Intelligent Automation: Enhancing Employee Experience

In the last 20 months, millions across the globe have voluntarily resigned from their workplaces in a phenomenon coined as ‘The Great Resignation’. Now in 2022, this trend appears to be going strong with 1 in 5 employees planning to quit their jobs this year and a Gartner study finding only 13% of employees are
fully satisfied with their jobs.

Employee experience was voted the most important factor in HR strategy in 2020 by 10% of employees. Comparatively, 33% of the same research group predicted that it would become the most important factor by 2022, highlighting employees' perspective of its increasing value.

Over the few years however, innovation in technology has been at an all-time high, with different tech trends being leveraged to enhance end user experience across industries such as education and healthcare amidst a pandemic.

Since 2020, Intelligent Automation (IA) has emerged as one of the leading technologies in business process optimisation. IA combines robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent business management systems and integrates other tools with an aim of automating manual tasks and increasing AI driven decision-making.

The benefits are clear:

• Less time taken to complete processes
• Improved data accuracy
• Enhanced customer experiences

Bots can work 24/7 without the boredom, fatigue, and error humans experience. Though reasons for resignations may extend beyond repetitive and mundane tasks, they do have a negative impact on the overall employee experience. With these benefits, how can IA be leveraged within the workplace to address the issues of job dissatisfaction and enhance employee experience?

Here, we look into 3 key factors of negative employee experience and envision how IA can provide a solution:

1. Burnout 

Burnout can be described as the imbalance between expectations and resources. It leads to increased stress and several mental and physical health problems, impacting our ability to work. With IA’s ability to eliminate a large percentage of manual effort, this reduces employees’ workload, helping to alleviate stress. If we use the case study of a current Kainos customer, we can understand these benefits in context.

This intelligent invoice processing project is using IA to poll a mailbox for new invoices, using OCR to scrape the data and inputting data into an invoicing system. Below we can see the steps where automation comes in and the time savings:

2. Poor Company Culture 

Eighty one percent of employees believe creating and sustaining a positive culture aids [positive] employee experience, Forrester research has revealed. People want to ensure that their employers encourage healthy behaviours through promoting a culture of balance and efficiency over glorifying business and overworking. The monetary savings and increased operational efficiency seen in IA implementations not only directly reduce individuals’ workloads, but also allow companies to meet business objectives while placing less pressure on their people for their contributions to this attainment.

To revisit the intelligent invoice processing case study, the primary business objective was “to improve workflow management of the invoicing process”. The success (or lack thereof) of this objective formerly lay almost exclusively on employees. Imagine targets were not being met. We could expect calls for the Finance specialists to work smarter, harder and faster. Now that robots are reducing the human handling time while increasing the efficiency and data accuracy of the process, the business can meet this objective with significantly less responsibility being placed on employees.

3. Lack of Growth 

We know that when work is no longer interesting, people can disengage causing poor performance, and may even turn to new opportunities in search of more fulfilling work. Not only can mundane tasks be boring and uninspiring, they don’t contribute to positive employee development, and fill up time that employees could otherwise be using to upskill. Upskilling provides individuals with more confidence that they are competent in their field of work.

This plays a large part in employees feeling fulfilled at work, their likelihood of going for promotions and the chances of them being recognised at work – which in itself is another crucial element of positive employee experience. In other words, manually performing these time-consuming, automatable tasks impact career progression. With Gartner research showing that 40% of departing employees cited a lack of career development as a key driver of job dissatisfaction, leveraging IA to free employee time could help with combating this.

To summarise, intelligent automation is a powerful tool that you can use not only to retain your talent, but to enhance their daily experience at work.  

At Kainos, our experts in process excellence can guide you to optimise existing processes and identify areas where the benefits of intelligent automation can be maximised to transform your workforce.