The Dissonance between Working Hours and Productivity

It is ever more common to see LinkedIn posts discussing management complaining about remote workers and thinking about employing AI tools to reduce their workforce. The recent 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike provides a great example of how companies are struggling to retain staff as well as profits. Boards are demanding ever more from CEOs but there's a better way for improving the company's performance without sacrificing revenue and staff.

This article is about how companies can employ automation to reduce the stress and workload of their employees while achieving higher levels of operational productivity.

Departments Eligible for Automation

Some departments such as legal, HR, IT, shipping, and others are eligible for a very high degree of operations automation.

Administrative departments have the most potential for automation because for more technical departments such as spedition and warehouse, the market continues to provide industry solutions that save time and make it easier for people to complete their jobs.

Those departments are also the ones that are at the greatest risk of personnel expansion when the workload increases. This adds to the annual costs of the company and generally, expanding a department when work can be automated is frowned upon by management.

The Ever Growing Market of Self-Service Solutions

There are a lot of self-serving solutions on the market and more managers take the initiative to try them out themselves. There are many tools that can help in:

• managing tasks and work schedules optimally
• generating more leads automatically via our social media networks
• managing leads and generating quotes for clients with a few clicks
• allowing external parties access to our calendars so they can book meetings
• assembling the contents of contracts, quotes, and presentations automatically
• managing the onboarding and success of our partners in a streamlined manner

There are many other tools that maintain data consistency and increase productivity — exactly what we use for most of our projects. The main issue is that the demand for automation increases rapidly once we are able to provide a proof of concept.

What is the Right Solution?

Usually the right solution has a lot to do with the level of automation a client is willing to accept. Let's take, for example, a company that imports and sells sportswear through partners with local establishments. They need a setup that enables anyone to subscribe as a partner, receive access to a partner portal and get onboarded on company materials and sales tactics. There are two ways to approach this project:

• The highest level of automation: the company has a partner page on their website where applicants can subscribe and get access to a partner portal automatically or after approval; email sequences prompt partners to read promotional material and get in contact with the right manager; scheduled sequences provide access to marketing bundles and recurring strategy meetings; leads and deals are registered automatically via referral links, and rewards are accrued automatically too.
• The appropriate level of automation: any level of automation deemed acceptable by management. The company may prefer face-to-face meetings with every partner and individual onboarding workshops. Once a pattern forms, content can be created for popular topics that partners can learn from on their own time. This approach preserves manual steps that bring real value while still creating a seamless flow around them.

The degree of automation also depends on the volume of marketing activities planned for the specific initiative. If sales teams are visiting events to sign on many partners, the highest level of automation is recommended.

How do I know it's the right solution?

Here we are faced with the same question — what level of automation do we want to achieve? Let's take an IT company with a legal, HR, and shipping department. Each is eligible for high degrees of automation, but the question becomes: could similar processes in all these departments be managed with one single solution?

This is where automation consultants such as CoMantis come in. There are specialized tools for vendor management, but there are also other tools that do the same job, sometimes even better. The main question is: what type of work is performed by the team members?

The Legal Department

The in-house legal department is involved in creating contract templates and managing legal operations within the company (Powers of Attorney, company filings, etc.).

The IT Department

The IT department is tasked with managing the handover and reception of employee hardware (laptops, phones, peripheral devices), which involves both parties signing documents.

The HR Department

The HR department is sometimes required to send NDAs before the first meeting with a candidate. The candidate's information must not be stored anywhere, but the document needs to be filled in, signed, and stored in a designated place.

The Shipping Department

Sometimes the shipping department is tasked with establishing its own network of local storages where parcel orders are delivered. The department calls storage facilities in different countries, explains the deal conditions, and sends a contract for signing.

In all four examples above the type of work, from an operations point of view, can be summarized as reading, creating, editing, signing, and storing documents.

Analyzing the challenge

Based on the above examples, we need document editors, spreadsheets, eSignature, and storage solutions. We want "mail-merged" documents to be populated by data and sent for signing to different stakeholders. Once signed, the documents should be stored in a specified folder. Google Docs, Google Sheets, DocuSign, and Google Drive cover the requirements — but additional integration work is needed to achieve the desired effect.

Alternatively, we can introduce a new platform that solves all our problems with out-of-the-box functionality covering every department. That means a versatile product that might not be cheap and requires additional resources to set up.

There is no right answer!

It only depends on what we want to achieve. If management has left the departments to handle their operational initiatives, individual integrations might be enough for the moment. Alternatively, if the objective is to streamline the tech stack, combining several processes from different departments in one platform makes it easier for the whole company.

A conversation about the volume and type of work people should be doing to achieve desired results on a global level is absolutely necessary.

Work smart, not hard!

The famous slogan reminds us to think about what tools we need to make our work easier. As business owners know, keeping employees motivated is not easy — and remote work has made it harder. But one principle remains: enable people to understand that their work matters and empower them with tools so they can complete it with ease, and you won't have to worry about your company's success.

The type of work discussed above doesn't involve any ambitious goals to make team members excited about completing it. The majority of the work is extremely boring: filling out templates, sending them for signing, and storing them. The possibility of human errors is high, and the work does not require creativity.

People should only do intelligent work!

Automate as much as you can so no monotonous work is left to be done by people. That still doesn't answer questions such as: Can we afford it? Do we have enough time before the deadline? Who should be in charge of the project? What backup would we have if it doesn't work? Such questions can only be answered by an automation consultant with experience in operations automation.

What is the automation approach?

It is very hard for companies with a lot of manual processes to imagine that these processes can be automated and yet again achieve consistent results. It all boils down to the degree of detail one should pay attention to and the frequency of the task. Many important documents are created manually from templates and need high attention to detail — but if dynamic data is imported into the template automatically via an integration, there's no need for any attention to detail regarding the contents of the document.

The main objective is to identify the established processes that function well and find the right tool(s) to automate them. In some cases, a company can automate many different processes in different departments with a single cloud solution, whereas in other cases an enterprise system or specific industry solution is required.

Addressing management concerns

There are a couple of concepts that might cause concern for managers, CEOs and board directors — remote work and procrastination. What's important to remember is the objective to keep employees capable and motivated. This is done by treating them like human adults and allowing them the autonomy to do the work they were tasked to do in their own time. This doesn't mean not to reprimand those that abuse such a system, but rather to allow people to do their job creatively so that they feel satisfied.

What you want as a manager, CEO or board director is to have as many problem solvers as you can at your company. Highly-motivated problem solvers are the result of the automation approach being implemented throughout the company, and these problem solvers will make sure your business runs smoothly. As Richard Branson said: "Take care of your employees, and they'll take care of your business."

Conclusion

At a recent partner event I attended, the closing slide of the CEO's presentation contained four words I will never forget: "No politics, no ego!"

In any company with several interconnected departments, there are people that are averse to change. As those people remain in those positions for longer, it makes it even more difficult for change to take place. When more automation is introduced, these people are afraid of losing their jobs and might hold the entire company back. The automation approach, paired with the right culture, is what allows organisations to keep growing without burning out their people.