'The skills these workers gain in automation-first environments provide rich career opportunities'
While automating mundane tasks can be a money-saving play, could it also be used to keep employees engaged and bring in new talent?
Yes, say respondents to a new survey. Nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of U.S. executives say they are struggling with the current labour shortage and, as a result, 78 per cent are likely to invest or increase their investment in automation to manage through the impact of higher-than-normal turnover rates.
Eighty-six percent of executives surveyed believe automation will enable their employees to focus on more creative work — and spend less time on mundane, repetitive, time-consuming tasks. As a result, 85 per cent say that incorporating automation and automation training into their organization will help them retain employees and attract new talent.
The U.S. executives also believe automation is helping their companies perform better by saving time (71 per cent), improving productivity (63 per cent), and saving money (59 per cent).
“The dynamics of work and the workplace continue to evolve, creating multi-faceted pressures on employers to retain employees and attract new talent,” says Bettina Koblick, chief people officer at UiPath, which conducted the survey of 500 U.S. executives in December.
“Business and technology leaders recognize automation is both a long-term strategy that maximizes the impact of their existing technology stack and a solution that helps each individual employee grow and succeed. The skills these workers gain in automation-first environments provide rich career opportunities in inventive workplaces.”
Retention advantages
Providing current employees the opportunity to advance is another way that may help in retention, found the survey. Forty-two per cent reported a lack of advancement as why people walk out of the door and retention can be improved by allowing new learning on the job, reported 60 per cent of executives.
Providing an automated method of showing employees what other opportunities exist in the organizations is a great way to keep them engaged and interested, says Somen Mondal, general manager of talent intelligence at Ceridian in Toronto.
“The worst thing you can do is let someone go that could have been reskilled or could be in a job that is complementary. But people just don’t know because they don’t have access to a breadth of data and so what we’re finding is companies have a hard time disseminating how… employee XYZ in a remote part of the country has the skill to do another job.”
A toxic work culture was also tabbed as one of the main drivers of employee exits, according to another study.
Offering training to employees on new automation tools is another way to enhance the retention, according to the UiPath survey, as one in three executives said a lack of training is another major driver of dissatisfaction.
But organizations should be wary of how they set up the training regime, says Koblick.
“What can easily happen is that is that a company deploys a group of people called the automation team or their automation centre of excellence and pretty soon that team has way more pipelines than they can ever actually build automations against and in that, you’re creating this somewhat of a dissatisfaction.’”
Instead it should be about helping people not only understand what is right for automation but also for them to become “citizen developers” so more people in the organization are able to build their own automation, she says.
“Pretty soon, you have a really agile way of thinking about automation. It’s not dependent on a centre of excellence, it’s not dependent on something in a queue somewhere, it’s as you enable your organization to actually build automations.”
A shortage of IT workers was seen as one of the ways the pandemic has upended the working world, found another survey.
Automation in HR
Automation can also be employed to great effect in the recruiting department, says Mondal.
“If you look at a recruiter’s job, typically they spend about 70 per cent of their time doing non-strategic tasks… like interview scheduling, looking at resumes, going back and forth with candidates, whereas 30 per cent of their time is spent doing strategic tasks.”
By enabling this great boost in efficiency, the job becomes easier and recruiters are more quickly able to focus on addressing the talent shortage in the organization, he says.
“This is where automation really helps, such as interviews in automated chats with candidates. We’re definitely seeing that in high-volume recruiting, as well as lower volume; but when you’re hiring 100 people at a time, this is very important so I agree that people are looking at automation as a method to be more efficient and to make their staff more comfortable with their jobs.”
One U.S. company recently improved its onboarding experience with digitization.
With the increase in time gained, HR employees are better able to succeed, according to Koblick.
“I’ve never heard of an organization where the people say, ‘We have enough time to nurture our development or thinking or learning,’” she says.
“If you need less people to do the work, you will absolutely save money, gain efficiencies, and you’ll be able to deploy people in other ways. There’s generally also a benefit when smart people stop doing rote, repetitive work because it doesn’t stimulate your brain. While that’s not an easily measurable benefit, from a human perspective, it’s pretty cool not to have to massage the same spreadsheet the same way every week to get a nice little report out to the same person.”
For those who wish to jump into the AI pool, there are some pitfalls but the upside is worth any risks, says another expert.
