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 founded 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 our tasks and work schedules optimally

• generating more leads automatically via our social media networks

• managing our 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 and this is exactly what we use for most of our projects. The main issue that we always encounter 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 we can 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; sequences of emails will be sent to partners that prompt them to read promotional material and get in contact with the right designated manager; other sequences of emails provide access links to marketing bundles within their partner portal that help the partners promote the products; also scheduled sequences for monthly strategy improvement meetings; leads and deals would be registered automatically via referral links and rewards from accepted leads and closed deals would be accrued automatically too. In fact, all of it would be automated – as expected – to the highest level!

• The appropriate level of automation: any level of automation that is deemed acceptable by the management of the company. It could be that the company would like to first have face-to-face meetings with every single partner and then schedule individual online onboarding workshops with all of them. In this case, we need to discuss the “signing materials” e.g. equipment, branded wear, etc. and the onboarding process e.g. stages, schedule, materials, activities, etc. Once we see a pattern forming, we can create many types of content for popular topics that partners can learn from in their own time. This approach considers the possibility that there is a part of the process that must remain manual because it brings more value. If such a part exists, then we let it remain manual but create the process around it with it in mind so that there is a seamless flow of information and actions.

The degree of automation also depends on the volume of marketing activities that would be done for the specific initiative. If there is a plan for sales teams to visit events where they are expected 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 example of an IT company with a legal, HR, and a shipping department. Each of those departments are eligible for high degrees of automation but then 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 are in a completely different category that do the same job, sometimes even better. The main question is: What type of work is performed by the team members? Let’s take a look at each one of the departments individually:

The Legal Department

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

The IT Department

The IT department is tasked with managing the handover and reception of employee hardware e.g. laptop computers, phones, peripheral devices, etc., 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 and the candidate’s information must not be stored anywhere but the document needs to be filled in by the candidate and signed. Once signed, the document has to be stored in a designated place.

The Shipping Department

Sometimes the shipping department might be tasked with establishing its own network of local storages in different countries where parcel orders would be delivered to clients. The shipping department is tasked with executing the process of calling storage facilities in different countries, explaining the conditions of the deal, and sending a contract for signing.

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

Analyzing the Challenge

Based on the above four examples, we need document editors, spreadsheets, eSignature, and storage solutions. We want “mail-merged” documents (the templates) to be populated by data (from the spreadsheet) and sent for signing to different stakeholders (the eSignature). Once signed, we want these documents to be stored (the storage) in a specified folder. It seems Google Docs, Google Sheets, DocuSign, and Google Drive are the right tools for us because they cover the requirements of what we’d like to automate.

In this case though, we would need to engage with integration specialists because additional work needs to be done to achieve the desired effect. The benefits of having integrated products is not only data consistency but also not introducing a new solution into the current tech stack.

Alternatively, we can introduce a new platform to the tech stack that solves all our problems by providing a complete range of out-of-the-box functionalities and cover all requirements we have from all processes in the departments. This would mean we are working with 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! In this way, arriving at a solution that tremendously increases the business velocity of the client – the “right” answer – is easily achievable.

Work smart, not hard!

The famous slogan “Work smart, not hard!” tries to remind us of just that – think about what tools you need to make your work easier! As business owners know, keeping employees motivated is not an easy task and now it is even harder as remote work has become ever so popular 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 so far doesn’t involve any ambitious goals to make the team members of the four departments motivated or excited about completing it. On the contrary, the majority of the work that needs to be done is extremely boring! Filling out templates, sending them for signing, and storing them, all manually, is work no person should do or be responsible for! The possibility of human errors is high and the type of work does not require creativity.

Each of the departments mentioned above have key roles in any expansion that the company might be planning. Managers and team members in those departments must be in an environment that promotes creativity if they want to think of solutions faster than their colleagues in competing companies. More evidence starts to surface about how moderate amounts of procrastination increase a person's problem solving abilities. This is just how the brain works i.e. leave it alone and the solution appears out of the blue, most of the time in a shorter timeframe than if we tried to push it. Since we only have 8 hours per day, how are we supposed to leave it to chance that the solution will pop into existence at the right time, especially if we have deadlines and on top of that, and how can management be assured that employees won’t let them down?

People should only do intelligent work!

Some of you might have guessed already – yes, automate as much as you can so no monotonous work is left to be done by people but this still doesn’t answer questions such as Can we afford it?, Do we have enough time to do it before the deadline?, Who should be in charge of the project?, What backup would we have if it doesn’t work?, and many other valid questions.

