Tech haves and have-nots: Has your work been transformed by automation yet?

Look inside British businesses and you’ll see a stark divide between tech haves and have-nots in working practice.

According to Workfront’s State of Work research, 43% of UK knowledge workers have already seen some of their menial and repetitive tasks automated – freeing their time for higher-level tasks and strategic thinking.

But on the other side of this technological divide, an identical proportion of workers (43%) say their jobs have not been touched at all by automation. They are still doing everything they used to do in the way they used to do it (hands on rather than switched on).

Competing businesses – striving to cultivate the same crop of customers – may well be operating in parallel universes with one embracing automation and bots, the other relying on people power. The lesson of history is simple; those with the best tools win every time.

Workers want more automation … and fear it

Delve deeper into Workfront’s research and you’ll find that the average level of task automation is now about 30% of a UK knowledge worker’s day job. But workers believe that about 40% of their work could be and should be automated. Yet alongside this bullish view of the potential to automate, there’s nervousness about its longer-term consequences.

Split the findings by demographic and you’ll find millennials are twice more likely to fear losing their job to a bot than baby boomers. The implication for business leaders is a clear need to train and encourage workers in fields of endeavor that are resistant to automation; creativity, strategic thinking, and empathetic management. The best way to ease fears of what lies ahead is to show people a positive way forward.

What’s a job for a bot, what’s a job for a human?

That brings us to the core question for businesses of what tasks are ripe for automation and what needs to be left in human hands? Nine out of 10 workers believe that regardless of how sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes, there will always be the need for the human touch in the workplace. So, if creativity, empathy and strategy rest with humans, what’s the right job to give a bot?

The guiding principle is that if a task falls into at least one of these categories, it should be automated:

If the tasks falls into all four categories, automation is essential to see productivity gains in a business.

But if those are the principles, in practice the answer is to start small.

Take the example of automated email routing; setting up rules that auto filter messages by sender or content into folders. Messages are sorted and prioritised as they come in without the need to skim read or drag and drop. It might only save a moment or two, but those are minutes over the course of a week that can be better spent on other tasks.

Once small tasks are routinely automated, there’s an opportunity to think of larger scale changes. Most companies are still managing work with 20th century tools and methods such as spreadsheets, email, status meetings, and people to manually gather and report on all of it.

What the age of automation mandates is an operational system of record that connects all aspects of activity across the enterprise to get a view of the truth. More than half of UK workers (55%) aren’t using such a work management platform but would like to.

Fender case study: How big are the benefits of automation?

Research found seven out of 10 workers believe the rise of automation will create time to “think of work in new and innovative ways.” But how much more time?

Fender, the iconic American guitar and musical instrument manufacturer and distributor, introduced a project management and digital asset management system to automate work on marketing projects from campaign planning, content creation and approval to delivery and archiving.

The single system channels project requests and communications from more than 50 different stakeholders. The original time-consuming discovery phase of back-and-forth emails and meetings has been replaced by a more efficient project request queue where requestors outline project goals and objectives in a custom form. Today, the system is helping Fender to manage 150 active projects per week. And the benefits?

• Two-hour per day time saving. Every new Fender marketing request used
to be submitted differently, requiring a creative team member to participate in follow-up meetings or send emails to better understand each request. Now a request handling has been simplified with a standardised queue and templates.
• 30–40% less time spent in meetings 
for creative team members. Now all marketing project communications are in a single system, meetings are more focused
and efficient.
• Complete project visibility, improving productivity and accountability. From creation to review, and approval to archiving. Dashboards enable employees to better manage their time to agreed-upon schedules.
• Faster decisions and less rework with digital proofing.
• Creative asset control and on-demand delivery. The reduced time to retrieve assets when they are needed.

Future now

As almost half of UK workers know, automation is the future happening now. The other half just need to catch up.

The challenge for businesses is to show team members how automation can free their day for more meaningful and strategic work. Technology that solves problems and improve productivity – without increasing headcount – should be embraced.

But as no one wants to feel like their job is on the cusp of being automated, workers should be trained to acquire new skill sets to ensure they continue to make a positive contribution in future. And find digital tools to manage modern work. So, in which universe is your business? Are things still hands on or switched on?