By Zakir Ahmed, Senior Vice President & GM – Asia Pacific & Japan at Kofax
The Great Resignation is the latest catchphrase to come out of the pandemic. Although the COVID-19 expanded many people’s waistlines, the Great Resignation is having the opposite effect on many organizations. It’s shrinking the size of their worker pools and causing churn and disruption in the process.
Employees across all industries have entered a deep state of self-evaluation, questioning the meaning and purpose of their lives and their jobs. The common dreaded conclusion is job dissatisfaction and fear of being replaced with robots. Now, many are looking at alternatives because the pandemic has created new opportunities.
More than 40 percent of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year, according to a recent report from Microsoft. Among workers in Asia specifically, that number climbs to 47 percent.
Companies are struggling to stanch the flow of workers out the front door, protect their intellectual property, and keep business processes intact. While it’s true it can be difficult to influence the whims of employees, with remote working more prevalent, there’s a way. It’s as simple as removing what’s unsatisfying about a job: the boring, redundant, unchallenging work. The question is, can it be done in a way that benefits employees, and the business?
The answer is yes and it lies in automation but seen from a new perspective.
Organizations must shift their point of view on workplace automation and ask where it can be applied wisely and for the greatest good. The same automation strategies companies have successfully plied to improve the customer experience must be turned inward. This new outlook on automation can do more than transform your workflows—it can transform the workplace into a more rewarding environment for employees and create “intelligent teams” of digital and human workers collaborating in harmony.
Freed from the shackles of mundane tasks, employees can focus on more meaningful work, which has the double benefit of enhancing the employee experience (EX) while improving business processes and the bottom line.
It’s Time for ‘The Great Resignation’ to Resign
Automation is an obvious way to remove some of the drudgery that’s contributing to the exhaustion and lack of meaning among the workforce. Many executives are on board with this approach, with 82 percent globally and 1 percent higher in the APJ region saying enhancing employee productivity and/or satisfaction was a specific driver for automation, according to the Kofax 2022 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study.
However, many companies aren’t quite sure where to start. It’s not as simple as merely piloting automation. Enterprises would be wise to include forward-looking, human-centric strategies— not strictly technology-focused ones—in their implementation.
By digitally transforming these high-value workflows, 72 percent of all executives surveyed expect to help employees do more with less and 70 percent expect to eliminate dull, repetitive work employees don’t enjoy. For executives in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, those numbers are 73 percent and 69 percent, respectively.
Additionally, a resounding 94 percent of executives surveyed said manual processes—the inability to organize and manage the human and digital workforce at scale—was among the most common challenges they face on their digital transformation journeys. Fortunately, an intelligent automation platform helps overcome this obstacle and can help organizations identify the best places to start.
AI-driven automation can evaluate the day-to-day, manual tasks and functions employees perform and identify the “drudgery” culprits. Companies can also prioritize where to remove the menial work by focusing on automating key workflows that’ll have the highest impact on the business, so you’re helping your performance as well as your workers.
The ability to scale and manage digital and human resources throughout the organization makes it possible to speed up the automation process across the enterprise and create successful teams of digital and human workers that are more powerful and efficient together. Robots become a friend, taking over the tasks humans find mind-numbingly boring and reducing the burden that’s creating exhaustion.
There are smarter approaches to automation that improve the EX and your bottom line. Processing invoices and manual data entry are the mundane repetitive tasks that instigate the Great Resignation. Intelligent automation technologies mitigate the root problem by automatically capturing the required information quickly and accurately, allowing workers to focus on higher-value tasks that require customer interaction and strategic thinking.
Businesses face the issue of segregation in their business functions, but intelligent automation unites siloed business functions with connected systems to enhance collaboration among cross-functional teams. The improved productivity leads to quicker information delivery to enterprise systems in real-time. Employees now have immediate access to the latest and most accurate information at their fingertips and feel less overwhelmed when automation takes some tasks off their plate. An efficient work environment lets employees clock out on time to build meaningful relationships with families and personal ambitions. It results in recharged employees that look forward to returning to the workplace.
To make better business decisions, advanced analytics are ready to churn out valuable insights for managers and executives to identify areas to improve the business. It can identify workflow bottlenecks, improve cash flow, and understand customer experience. Such decisions help reduce cost as the mundane tasks are digitized.
To avoid corporate burnout among your employees, show them some love by turning the focus of automation inward. With intelligent automation reinventing the EX, companies can turn employees’ frowns upside down and kick the Great Resignation to the curb.
