Staff Turnover = Lost Knowledge

For many industries, staff turnover is becoming a major problem. From speaking with various Local Government managers, they are particularly struggling. Public service roles are often highly prized during times of economic uncertainty. Unfortunately, the rigidity of budgets - which in part provides that stability - becomes problematic in times of wage inflation. The steady hand on the wheel starts becoming a dead weight and employees leave for better paying private sector roles.

Turnover Costs Money & Degrades Customer Service

The impacts of turnover are then two fold. First there is the straightforward cost of replacing the individual. This is estimated to be in the region of around 20% of the employee's salary . The second, less obvious costs are those spent firstly in training the replacement, and even less tangible, the cost of having reduced productivity while that employee gets up to speed.

From speaking to various records manager/customer service leaders in the local government space, it's become apparent that a lot of processes are undocumented. They are built up in the employees personal knowledge base (aka - their brain) and this all walks out the door when they do.

Robots to the rescue! (sort of)

Automation presents a partial answer to this problem. As we pointed out in our article on identifying use cases this lack of captured knowledge relies on an "internal, cultural approach to business, which over relies on staff/systems to execute processes".

This is why one of the key advantages of starting the process of automating routine activity is that your process gets defined, recorded and out of your teams grey matter. The impact of staff turnover from a knowledge and service degradation perspective is mitigated.

It also has a secondary benefit. By going through the process of analysing how a job is done, the opportunity to review if that is the most effective approach arises. Technology moves ever forward, and so by bringing an automation mindset to a business process, it can be reimagined to be more effective.

Add the opportunity to scale

Once a process is automated, there is a further benefit for resource constrained organisations. Peaks in demand can be addressed without more headcount. One example we heard of was a part of a response to one of the natural disasters experienced last year. There was a grants program opened up, and responding to the surge of activity could only be addressed one way - overtime. This placed further demand on an already stretched team. There was no time to hire and train, so it just drove increased costs.

Automated processes still require additional cost to deal with surges, but the order of magnitude is much lower - and the time to scale up is measurable in minutes. There is also no need to train the additional automated workforce. It's just allocating more resource to an existing process.

The outcome is better customer experience and greater resilience.

It's that simple. Customers are much less impacted by staff turnover - your processes can carry on with less dependency on key individuals. Your organisation is more resilient - because its processes are captured and understood.

Talk to us today to find out how we can help you automate your business and minimise the impact of staff turnover.

Cheers, James

James Beresford - CEO - Talos: Efficient Decision Making through Automation and Analytics.