Imagine a scenario where your Product or IT team is as invested in your organization's business growth and expansion strategy as you are. Or a world where your marketing experts felt confident enough to share their functional knowledge to improve the performance of your business as a whole instead of only looking at their own monthly KPIs. The reality is that for many organizations, employees lack the bandwidth to think about the bigger picture because they're too busy putting out fires in their respective departments. However, it doesn’t have to be like this.
It's good that C-level executives no longer look at balance sheets to judge performance. Now, technological change also takes into account how people feel. The following report by leading tech giant IBM states that 75% of C-level executives believe intelligent automation will improve their business performance in the coming years. In another survey by the International Federation of Robotics, 70% of workers thought automation would give them better chances to do more skilled work. Both of these facts are linked.
When your employees take on greater responsibility through upskilling or professional development, they are better aligned to contribute to an organization’s overall performance. Unfortunately, most teams are still stuck in the process of completing mundane and low-level tasks, preventing them and your organization from utilizing their full potential.
"The reality is that for many organizations, employees lack the bandwidth to think about the bigger picture because they're too busy putting out fires in their respective departments."
In recent years, one of the most common discussions in the tech world has been how automation may displace the human workforce. Employees are often afraid that robots will take their jobs and livelihoods. While their fear is not entirely invalid, many often fail to see the bigger picture—harmonious work and high-value upskilling opportunities.
How Hybrid Automation Can Help Your Workforce Thrive
Modern organizations have some serious hurdles to overcome when it comes to full-scale automation. Hybrid Automation is different. The dual-pronged approach of human and machine creates value for teams by breaking down the barriers that traditional automation or a DIY approach often miss. Hybrid Automation platforms like Wrk automate workflows which, in turn, complete repetitive tasks–allowing your team to focus on key activities. In other words, this means you can invest your time and efforts in building fool-proof strategies, creating new assets, or even launching a path-breaking product into the market.
Hybrid Automation gives teams like yours the best of both worlds. Photo Credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters
But before we see what this means for your team, let’s break down some myths around automation.
Dispelling the Myths
While there are quite a few myths floating around about automation, these are two of the most controversial:
Machines are snatching jobs (and livelihoods) away
While it is true that automation-led technologies have replaced and augmented many of the manual systems that were commonplace in the 20th century, they have not eradicated the need for human intelligence and judgement, superior cognitive skills, or nuanced decision making. This then allowed businesses in many verticals to focus on more strategic goals including refining customer support processes, enhanced client representative strategies, and nurturing relationship managers, etc.
With Hybrid Automation platforms like Wrk, the aim is to support employees rather than displace them. It takes into account the pros and cons of each facet of work and synthesizes the strengths of both machines and humans for optimal results. This ensures that people remain at the epicenter of the power dynamic, and technology is the tool that empowers them to be better, faster, and more in control of their time at work.
Automation is smarter
Again, false. While there are some tasks that machines do better than humans, they aren’t the sole proprietors of efficient workflows. For instance, you'll still need a Quality Assurance Lead to oversee quality even with modern automation at manufacturing facilities. With Hybrid Automation, the opportunity is there for your team’s employees to continually move towards high-value roles which need human judgement and problem-solving. In these cases, automation will almost always help rather than replace a human workforce.
Human Empowerment in Action
When you overlook and undervalue employees, they often leave. There's no point in hiring a skilled worker if they spend most of their time doing process-based, tedious tasks that don't contribute to your company's overall strategy. This flawed process can lead to a higher attrition rate.
"With Hybrid Automation platforms like Wrk, the aim is to support employees rather than displace them."
Automating mundane, time-consuming tasks can empower your team to focus on the bigger picture. It also makes learning how to use new platforms and technologies less important every few months. This can all be done in one place through a platform like Wrk, meaning more free time and additional resources for your team to engage in upskilling and the opportunity to take on leadership opportunities.
Here are some ways that you can use Hybrid Automation in real-life scenarios.
Recruitment and onboarding
The quality of onboarding and recruitment processes at a company dictates the quality of the team hired. Often, companies have to deal with bad hires who increase recruitment and training expenses that, in turn, lead to a poorer-quality product or service. One way to tackle this is to have automated processes that manage the end-to-end stages of recruitment. This includes creating workflows for job postings, sorting applications in terms of experience and suitability. It can even set up the onboarding process for new hires.
Customer service
Customer service is important in every industry. Automating customer support tasks provides benefits like shorter response time, higher close rates, and better customer satisfaction. These are key parameters to judge a company’s service performance.
Retail industry
The retail industry is another space that can use Hybrid Automation to overcome operational inefficiencies. Issues like order misplacement, delays in shipment, and delivery mishaps are too common in the retail sector. This is especially true with more and more online commerce. Retail giants can match purchase orders automatically and add order information to different systems to track orders in real-time. They can also give their customers more peace of mind.
Hybrid Automation platforms like Wrk can help retailers with online orders, shipment issues and delivery timetables. Photo Credit: Mike Petrucci
Inspire Your Customers and Engage Your Team with Hybrid Automation
With Platforms like Wrk, you can reallocate the extra hours and resources elsewhere. It takes care of a process often put off when your employees are busy with tedious, repetitive tasks.
Optimizing Hybrid Automation to meet your business’s unique needs ensures you build employee trust and a unified workforce. It's how you can enable your team to work smarter and get the most out of their jobs.
Finally, by streamlining your company's operations through Hybrid Automation, you can improve how your organization and your customers interact with technology.
Talk to one of our experts today to learn how Wrk can help your business.
