Automation: The Answer To Retention Challenges

Offering a solution to the problems HR teams and businesses are facing

With mass resignations spreading from the US to the UK, Europe is now set to see rising unemployment as people re-evaluate their working lives. Holding on to your best staff has never been so difficult. With a highly competitive job market, HR teams and businesses as a whole need to offer top-notch working conditions. 

Automation provides people with relief from the mundane tasks that bog them down and stop them from delivering their value and this helps tackle many of the reasons employees leave for greener pastures.

The State of Play

Many aspects of our lives have been changed in the past 2 years – particularly in work and business. With government support for organizations, many companies were able to stay solvent during the pandemic and are now in a position to get back to normal.
 

But while those companies may be ready for the status quo, a lot of people have been changed by the experience and are now re-evaluating what is important to them – both in work and life in general. All that led to the Great Resignation in the US which has now spread to Europe, and businesses are now scrambling to find ways to retain their people.

The things employees are looking for are not new – they want an environment where they are offered recognition, progression, and engagement. They want to be happy. But with distributed teams and the pressure of increasing overheads, as the world’s supply chain rights itself, businesses don’t know where to turn to make impactful cultural shifts.

HR teams everywhere are faced with a highly competitive job market in which mass resignations are making it challenging to hire new talent. Those same HR teams now need to take a step back and focus on creating an environment where their existing people want to stay rather than focusing on replacing them after they’ve left.

Automation offers a solution to the problems HR teams and businesses are facing. It’s a word that is both overused and feared in many circles and that’s because it is often misunderstood. We should be turning to technology to make our lives better and automation is a tool that offers people the opportunity to find more meaning in their work, more time in their day, and more value in their job.

What is Automation?

When we talk about automation, we’re talking about using a piece of software, a robot (bot), to do a task without the need for a human being. At its base level that is all automation is. You already have lots of things in your life automated like calendar reminders and direct debits – so why isn’t it more widespread in business?

The answer to that question is multi-layered but at its core, it’s a lack of an understanding of the impact automation will have. We’ve been inundated with references to robots in movies and TV for the past century and so, naturally, people are a little distrustful of giving up control to bots.

Let’s address those concerns here and now. The first and most common is – “will the robot I bring into my business be able to take control of our business?”. No, the type of bots we’re talking about are extremely simple, they don’t understand, they just carry out a predefined process exactly as they’re instructed. This isn’t advanced AI; it’s a simple program that can only do what it’s told.

Next up is the perennial worry of many – “will a robot steal my job?”. Again, no, they’re built to assist us. By their very design, they take care of the processes that take up far too much time and stop us all from focusing on what’s important. People can do what RPA does, but RPA can do what people can’t. Computers are capable of processing more data in a day than any person could in a thousand lifetimes so it makes sense to lean on that when it comes to time-intensive tasks.

“Alright, if my teams have all this free time, what will I be paying them to do?”. That’s the call from any business leader concerned that they’ll have people idle if a bot takes on the repetitive work. This is also where attitudes toward Robotic Process Automation, RPA, need to change. Businesses don’t hire people to mindlessly enter data, they hire them to add value. That’s done through strategizing, creating, and focusing on customer satisfaction – not through repetitive tasks.

That’s a brief rundown of what automation does and some of the reasons it hasn’t found its way into some businesses. But how does this all loop back into retention?

Happy, Healthy People Stay Longer

Because of the global pandemic and a shift to home working for many, people have become increasingly aware of the importance of mental health. That means that unlike before when people were more willing to put up with a lack of fulfillment or a job that just wore them out, now they’re motivated to find companies that can support their needs.

Working in HR the focus shouldn’t now be on battling other companies in the ultra-competitive job market, finding replacements for the people who have resigned. Instead, the focus should be on keeping the great people that the business already has. Much of a workforce’s time is wasted on mundane tasks that a bot could easily take care of so rather than increase the staff count HR should be thinking about giving the existing workforce more time.

A study by the World Health Organisation shows that people who are overworked have a greater risk of heart disease and stroke. Is it any wonder then that people who are overworked produce lower quality work and then quit?

Everyone reading this has at some point in time had to fill out a weekly excel report that was awkward, slow, and felt like a waste of their day. That right there is what bots are for. If your business has excel files everywhere and data siloed between departments then a bot can help automate the collation of all that data at scale. It doesn’t require a person and in fact, when a bot is available it’s a waste of that person’s time.

Automation can be set up for any task where the process can be defined and consistently worked too. Generating reports, data entry, filtering candidates, and employee onboarding emails, are all tasks that take up your time and they don’t have to.

If an employee is spending their time regularly doing manual reports they’ll become frustrated because they know it’s a waste of time. They know that they’re worth more than a basic process. If you can automate even a small portion of their work they’ll have extra hours in the day. These can be used to provide additional value to the business but part of it can also be used to focus on professional development with things like training courses. 

A Glassdoor study found that for every 10 months an employee stays in a business their chances of leaving increase by 1%. That means you not only have to have a development plan for each person, you need them to have the time to take part in it.

Imagine how engaged the people in your business would be if you could offer them meaningful work and a break from the repetitive things that get them down and damage their mental health. Creating a culture where automation is embraced only takes a single success. People very quickly see how much better they can have it and they’ll want it too. Thankfully, automation scales quickly and can be implemented almost anywhere in a business.

The Bottom Line

As we said at the start, the reasons people leave jobs aren’t a mystery to anyone so HR teams and businesses need to focus on fixing those problems rather than trying to keep pace with a ballooning job market. Automation, in short, saves time. This is time you can give back to the people of your business and they can use it for the business and for themselves.

People are expecting more from employers, they expect to have control over their professional lives and if they don’t get it they’ll go elsewhere. In the future, being able to advertise that a role is truly dedicated to delivering value and not doing manual work, will become the norm. No one should have to do copy-paste work and in a few years, no one will be willing to.

Whether you’re working in a large enterprise or an SME, the problems of poor retention are costly. Forward-thinking companies are seeing the light and are using technology to lighten the load on their most important asset – their people. Automation frees people up to be engaged, seek progression, and receive recognition. That sounds like the ideal environment for anyone and it can be created with the help of automation.

Cristian Ignat is the Founder & CEO of Aggranda, a company that trains software robots using RPA technology on the UiPath platform. This way, Aggranda is creating time in companies and in people's lives. Connect Cristian Ignat Visit www.aggranda.com