4 Ways Workplace Automation can Help HR Teams Get Work Done Right

4 Ways Workplace Automation can Help HR Teams Get Work Done Right

A majority of knowledge workers today believe that implementing automated processes will empower them to think beyond their daily task list. Here are four examples of how HR teams can do this well.

“We shouldn’t be worried about robots taking our jobs ... we should be looking forward to cobots coming along and supporting us,” the futurist and author James Wallman once said.

Wallman, whose ideas have graced the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, GQ and Vice, suggests we need to see bots as future colleagues or “cobots” who will augment human performance.

In this way, Wallman invites us to think about how automation technology can liberate us to do our best work, not liberate us from our jobs.

Workfont’s research with thousands of knowledge workers over the last five years has shown that 86% in the United States believe that the rise of automation will help them think of work in new and innovative ways.

But 58% of U.S. workers say they’re so swamped with getting day-to-day work done that they don’t have time to think beyond their daily to-do list. They want and need technology to accelerate work.

Automated work management technology improves both human performance and morale by soaking up mundane-but-necessary tasks and changing workplace practice for the better.

Here are four examples that will help your HR team.

1. Embrace remote work It’s not far off a decade since Google’s (now Alphabet’s) chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that the future of enterprise technology was “social, local and mobile.”

Employees increasingly expect a workplace they can log into rather than walk into.

That could be as simple as cloud-based systems that mean you can work anywhere without physically carrying paperwork, and the ability to collaborate without colleagues without sitting in the same office space.

A two-year test project with 500 employees run by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom found that when 250 workers started to telecommute their productivity rose by the equivalent to a full day versus their 250 colleagues who were still working in the office every day.

Employee attrition among the telecommuting employees decreased by 50% and they lost less time through illness.

The company taking part in Professor Bloom’s study also saved about $2,000 per employee on office rental.

If you haven’t already done so, you should be looking at ways that automation can give colleagues freedom of movement and a more flexible working life.

2. Leverage pattern recognition and large data sets Bots can equip us with business insight that will help make us better decision-makers, leaders, and managers.

Take a look at professions that no-one could have imagined until recently would be automated.

For instance, the knowledge and practical experience of human medics is being augmented by forms of artificial intelligence that can read through thousands of case-histories in an instant and help to give a more accurate diagnosis. And junior lawyers don’t need to spend hours in a library looking for a legal precedent when cobots can find the obscure but relevant reference in seconds.

There are exabytes of data in every business that would take humans an eternity to fathom. Yet bots can process data, identify patterns, and deliver new insight in a fraction of the time.

Think that could never apply to HR? As Professor John Boudreau of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and Ravin Jesuthasan of Willis Towers Watson wrote in February this year: “HR consultants work with analytical tool kits, change management frameworks, and process design techniques that must be customized to diagnose unique problems and solutions. Such work is generally less amenable to automation, but advances in cognitive automation might automate some analytical tasks, or ‘learn’ from previous client engagements.” Work management automation technology clearly matters to HR teams.

3. Automate repetitive tasks Here’s a simple rule: if a task is repeated with regularity, it should be automated.

Take the example of notifications or reminders: what if you could automate routine chasing emails or calls to remind colleagues of imminent deadlines? Automated project notifications save time and the stress of pushing others to stick to the plan.

One study concluded that 90% of US workers are burdened down with repetitive tasks that swallow up the equivalent of 19 days’ work a year. That’s 19 days that employees could better spend on innovation and imagining more creative approaches to business problems.

Encouraging managers to identify and automate repetitive tasks in their teams should be high on HR’s agenda to improve performance and productivity. As McKinsey & Co’s Kweilin Ellingrud has argued: “When automation can handle up to 45 percent of repetitive work, it gives workers time for more higher-value tasks such as problem-solving, finding solutions and developing new ideas. This will empower employees, and generate a more engaging and challenging work experience.”

Also Read: How Artificial Intelligence is Humanizing HR

4. Automate time-consuming tasks If you repeat a regular task that swallows precious time, that should be automated too.

For example, how much time does an HR team spend manually sifting and sorting through resumes when a sought-after job becomes available in their business? This task doesn’t need to overwhelm the entire department. As proof, the HR team in one international business has cut the time spent trying to shortlist the best candidates by two-thirds by automated filtering of applications submitted through their website. If key job requirements aren’t apparent on the application form, it is autosorted to the “no” pile.

The HR challenge for all businesses is to find those time-sucking tasks, large or small, that could be automated with the right cobot.

James Wallman is right in his counsel that we should not fear automation. Automation technology has the potential to liberate teams from mundane work, free time for innovation, and help make us better managers by providing timely data insight to inform decisions.

As I argue in Done Right, what leaders and HR teams need to keep front-of-mind is that creativity and ingenuity are going to be the primary human attributes of the future workplace.

So, when you’re next reviewing or drafting a job description for a role, where are you going to draw the dividing lines between bot and human?

How can you get the best from your workforce by bringing in the cobots?