Robot HRM

Vo Tran Truong Duy
Ngo Nguyen Tien Dat
Nguyen Ngoc Dang Hung
Nguyen Pham Quoc Minh

COVID-19 has been one of the most tragic pandemics in human history due to the fatality and infection rates and the significant impact on modern society. Specifically, the Delta variant of the coronavirus harmed the Vietnamese labor force in the third quarter of 2021 as over 28.5 million people whose age bracket is between 25 to 54 had been witnessing job losses, furloughs, irregular working shifts, reduced working hours, and income. Moreover, during that time, most employees have been transformed into a hybrid working environment, in which they can freely choose to work remotely to reduce the risk of infestation of in-person contact. By going online, most of the popular tools utilized for the workforce during that time, mainly from Microsoft, such as Teams, welcomed the 145 millionth user in Q2 2022. As a result, more and more users trust Microsoft services, especially office staff, due to the convenience of this kind of Hybrid work environment; therefore, Microsoft is interested in hearing the feedback and the impact of the products. For that reason, a global survey conducted by Microsoft during the pandemic among employees around the world indicates that approximately one-fifth of them feels that their employer is neglecting them in terms of work-life balance, 45 percent of them feel overworked, and 39 percent feel exhausted from daily work. 



The Robot HRM project had foreseen the necessary assistance and enhancement to this hybrid working model during the severe COVID-19 pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City in early 2021; thus, the project was initialized with tons of features offered to address multiple issues upon going hybrid. Specifically, a Machine Learning model has been developed from an early stage to extract and indicate an employee's mental condition based on facial expressions captured through the phone's camera while he/she is checking in the Attendance Record process. From the extracted information, the employer is aided in their decision-making process as they have acquired the brief of the employee's mental health condition at the start of a working day. Apart from that, there are still different HRM functionalities in which the employer can handle employee presence and productivity management via a single website and a few clicks. In general, we have launched the product with the vision to facilitate a new era of digital collaboration when most of the employees, especially from the technology sector, have proposed their desire to adopt the hybrid working model.