Businesses across the globe are integrating automation into their operations to achieve higher efficiency and a maximum employee productivity. However, there are organizations that are still unsure about automating certain tasks. One of the biggest hurdles they face is the fear of losing one of their most important assets – workforce.
Does automation mean reducing your workforce?
31% of organizations are worried about labor displacement and job loss that could come from job automation and artificial intelligence(AI).
Source: McKinsey & Co
Let’s address the elephant in the room. Does automating processes reduce your workforce? Possibly, unless you really want to grow your company then you would be smart to look at ways you can use your employees to focus their energies in helping to grow your customer base, provide an even better service and to open new revenue streams. These are some of the things that need time and strategizing and cannot be possibly achieved if your employees are wasting time and efforts doing manual, repetitive and mundane tasks.
Automating certain processes can enable your employees to think creatively, bring ideas to the table and focus on more important and dynamic tasks. It leaves them with more time to learn new skills that ultimately work for the benefit of your company. Therefore, technology isn’t replacing jobs. It simply helps us eliminate repetitive activities that create hurdles in the way of the success of your business.
Is the problem other way round?
Are you facing a high attrition rate in your organization? Do your employees feel burnt out? One of the biggest contributors to employees leaving an organization could be stress levels due to repetitive, boring, and tedious tasks. If you fail to move ahead with the times and embrace newer technology, your team will move on to pastures new.
Automating processes can help employees achieve tasks quickly and easily, allowing them to focus on high-value work that will give them a greater sense of achievement and satisfaction.
With employees freed from time-consuming, low-skill tasks, the management can better allocate resources by delegating the right people to the right projects. Leaders feel empowered to strategize and manage the organization more efficiently while mid-level to junior employees feel more productive.
When and what should you automate?
66% of business leaders were piloting solutions to automate at least one business process
Source: McKinsey & Co
Many business leaders have already started their journey to leverage automation. On the other hand, many are still struggling to identify what processes to automate and when to do it.
How do you know if you need to automate a process?
Is it repetitive: Is your team spending too much time doing repetitive tasks? Identify these tasks within each department that your employees perform on a daily basis and ask if they could be automated.
The average global time people spend on duplicate tasks per week is 4 hours and 38 minutes, which amounts to about 10% of people's time at work. This may not seem like a lot of time when viewed in isolation, but, it eventually does build up to 219 hours lost per year to pursuing tasks someone has already completed.
Source: Clockify.me
It is manual: Do you feel the efficiency and productivity of your staff could be more than what it is right now? It could be due to the manual tasks like data entry, paperwork, etc. Automation can not only keep everything going in your organization but also ensure work gets done faster.
Prone to errors: Making mistakes is a natural human tendency. Do you feel there could be a more reliable way of carrying out processes and completely remove errors? From the simple to the advanced, there are a lot of tasks that you can automate to make sure there are lesser or no errors and time is not wasted in rectifying them.
Automating certain processes can significantly improve efficiency and productivity within your organization.
Microsoft shares great insights on how you can assess the impact of automation by comparing your original business process against your new process, using the success metrics you defined. To find out more, click here.
Automation makes technology do the work that humans shouldn’t do or don’t want to do. If implemented the right way, the result could be an increased productivity, lower operational costs and time.
To capitalize on the benefits of automation and to automate your workflows for more productive and effective outcomes, talk to us.
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