Since the earliest days of commerce going back as far as we can into history, the driving force behind business success hasn’t been an idea, a product, or a service. The heart of success has always been the people who make those things into a reality. That is still true today, even after integrating computers and their networks into commerce triggered a revolution of its own. Common tasks became easier to perform, productivity grew, and new business opportunities arose.
However, there are perhaps dozens of failures behind the scenes for every visible business success. People may be the driving force for generating business wins, but hard work alone can’t always overcome a company’s challenges. Over approximately the last two decades, a notable shift in the way we work has been underway as businesses look for more opportunities to enhance and improve how much staffers can achieve by enhancing their access to technology.
Will emergent automation technologies change the calculus surrounding the most important parts of a business? To answer that question, we must first examine why the current model has persisted for so long and its inherent problems. We can then explore how new tools, such as robotic process automation could set the stage for an entirely new way of working. What will the future of doing work look like?
The Pros and Cons of Fundamentally Staff-Driven Work
Why are people typically the drivers of productivity and growth in a business? Setting aside the fact that only relatively recently has technology truly changed the game, the work ethic brought to the table by a motivated team offers companies numerous benefits:
- The opportunity for collaborative work and creative problem solving can produce unique ideas and solutions to empower the business’s success.
- A workforce dedicated to the company’s goals and believing in the link between a team’s success and personal career growth.
- The dedication to achieve more with less due to believing in the mission, especially in start-up scenarios and throughout growth stages.
However, as important as these elements are to success, they come with some drawbacks. When companies lean so heavily on their human staff to be and do everything, some adverse outcomes become quickly apparent:
- Waning job satisfaction due to a lack of engaging opportunities outside of rote tasks can cause a decrease in work ethic and productivity. According to Forbes, unhappy workers are nearly 20% less productive than their colleagues.
- Increased worker burnout, negatively impacting company morale and potentially increasing staff turnover.
- The development of inefficient processes that hold back individual efforts and cost the business unnecessarily. With companies collectively losing billions every year from inefficiencies in core areas such as customer service, there is room to recapture lost revenue.
For all these benefits of building a diverse and motivated team, the drawbacks of overreliance can quickly outweigh the upsides. This unbalanced approach can even lead to business failures. For these reasons, businesses have been quick to embrace computerization solutions that have helped lighten the load over the last 20 years.
The Role of Machines in Business
The appropriate investments in technology can aid in reducing the burden placed on staff in high-demand situations. In real manufacturing settings, more advanced equipment and the computer software to operate it can mean less stress and mental fatigue for a worker during the day. Software built to help a knowledge worker quickly access or input information serves the same function.
However, many of these systems still don’t address one fundamental challenge facing every business: the need to handle low-level tasks that are highly repetitive but also essential to higher process functions. Managing these tasks can be a primary factor in reducing productivity, driving down employee satisfaction, and holding back the business. Enter a groundbreaking technology: robotic process automation, or RPA.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
RPA is a computer application that provides a framework for digitally recreating and executing a series of rules-based human-computer interactions. In other words, it automates processes, in whole or in part, that don’t require any complex decision-making. Think of the employee who must take data from one place and enter it again into another system. Such tasks can be mind-numbingly repetitive and cause negative impacts on job satisfaction and work ethic over time. RPA steps in to provide human workers with more opportunities to make valuable contributions.
Some brief examples of what companies can achieve with RPA include:
- Improved customer support. RPA could automate the retrieval of customer records, update information as directed by a human operator, or provide automated responses to basic user inquiries.
- Automating tasks involving software interfaces, such as transferring data, creating records, and so on.
- Gathering data from diverse sources for human analysis or decision-making.
When appropriately factored into a company’s strategy and deployed to effect, RPA could mean the start of a revolution for firms.
What Effective RPA Could Mean for Business
Reducing burnout becomes easier with the opportunity to take repetitive tasks out of human hands. A key advantage to RPA is not only that it makes these low-level jobs faster, but it also allows staff to devote their skills and experience to problems that demand more creative thinking. Keeping teams engaged with their roles and finding new ways to make valuable contributions can be vital in maintaining good morale and keeping strong employees in their positions longer. With RPA, and ultimately a strategy for intelligent automation that looks to the future of tools such as ML and AI, automating administration from the bottom up becomes a real possibility.
Consider the doctor’s office that automates patient record management and retrieval so that staff can provide a better experience for visiting patients for just one example. A local credit union could dramatically increase credit and loan application processing times, or a business may finally effectively integrate legacy systems into current software with a robotic go-between. The possibilities for redefining rules-based tasks are almost endless.
The Future of Work: A Hybrid Approach?
There’s no removing the essential human element from business. Ingenuity, creativity, complex problem-solving and effective communication are all the sole domain of human staff. However, with the growth of new technologies such as RPA, businesses no longer need to over-burden their employees with dull administrative tasks that prevent them from contributing to their full potential.
For the existing business and the new startup alike, an investigation and investment into RPA could pay dividends for years in the form of reduced burnout, boosted productivity, and happier staff. There’s never been a better time to explore the potential for automation in business.
