Focus on How Automation Can Improve the Employee Experience

Numbers alone are incapable of telling the full story of how automation affects employees. Nuances and exceptions related to what types of jobs could be replaced and how soon that could happen make it impossible to fully describe the process in a single article.

Workplace demands, employees’ skill levels, job training requirements and resource redeployment can all vary the drive toward and pace of automation. Manufacturers will feel greater urgency to automate their workplaces, but service-oriented organizations may resist automation for years until an event such as the global COVID-19 pandemic makes robots and software bots the best options for protecting workers and customers. In the public sector, human toll collectors on highways and bridges are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

The Process Produces Benefits and Brings Risks

Automating work tasks in some form is, for the most part, inevitable. Sooner or later, by dramatic market disruption or as a result of slow, plodding technological advances, jobs are shaped by automation.

Economies rise and fall on reinvention, and labor costs constitute a large segment of every organization’s budget. Desires to streamline processes, achieve efficiencies and reduce manual tasks eventually convince all employers to adopt machinery and implement computer software. Doing so is smart for a couple of reasons.

Automating processes can reduce operating costs when less actual labor is required to produce goods and deliver services. It also saves employees time on performing repetitive, redundant and arduous tasks, freeing them up to devote their workday to higher-level endeavors such as setting strategy. Last, automation has the potential to simplify task completion, which reduces frustration and wasted effort. The result can then be increased job satisfaction.

In all circumstances, a question that must be answered is whether it’s possible for automation to go too far and render employees obsolete. No universal rules can be formulated, but job automation has measurable effects.

For instance, a May 4, 2020, story on the MIT News website shares this estimate by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University: “From 1990 to 2007, … adding one additional robot per 1,000 workers reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by about 0.2 percent.”

That works out to eliminating 2 or 1,000 jobs for humans. Though this is significant, it is also not the kind of robotic takeover some have predicted and feared.

“It certainly won’t give any support to those who think robots are going to take all of our jobs,” Acemoglu said. “But it does imply that automation is a real force to be grappled with.”

Ensuring Organizations Realize the Full Potential of Their Human Elements

The employment effects of automation are not experienced uniformly. When workers are displaced, relocating within the same organization and taking on new or different roles may be possible, but every employee who can retrain may not want to do so.

Some employees will make lateral moves to teams that provide better matches with their current abilities and career desires. Other people will seek to develop strategic skills through the introduction of technology to keep their jobs, but in a smarter way. Still others who are made redundant will choose to leave rather than learn a new set of skills.

The accounts payable (AP) function offers a good example of how automating high-touch processes that are prone to paper backlogs can impact employees and the performance of organizations. A survey cited in a 2018 Goldman Sachs report titled B2B: How the Next Payments Frontier Will Unleash Small Business revealed AP staff devote 30 percent of their work time to performing routine tasks such as manually handling invoices, inputting data, resolving unmatched invoices and chasing down ink-on-paper signatures. Each of those steps can be annoying and time-consuming. When an AP staff goes fully remote, as most did during the pandemic, performing some of those tasks may become impossible.

The authors of the Goldman Sachs report further estimated business-to-business payments would top $200 trillion by 2028. Clearly, reducing friction in such transactions by eliminating paper checks and enabling real-time approvals has the potential to lower an organization’s payment processing costs. A cost-savings figure given in the report is 75 percent.

Automation Cuts Some Jobs and Reinvents Others

Understanding automation-driven changes requires employer investment. Formulating and communicating a set of shared goals for automation is essential. Continuing with the above example, automating payment processes reduces operating expenses. Achieving that outcome should be given equal weight with equipping AP staff to harness the power of automated tools in order to avoid layoffs.

Automation is here to stay. The good news is employees are adapting by taking on more strategic roles. Organizations that encourage and facilitate this shift in how workers do their jobs have the highest chance of improving employees’ job satisfaction and facing the future proactively.