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What Does AI Have to Do With Workplace Well-Being?
What Does AI Have to Do With Workplace Well-Being?
From Steffannie Roaché, MS LPC, Professor of Practice, Trauma Informed Oregon
A few weeks ago, a community partner with whom I talk often told me she was dreading a meeting with her team. Something had gone wrong, and she was going to be entering a gathering full of people who had already experienced job losses, funding cuts, and a great deal of uncertainty. She was worried this meeting could push morale somewhere it wouldn’t easily come back from.
Before the meeting, she used AI to help her think through her opening remarks. Not for a script, but for help finding language that acknowledged what people were going through without making promises she couldn’t keep.
She sent the document containing the AI’s suggestions to me, and asked whether it felt trauma informed. Believe it or not, what the AI produced was pretty close to what I would have suggested myself.
What stayed with me was why she used it. She wasn’t trying to get out of a difficult conversation; she was finding ways to handle the conversation in a trauma informed manner.
I’ve heard similar stories from clinicians, supervisors, educators, and the nonprofit sector. People are using AI to help organize thoughts, review wording, summarize information, and tackle tasks that used to take much longer.
Many of those same people are also wondering what all of this means for the future of their work.
Recently, a community member explained in a workforce wellness event that he worried he was helping train systems that could eventually eliminate positions like his. Another wondered how organizations would determine the value of someone’s work when a tool can produce similar work in seconds.
Those concerns don’t strike me as anti-technology, just human.
Most people have spent years building expertise. They’ve invested time, money, energy, and identity into becoming good at what they do. Questions about AI often land in the same place as questions about job security, professional value, and whether experience will continue to matter.
Meanwhile, people are trying to understand what role they will have in a future that feels different from the one they prepared for.
That’s a workplace well-being conversation that deserves time to explore.