<!–Uday Deb
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Since the pandemic, employees around the world have been re-assessing their relationship with work. And over the past year, we have witnessed the direct outcome of this re-assessment: The Great Resignation.
While some may think that we are now seeing the end of this global phenomenon, in reality, it is not yet behind us. A recent report in the Times of India found that a staggering 86% of employees in India have plans to resign in the next six months, with a majority saying they would accept a lower salary or even forgo a pay rise or promotion for better work-life balance and overall well-being.
The Great Resignation has brought with it a multitude of new challenges for not just HR leaders but the entire C-suite. Organizations have had to implement new strategies for hiring and retention, upskill the current workforce to bridge talent gaps, accelerate the training of new employees to meet the demands of business, and ensure that the remaining employees do not face burnout, among other issues. But what if there was a way for organizations could minimize employee attrition? What if technology could be used to elevate employee experience at work, increase job satisfaction, and at the same time help employees complete tasks more quickly to better balance their professional and personal lives? This is not a distant dream. Many organizations are able to change their employees’ experience at work with the power of intelligent automation.
From digital assistants to personalized wellness programmes, intelligent automation has the capacity to transform how we work. Organizations across multiple sectors are learning how intelligent automation can be deployed in ways that have a huge impact on employee retention, such as:
- Making hybrid work feasible: A large number of organizations quickly reverted to working on-site in spite of their employees showing a strong preference for remote or hybrid work, leading to many resignations. The availability of cloud automation is lifting pressure off of leaders and managers. For example, a financial company implemented cloud-native RPA-as-a-service to help with fraud detection alerts during the pandemic. Prior to this implementation, the task was not only highly labor intensive but was done exclusively on-site, making it difficult for the company to retain permanent employees to complete the work.
- Providing employees the right digital tools in our digital world: If each employee had a personal assistant, they might get more done in a day, and more quickly. Now imagine that the assistant helps with easy access across applications, platforms, and devices, and simplifies work by consolidating data and giving the employee a single-pane-of-glass view across applications. That is the power of digital assistants – software bots that combine business automation with robotic-process-automation (RPA) and AI, and work with their human counterparts to complete workflows. With the fast pace of work today, combined with the number of platforms, applications, and devices we work with, digital assistants are helping employees to remove clutter and focus on innovation.
- Switching repetitive, monotonous tasks to higher-value tasks: Repetitive and tedious manual labor decreases employee morale directly affecting retention. Intelligent automation, a combination of RPA and AI, is helping to remove the joyless tasks out of employees’ workdays, so that they can pursue higher-value work. Even in critical fields like healthcare, employees including doctors and nurses, often need to spend time on repetitive administrative tasks, instead of simply focusing on patient care. In an interesting example, one of the world’s largest mining companies wanted to reinvent work processes as they faced a loss of human capital as employees and had to complete many administrative tasks, including the registering of invoices, which were not related to their field of work. They implemented an automation solution so their employees could be utilized for their experience and knowledge instead of the boring, repetitive work.
- Personalizing the employee experience: AI can provide insights on performance based on previous data available and can predict or offer suggestions on training and skill-building, reward employees based on their individual hobbies/likes and dislikes. It can even identify employee interests and help design their career growth in collaboration with HR, and also provide custom wellness programs at a time in which the importance of an employees’ holistic well-being, including mental and physical, is being brought to every organization’s attention.
Make employee experience a strategic priority
Employee retention during The Great Resignation has not just been a priority for HR leaders but for the whole C-suite. Talent is every business’s most vital resource and makes a big difference to the bottom line. Business leaders who want to make it through this period of instability and create a foundation for success for years to come should make employee experience a strategic priority with the help of intelligent automation.
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Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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