Cultivating employee staying power through Collaborative Automation
Data shows that critical aspects of performance have dropped since 2022, including profitability, customer satisfaction, total revenue, recruitment and employee wellbeing.
Whilst this is happening, employee priorities are evolving fast, but if one thing is a certainty, it's that employees are seeking a leadership and organization that invests in their growth and meaningful moments at work.
And these two workplace shifts aren't unconnected.
Employee engagement and workforce resilience aren’t being championed.
And it’s not to say that HR and business leaders are unfamiliar with their importance. But, these areas are often deprioritized because of the lack of metrics and tangibly linked business outcomes.
Yet, when employees are freed from the repetitive and mundane, when recruitment teams can look in-house to fill skills gaps, or when managers can maintain a healthy work-life balance the real, concrete results for an organization are palpable. A partnership of human talent and digital capability can be transformative. 71% of employees say automation has positively impacted business performance, and although 72% of businesses say they’ve adopted automation to some extent, data makes clear that there’s still work to be done!
Webinar Highlights
The shift in work dynamics: Companies now face a risk of declining engagement levels among employees. Engagement is reportedly at a worrying low, with 45% of talent admitting to delivering only the minimum of what’s required in their contracts. This suggests a significant amount of untapped potential and potential productivity loss. The report from Kelly shared on the webinar also highlights a disconnect between employees and organizations, with a notable percentage expressing readiness to leave their current employers in the next 12 months, including both regular employees (28%) and executives. This points to a potential wave of turnover in the future.
Ways to retain employees: Amy Bouque, CPO at Kelly, emphasized “workforce agility” at the macro level – the ability to scale and provide strategic workforce solutions, such as utilizing variable workers. At the individual manager level, Amy advocates for “work-life integration,” allowing flexibility between work and personal life obligations. She also advises a focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB), with specific attention to job posting strategies, like removing unnecessary education requirements and scrutinizing criminal background criteria for flexibility. Lastly, she discusses enhancing workforce capabilities through automation, digitization, and process simplification to enable meaningful work and to prevent burnout.
Uncomplicated and inexpensive automation: Automation can have a significant impact without being complicated or expensive. Gabrielle from John Deere provides examples of successful automation in external workforce management. One instance involves streamlining contractor requests and work classifications, where a “fast pass” process was created for known situations, saving 15 to 20 hours per week. Another example is the implementation of a robotic process automation (RPA) bot to handle the creation of profiles for workers, resulting in increased efficiency, no missed steps, and quicker onboarding for managers. These automation initiatives have proven to be major successes, demonstrating that impactful automation solutions can be achieved without significant cost or complexity.
John Deere at the coalface
John Deere, with approximately 80,000 employees globally split evenly between production and salaried roles, has focused on enhancing talent acquisition processes. As we hear on this webinar, the company aimed to improve efficiency, identify talent more effectively, and enhance the overall candidate experience. Efforts included eliminating handoffs, such as creating a self-service platform for hiring managers to expedite the requisition process. A Talent Acquisition journey map was developed, defining roles and responsibilities for stakeholders throughout the process and offering just-in-time training resources. The company also implemented new technology, specifically an 8-fold integration with the applicant tracking system, to enhance the user experience for hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates.
Automation can, and probably should, be done in stages. As new opportunities and challenges come up, I would say always dabble to see what works and what doesn’t instead of using a big bang approach because things are going to change a lot.
Gabrielle Durand, Manager, External Workforce Management, John Deere
Watch this session on-demand to glean more insights and tangible advice on automation and workforce resilience.