How Robotic Process Automation Will Impact Your Career

Humans Need To Play A Bigger Role

Succeeding in any digital transformation initiative requires engaged employees. With firms across geographies and industries now focused on harnessing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and capturing its well documented benefits, businesses recognize the need to keep employees at the core of their change efforts. Deploying RPA is a multifaceted task that must not be taken lightly.

Ensuring the success of your digital transformation initiatives requires you to ensure the success of one key success factor: engaged employees.

Psychological research proves that people are happiest at work when they’re most productive, and further, when they’re happy, employees are more willing to try harder to win, serve, and retain customers. In order for leaders to maximize the positive psychological impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), implementation, communication, and collaboration between the business and its employees is an absolute requirement. While the fear of losing their jobs could become a reality for some workers, automation will also spur on the growth of many new jobs including some entirely new job categories.

The largest transformation will be for those human workers that will be working side-by-side with “robots”. This is exactly why organizations must prioritize: Re-training employees. This includes encouraging continued innovation and research, and at the same time, developing workers’ skill-sets to adapt to automation.

Operating computer-powered machines enables intellectual stimulation to spill over to more creative aspects of a business and that results in employees feeling good about their work. The byproduct of employee satisfaction is better customer service. Happier employees always leads to better serviced customers. If employees are focused on routine and menial tasks, they’re going to give you maybe 50% effort. Empowering employee leads them to want to do more — that’s the biggest indicator of great leadership — they want to improve their relationship with the customer because psychologically, the machine has already taken their boring tasks away. Human workers will always be able to give consumers something machines cannot — empathy and compassion — we need both now more than ever.

The Importance of Communicating to Employees

It’s extremely critical to communicate to your employees exactly why RPA is being implemented before actually doing it. It gives them a sense of belonging, instead of feeling isolated, to know how exactly it will interact with the company’s strategy and also their career. If employees understand how RPA fits into your business strategy, the benefits that RPA brings, and what organizations plan to do with the jobs being transformed, organizations can manifest significant support. Failing to effectively engage with your employees at both a developmental level and at a communications level will result in a disjointed RPA initiative that is unable to meet the wider demands of digital transformation. All business leaders must be honest and transparent about any RPA initiatives so organizations can effectively transform their workforce by enabling a better workforce experience.

Humans react emotionally to major changes, especially if it impacts their well-being. Failing to answer the question of: “What will happen to me?” will spark emotional resistance. Preparing for this psychological impact requires structured change management programs to be put in place. If this is done well, RPA will absolutely lead to more engaged employees. The motivation of employees, the constructive ambition needed to operate new systems and be part of a new ecosystem, requires communication from both business and IT leaders. Frankly, if this is not how you are communicating to your employees now then you’re already in trouble.

The benefits of RPA include reducing manual errors, increasing efficiency, being able to augment human hours by operating 24/7, better employee engagement, and reduction of fraud, to name a few. Just like how the nail gun was a great automation tool for builders, it still requires humans to know where to place the nails. And just like a nail gun is one of the many tools in the builder’s toolbox, RPA is similarly one of the many tools that organizations should enlist and implement in order to meet their digital transformation efforts.

Organizations that have achieved scale in automation are those with a clear vision, strategy, and approach that includes both business leaders and employees. With the highly repetitive and rules-based tasks being automated, RPA enables firms to create digital workforce that can execute repeatable processes much faster, accurately, and more cost-effectively than traditional human workers. With RPA taking over menial tasks, employees can focus on what matters to the business most. This is due to workers focusing on more face-to-face, customer-intensive tasks instead of inefficiently focusing on other boring tasks.

The convergence with Artificial Intelligence (AI) means that RPA is starting to evolve even further. Being powered by AI means it will be able to conduct more sophisticated processes even faster. In the grand scheme of things, RPA is still in its infancy and I believe there’s a lot more convergence, especially with AI, that will happen in the future. Companies should be looking towards increasing budgets, which will increase costs and decrease profit in the short-term. That’s called an investment. Most companies are seeing a positive return on their original investment within 6-months, and that will continue to compound as time goes on. Ignoring this will mean you will lose. It’s just a matter of time.

As RPA matures, data quality will also improve. In other words, RPA enables organizations, with the help of other tools, to create a deeper profile of not only the customer, but also the employee. Most employees were expecting to be more engaged in their current role than they actually are, but studies show that businesses undertaking RPA to optimize their processes and increase efficiency, are already experiencing higher levels of engagement from their workers compared to those who are hanging on to the status quo.

The director of people analytics at a well-respected insurance firm reinforced this point when he was asked about the benefits he’s seeing from the implementation of RPA:

“Menial tasks have reduced significantly for our employees, they’re more engaged and focused. Dare I say it, they seem to care more . . . we want to give our employees and our customers a good experience, and with RPA we’re able to give them a great one instead.”

The need for high emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion, and being kind has never been more important. This may seem like a contrarian view to most, but I wholeheartedly believe that as Robotic Process Automation becomes more prevalent in businesses, the more people will enjoy their careers, and the more time they will spend interacting with people rather than computer screens like today. Ironically, the advancement in RPA technology will result in better customer experiences and an increase in job satisfaction.

People are the foundation of every company — let’s not lose sight of that.

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