工智能。虽然把裁员的脏活累活完全交给人工智能可能是件好事，但仍然需要人类介入战略性地、有同情心地处理裁员问题。但如果使用得当，人工智能肯定可以支持领导者做出我们任何人都必须做出的最艰难的决定。