Such questions can only be answered by an automation consultant with experience in operations automation. Here is an example of the way we envision a working day for a manager of one of those administrative departments when the company’s board has set its eyes on new markets and have taken an expansion initiative:

• 09:00am – 10:00am – morning coffee with colleagues, discussing personal aspirations

• 10:00am – 10:30am – checking emails, preparing the schedule for the day

• 10:30am – 12:00am – monitoring work already done and doing the entire work for the day

• 12:00am – 14:00am – lunch and coffee with colleagues, a 30min. walk in nature

• 14:00am – 15:00am – meeting with team, progress discussion

• 15:00am – 16:00am – meeting with team, planning discussion

• 16:00am – 16:30am – coffee with colleagues, discussing personal aspirations 

• 16:30am – 18:00am – coffee with management, updating on progress and strategy

Apart from the obvious reaction of surprise, many productivity and operations type questions arise but to extinguish your worries, such a workday is only possible if the management of the company has taken the automation approach to heart. Let’s take a look at it in more detail.

What is the Automation Approach?

It is very hard for companies that have a lot of manual processes to imagine that these processes can be automated and yet again achieve the same 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 a 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.

There are many such processes that can be fully automated via various existing solutions or a combination of them. The main objective is to identify what are the established processes that function well in the company 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, the need for a unified, all-encompassing, enterprise system or a specific industry solution is required.

The working schedule from above is only an example that tries to illustrate how much one should focus on completing the work for the day versus how much I’m interacting with my team and management. The schedule above is only an example but my focus is stressing how much time should be spent on work and how much time should be spent on communication. Let’s break down the example work schedule.

Breaking Down the Example Workday Schedule

Let us imagine that we are the heads of legal departments in IT companies and part of the expansion initiative – opening offices in different locations worldwide. Let’s break down our activities on the first day after the assignment has been given a green light:

• 09:00am – 10:00am: we would have our morning coffee with our colleagues and inform them informally that we are part of the expansion project, thus breaking the ice that a serious task is on the table therefore all our cognitive faculties need to be at best performance.

• 10:00am – 10:30am: we’ll check our emails to delegate work that can be delegated so we can focus on creating the process of expansion into new territories;

• 10:30am – 12:00am: we’ll create the expansion process i.e. criteria for identifying suitable candidate locations, assessing local legal partners, contracting chosen legal partners, receiving minimum necessary information for a decision to be made;

• 12:00am – 14:00am: we’ll have our lunch and then a coffee (or tea) with our colleagues then take a 30min. to 1h walk in nature to digest the food so we don’t sit down straight away as this is very bad for our health;

• 14:00am – 15:00am: we discuss with our teams what progress we are expecting to make within each sprint i.e. if the objective is to expand in 4 new territories within 2 years, we have 6 month timeframe for expansion per country;

• 15:00am – 16:00am: we discuss what we need to execute the expansion in one country within the limited timeframe i.e. brushing up on local labor laws, contacting and receiving offers from local legal partners, designing a list of tasks for the local legal partners, etc.;

• 16:00am – 16:30am: we ask our team members to share personal feedback regarding how they see the process being carried out i.e. if they have concerns regarding the speed, if we have enough buffers, national holidays, plans for family vocations, and other factors that need to be taken into account so that we don’t have any surprises.

• 16:30am – 18:00am: last but not least, we have tea with the management/board of directors to update them on our conclusions e.g. yes, it can be done within 6 months, we need support from this and this department and we’ve already synced with them on the topic, we’ll utilize 17% of our budget for the completion the expansion project and all team members are excited to begin.

The schedule above might sound like a fantasy for some managers but the above case is a real case! The schedule can be different for managers from different departments but the most important ingredient is focusing on doing work that brings real value by solving a particular problem.

Addressing Management Concerns

There are a couple of concepts in this article that might cause concerns for managers, CEOs and board directors – remote work and procrastination. Yes, those two are linked and we can speak from experience but 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 to have 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 the approach one needs to take here is allow people to do their job in their own time and do it creatively so that they feel satisfied.

What you want as a manager, a CEO or a board director is to have as many problem solvers as you can at your company. Yes, including the custodial staff! Today businesses face an increasing number of challenges on a daily basis and unless operations are streamlined with automation, most of the time it might feel like we are doing nothing more than extinguishing fires. This is not a sustainable approach as company managers and firefighters have very different jobs!

Highly-motivated problem solvers are the results of the automation approach being implemented throughout the company and these problem solvers will make sure your business runs smoothly. As the famous saying by Richard Branson goes: “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your business!”.

Conclusion

Last year I went to a partner event organized by one of our clients and I still consider the event to be one of the most epic I’ve been to in a while! The one thing I took away from the event was from the closing slides of the presentation given out by the CEO in connection to how they are going to realize their ambitious plans. These four words will forever be ingrained in my mind – “No politics, no ego!”.

In any company that has several interconnected departments, there are people that are adverse 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 not be willing to facilitate the change thus holding the entire company back.

What I find important for change management is for all involved to have a clear understanding that the path they have taken till now is not the one they’ll continue to be on and that whatever was done so far could be done better. Change is the only constant in the universe but if carried out correctly, all can benefit!