Originally published by Business Reporter. Learn how business can enable a productive workforce by accessing know-how, identifying skill gaps and developing talent intelligence in this article written by the Starmind team and published by Business Reporter. The future of work is here. With the accelerated trend of working remotely, companies need to realise the potential of every employee now more than ever. A disproportionate amount of intelligence lies undiscovered and inaccessible within organisations.

With this in mind, it becomes a business imperative that the collective intelligence and skill profiles of an organisation and each employee is mapped out, accessed to increase productivity and developed to future-proof the company’s operations.

The good news is, there is a solution – and it’s much closer than most enterprises realise.

Starmind is an artificial intelligence platform for employees and skills designed to supercharge productivity, innovation and career development. Using patented AI, Starmind builds individual and organisational skill profiles to identify expert intelligence, access undocumented knowledge and develop talent intelligence.

Identifying expert intelligence

● Make expert knowledge accessible and transparent
● Bust silos and let employees participate in solving critical problems
● Form agile customer project teams or internal project teams with the best experts you have in the company

For organisations with thousands or hundreds of thousands of team members, identifying individual expertise, and sharing it in-house effectively, can seem like an impossible task. A team working on one side of the globe may have no idea about the expert intelligence that sits within the business elsewhere. Often, the problem begins with the fact that employees and teams work in silos, which makes a culture based on knowledge-sharing and transparency harder to promote.

Starmind’s advanced artificial intelligence helps to break these organisational silos at their core by recommending employees who are subject-matter experts. The AI platform does this by building real-time skills profiles reflecting employee know-how and competencies, helping to identify intelligence and enabling teams to form rapidly with the best experts available. It draws on data from more than 200 of the most popular enterprise software sources, such as Microsoft Office, Jive, Slack and Microsoft Teams, to create this real-time intelligence map that continues to learn and unlearn, and which is available to every employee on desktop or mobile.

Accessing undocumented intelligence

● Increase effectiveness by allowing employees to answer repetitive questions once and make this know-how accessible to everybody
● Build and retain a corporate knowledge pool and capture know-how before employees leave
● Surface hidden knowledge and make it accessible

Studies suggest that just 20 per cent of each employee’s knowledge is documented (recorded in emails, Slack messages or meeting notes), while 80 per cent remains undocumented and inaccessible.

As many as 61 per cent of workers across the UK and US report that they can’t find the information they need to do their job effectively. In comparison, 65 per cent have knowledge and skills their organisation doesn’t know about or capitalise on.

Part of the problem is that when a team member leaves an organisation, their intelligence leaves with them. It can seem impossible to gather and retain all of that individual’s rich insights within the business after they’ve gone. Furthermore, if a team member’s current position only requires them to use a small percentage of the full breadth of their expertise, then there is no way of telling what else they could contribute.

AI can also help in this area by encouraging employees to ask questions and provide answers through gamification. This then helps to build the corporate knowledge pool and capture employee know-how.

Develop talent intelligence

● Identify skill gaps on an organisational and employee level
● Build a targeted learning and development plan based on skill maps
● Generate GDPR and privacy-compliant skill profiles at scale

Finally, Starmind provides businesses with a real-time skill map of their entire organisation, which is comprised of individual and company-wide skill profiles that identify skill gaps and reveal where critical skills lie. Knowing this allows businesses to strategically plan for the future, retain their competitive advantage or pivot and wisely invest in talent development.

Tackling skill gaps at both an organisational and employee level helps businesses identify what skills it has and which skills need to be developed. Businesses can then build targeted learning and development plans that focus on upskilling, training and promoting from within.

In a recent global study from Boston Consulting Group, statistics show that 67 per cent of workers are willing to reskill, and 65 per cent already spend significant time learning each year.

Starmind gives businesses the opportunity to leverage the talent they already have by identifying expertise and skillsets that would have otherwise remained hidden.