5 Ways Workflow Automation Improves the Employee Experience

Using Workflow Orchestration Tools to Reduce Administrative Burden and Drive Upskilling Efforts

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Elizabeth Mixson
03/10/2021

The numbers are clear. Employee burnout is on the rise. In fact, according to one particularly alarming Harvard Business School report, 89% of respondents said their work life was getting worse. A separate survey conducted by LinkedIn’s Glint found that reported incidents of employee burnout increased by 33% in 2020.

Though the causes of employee burnout are certainly multi-faceted and complex, one thing is clear: companies need to reduce the volume and variety of work they’re currently asking employees, especially knowledge workers, to do. Otherwise productivity levels will continue plummeting while anxiety rates soar.

By tying together multiple applications and business tasks to automate end-to-end business processes, workflow automation tools can be powerful tools for helping employees complete their work faster, easier and more effectively. Instead of replacing workers, workflow orchestration tools can help employees automate stressful, burdensome tasks on their own terms and allow them to focus on more meaningful activities.

The only problem is that many workers remain skeptical of digital workflow tools. According to a recent study of executives in Singapore, 81% of business leaders say that workflow automation is primarily used to enhance employee experience rather than replace human workers. However, 43% or respondents also said that they lack the buy-in from employees necessary to adopt these technologies.

However, workflow orchestration tools offer more than just increased productivity. The following is a look into how automated workflow management systems (WMS) can be used to enhance the employee experience and, ultimately, business resilience.

Reduces Busywork & Administrative Burden

According to a 2015 report by Mckinsey, about 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their constituent activities automated using current technology. Considering the average work week consists of 60 hours, digitizing workflows could potentially save workers upwards of 18 hours per week.

This means that instead of performing boring tasks such as data entry or invoice validation, employees could focus on more valuable activities such as developing new skills, strategic planning or internal relationship building.

Improves Team Collaboration & Trust

One of the best things about WMS tools is that they allow the user to monitor workflow progress. Instead of calling or emailing an employee to enquire about the status of a certain project or activity, a manager or other interested party can simply check the WMS for a basic status update.

Gone are the days of the cross-functional “black box” whereby, once the process is handed off to the next team, there’s zero visibility into what’s going on. With WMS and digital workflow tools, everyone involved with or overseeing the process can see what everyone else is doing. Furthermore, if there is some sort of problem or error causing a bottleneck, the system automatically alerts the team so that the issue can be addressed and everyone knows why/how the delay was caused.

Improves Regulatory Compliance

What your mother said is true: everyone makes mistakes. However, when it comes to highly regulated industries (i.e. healthcare, financial services, etc.) and activities (i.e. payroll, accounting, etc.) minor mistakes can have huge consequences.

While human intelligence is still far superior when it comes to complex decision making, automated tools such as robotic process automation (RPA) are way more effective when it comes to performing mundane, repetitive tasks as well as generating and collecting accurate data.

With workflow orchestration solutions, employees can rest assured that the right data is being generated and collected at the right time which they can in turn use to enhance strategic making.

Better Onboarding

First impressions matter especially when it comes to integrating new employees. In fact, new employees who went through a structured onboarding program were 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years. In addition, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced “great onboarding.”

However, new hire onboarding can be an incredibly complex and time consuming process. Not only does it require the coordination of multiple people and requirements, 69% of managers describe onboarding as time-consuming and 49% say it’s frustrating.

With workflow automation, the HR team can orchestrate all of the various tasks across departments leading to a more seamless and transparent onboarding process.

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Increased Opportunities for Upskilling & Career Advancement

Studies have proven that employees are significantly more likely to adopt a new technology if it’s presented as an opportunity for upskilling or career advancement. Using low-code WMS tools employees can not only design and automate processes based on their own individual and business needs, they can also develop a whole new arsenal of skill sets such as digital process engineering and process analytics.

Scalable RPA & Intelligent Automation Live

The key for global corporate enterprise is to benefit from the collective intelligence presented by RPA and cognitive technologies along with human workers. Only by having technology combine with human talent can global corporate enterprise achieve scalable intelligent automation. And only with scalable intelligent automation enterprise resiliency be realized.

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