As AI takes on more routine and manual tasks in the workplace, the qualities that will increasingly set successful companies apart are human. Some of those qualities are empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence.
We often talk about emotional intelligence as an individual skill, but it’s just as critical on a team level. Vanessa Urch Druskat, author of The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest, describes team EI as “a set of habitual routines, or norms, that together meet the core social needs that are activated when people enter teams. These include the need to feel genuinely accepted, known, and valued; the need to engage in discussions that build a shared understanding of the team’s priorities and experience; and the need to have a genuine sense of influence and agency within the team.”
At my company, employees work in cross-functional teams. I’ve seen firsthand how team dynamics—how people collaborate and gel—can make or break a project. That’s why I think a lot about how to build emotionally intelligent teams, where everyone feels valued and heard. Luckily for today’s leaders, AI tools offer novel ways to help companies do exactly that, cultivating the more human side of teamwork. Here are a few strategies that have worked for me.
1. EI-Driven Hiring With AI
Building an emotionally intelligent team begins with hiring. Too often, I hear about leaders taking a bull-in-a-China-shop approach—barreling through the process and cleaning up the mess later. I think it’s a short-sighted strategy. Thoughtful hiring decisions are always worth the upfront investment.
AI tools make it possible to devote the necessary time and resources to hiring without sacrificing efficiency. Research shows that AI agents can speed up time-to-hire by 20–30%, all without giving short shrift to critical soft skills.
Conversation agents, for example, engage candidates in two-way dialogues, collecting details like names, emails, phone numbers, and availability. This not only streamlines the process for recruiters but also creates a more interesting candidate experience than simply filling out online forms. Assessment agents can administer cognitive, technical, and behavioral tests. Some of them even gamify the process by offering candidates real-world scenarios to navigate. They can then analyze responses for sentiment, tone, and communication skills. Interview agents such as HireVue take it a step further, conducting interviews and using speech recognition and sentiment analysis to evaluate responses.
Together, these AI tools help companies look beyond hard skills and resume bullet points to assess qualities like empathy, adaptability, and collaboration potential. The long-term payoff is clear: emotionally intelligent hires reduce conflict and strengthen team cohesion.
2. Monitoring Employee Morale
Employee surveys are a valuable way to gauge how people feel about their workplace experience. But they’re inherently limited because they rely on self-reporting. Some employees may hesitate to share negative feedback—or may not even be aware of dips in their own engagement. That’s where AI tools can help fill in the gaps.
Take sentiment analysis in Slack. It evaluates the emotional tone of messages, giving companies a more nuanced view of employee morale, engagement, and satisfaction. Say one person constantly shuts down their colleague’s ideas, leading others to contribute less over time. Sentiment analysis can flag this pattern so leaders can step in, perhaps encouraging a more “yes, and…” approach. It can help spot signs of tension or burnout before they snowball into bigger problems.
To offer another example, some AI-powered meeting summarizers go beyond mere recaps and offer insights into the tone and sentiment of conversations. They show whether the tone of the meeting was positive, negative, or neutral, and track how sentiment shifted throughout the conversation. These tools can also break down each participant’s talk time, sentiment, and key points, helping leaders see how everyone contributed and felt. Of course, they’re not infallible. Like humans, AI tools run the risk of misinterpretation, maybe failing to register tones like sarcasm. As long as you keep their limitations in mind, they can be a big help.
Privacy and trust are also critical. Employees must know these tools are being used, and that the goal is to support, not surveil. With these insights, leaders can address communication issues early, before minor morale dips turn into major problems.
3. Automating Busywork To Boost Human Connection
When I launched my company, AI was the stuff of sci-fi films. As a solopreneur, I had to perform every role myself. The learning curve was steep, but as the company grew, I was finally able to hire additional hands to help me. It certainly lightened the load, but those early days, pre-automation, were chaotic. I had very little time to focus on less visible facets of the company, like culture and team morale.
When I began automating tedious, manual tasks, I gained time for connecting with colleagues and checking how they were doing. Automation became the default throughout the company, as I encouraged team members to do the same—figure out ways to delegate boring, less meaningful tasks to tools and technology, and leave more time for the human side of our work.
Some people assume that integrating AI into your workforce is all about slashing costs and reducing staff. In my case, it couldn’t be further from the truth. The more we automate busywork, the more time we have for tasks that the machines can’t complete—like building rapport, gauging each other’s well-being, or taking an extra half hour out of the day for a casual team lunch. AI can take on repetitive tasks like scheduling, taking meeting notes, and generating first drafts. And less time spent on essential but draining duties leaves more time for relationship-building activities like one-on-one check-ins and team-building rituals.
It’s time for leaders to embrace AI as a partner in cultivating more empathy, trust, and team collaboration. Emotionally intelligent teams supported by AI are the future of work.