RPA - Preparing Employees for Bots

Robotic Process Automation is Coming: How Can We Prepare Our Employees?

by Craig Nelson

Introduction

The War of the Worlds broadcast aired at 8 p.m. on Halloween eve 1938 proclaimed the ‘Martians are Coming’. This program was intended to be a hoax but resulted in numerous emergency calls and general pandemonium. In today’s world, widespread and rapid adoption of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is causing a similar reaction from the general population. But this is no hoax, it is a sweeping innovation that is impacting businesses and their employees in very real ways. So, what should business leaders do to prepare their employees for the advent of RPA.

We suggest three strategies for assisting employees to prepare for and embrace RPA:

·                    Enhance Employee Understanding - Engage employees and help them understand what RPA is and what it is not.

·                    Engage Employees in Strategy and Assessment - Include employees in RPA strategy creation and engage them in assessing which processes should be candidates for automation.

·                    Define and Communicate Impact - Include employees in defining the job impact of automation and defining the upskilling opportunities that RPA offers.

Enhance Employee Understanding

The likely first response to hearing the term ‘Robotic’ -- is “they are here to take over my job”. Our media is replete with both fictitious and real examples of robotics replacing human workers, if not taking over the world. Helping employees to understand that RPA is a means to eliminate those mundane tasks associated with many business processes, that employees would gladly relinquish, is key to improving the understanding of RPA among workers. Many processes include “swivel chair” rekeying of information between and among applications or extracting data from an ERP system to validate that data against data in another system.  If only we could find an employee without ambition who would relish performing these duplicative and repetitive tasks. Virtual workers are just such teammates, willing and able to perform mundane tasks without complaint and with unmatched speed and accuracy. After seeing the capabilities of RPA, one employee proclaimed, “It’s like taking the robot out of the human”.

Engage Employees in Strategy and Assessment

RPA has demonstrated its capacity to reduce operational cost with ROIs in excess of 500% through the redeployment or elimination of FTE workers. Indeed, the quest for cost take-out is what drives most business unit executives to take the leap into RPA. However, what many business leaders do not initially recognize is the impact of RPA on speed-to-market and revenue cycle improvements. This leads to new opportunities for employees to perform higher value functions that result in increased market share. For example, with RPA in place, one premier insurance organization realized they were binding more policies simply because they could process more broker request for quotations faster and more accurately by eliminating mundane work that underwriters had been previously performing. In the end management retrained and redeployed workers to accommodate the increased demand for policy binding.

Business leaders can create enthusiasm and support for RPA by engaging employees in developing the RPA strategy and including them in evaluating opportunities for automation of the very processes they perform each day. Employees know where bottlenecks exist and where there is pain and redundancy in the process. Their imagination and vision for what could be can be a means to rekindling the creative capacities that many workers are unable to express when performing repetitive and mundane processes.  

Define and Communicate the Impact

The potential of robotics to eliminate human workers is not a definitive impact of RPA. Including the human workforce in defining the potential impact of RPA on the organization can help employees self-identify what roles within a process are likely to be eliminated. In reality, RPA is typically deployed as part of a larger business process that is made up of a series of mundane or repetitive tasks that cannot be defined simply as an FTE. When employees and their managers begin to understand the operational complexities of RPA, it becomes evident to both that there are opportunities for creating new jobs allowing employees the opportunity to be reskilled. Of course, this is not always possible and in some cases, jobs and employees are eliminated. However, giving virtual workers a face in the organization helps employees embrace RPA and has sometimes resulted in employees naming their virtual teammates, recognizing them in rewards ceremonies and inviting them to company outings.  Once embedded in the business process, virtual workers require monitoring, mentoring and optimization. Often employees displaced by robotics find their experience in helping to define and deploy RPA to be a marketable and highly sought-after skill set. 

Conclusions

Whether the Martians are coming or just Digital Robots; organizational change management (OCM) is critical for ensuring the success of RPA. Research demonstrates that over 70% of initiatives designed to optimize business performance fail due to inadequate OCM. Here are few OCM standards that every RPA deployment should include:

·        Communicate early – Formalize a communication strategy and structure for discussing RPA and be prepared to take the message company wide. While RPA may germinate in a business unit, its impact and operating results will spread rapidly once it is proven. Leaders must stay in front of the message. Failure to do so results in employees coming to their own conclusions and creating their own networks to communicate the impact of robotics

·        Involve people – The old adage that ‘involvement leads to commitment’ is true in any OCM program. Employees are smart, creative and passionate.   Involving them creates excitement around the possible and assists them in beginning to consider where and how they might fit into the changing organization. After all, change is inevitable. Organizations might as well involve employees versus keeping them in the dark.

·        Educate and Train – Most organizations espouse that employees are their most important assets. Put this into action by identifying talent in the organization that can contribute to the RPA journey. Train and reskill employees to become process assessment experts and help them acquire skills related to managing virtual workforces. The expansion of RPA within an organization is often rapid and wide-spread. Your business needs employees who already understand current business processes and can contribute to operational automation. Take advantage of your most important assets.

Robotics is here to stay and cost removal and cost avoidance are and will always be critical for competing in the global economy. However, preparing employees for the future is every leaders’ responsibility. It can be said that the best way to predict the future is to create it. Who better than existing employees to create the future and lead the charge into RPA.