[ad_1]
Employers need to come up with a more compelling proposition than what works today as flexible work arrangements, with robotic companions being one use case to consider, writes Tecala’s Rajith Hatthotuwegama.
On all available evidence, flexible working is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean current models can’t be improved. Flexible working 1.0 is often understood in Australia in overly narrow terms, such as less time spent commuting, leaving more time for “exercise and other activities”.
But is this slight rearrangement of existing working hours really ‘flexibility’, or are employees creating – or overpaying – their time elsewhere?
Case in point: a study by Swinburne University shows that one in three workers are now putting in more hours than two years ago, and “more than half work outside their ‘standard’ hours at least once a week.
This goes against the purpose and ideal of flexible working. This also brings us to a related point: Working flexibly does not mean working efficiently.
There are almost certainly inflexible processes or aspects of existing job roles that have followed employees home (or wherever they now do work). This may involve preparing weekly or monthly reports; manual processing of invoices or contracts; or other forms of administrative paperwork.
When employees have regular tasks, there is no flexibility in when they can be done. The activity needs to be completed within a certain time and that usually ends the conversation.
All of these friction points for flexible working add up in the minds of employees. Things employees don’t like about their roles can quickly escalate into exit trigger points. Recruiting to replace one star performer and training a new employee can cost an organization up to $400,000 and two years of effort. In the current war for talent, this is not where an organization wants to be.
As NAB recently noted: “Some businesses may require a more compelling staff offer to avoid costly and time-consuming people movements.”
So, what to do? We need to move away from this idea that flexibility is only about choosing where you work or being able to cram that extra bit of admin life into existing working hours.
We need to work towards what could be considered flexible work 2.0, a state of mind and a model that gives people the tools and assistance to streamline or offload the more inflexible parts of their work roles and give them more control over what work they do and when.
Doing so will enable employees to truly experience what flexible working should be like and allow employers to reap the promised benefits of improved employee wellbeing, satisfaction and retention.
A tipping point for virtual companions
When designing or trying to improve a flexible working strategy and model, employers can benefit from a more employee-centric perspective and ask the question: what can be done to really make employees’ lives easier?
Automation is one strategy used by leading organizations to improve the lives of employees by increasing their ability to work flexibly.
While early proposals for automation often revolved around replacing employees, the technology is now much more about augmenting employees by providing a tool or capability that can handle the most mundane and repetitive tasks that employees otherwise do.
Today, leading organizations see robots—enabled by robotic process automation (RPA) technology—almost as employees’ “companions.” Some organizations aim to have a one-to-one ratio of employees to bots—in effect, a bot for each employee to whom they can delegate administrative tasks.
Further reading: How to harness the power of robotic process automation.
This is part of Tecala’s own vision for the future of our workplace. We’ve already started giving people their own bots that sit in their system tray and have three or four tasks that they can do.
These bots don’t need to be advanced conversational AI. Instead, they act as support workers who can perform repetitive or “inflexible” parts of human work. Nowadays, there is also software that can sit “with” an employee and observe how they work to identify the most repetitive tasks. could lead to them being processed by an algorithm or robot to identify more opportunities and inflexible workflows earlier.
For example, month-end reporting is a task that has to happen every month, within a set time frame, which means late nights and lots of stress every month. So regardless of your flexible work arrangements, this highly repetitive task must be done at the same time, no matter what.
In smart business practice, robots are able to extract and collate data from various sources and compile it into month-end reports, so by delegating this inflexible task to your virtual companion, you retain the flexibility of your own work. routine. And parents of young families everywhere breathe a collective sigh of relief.
This brings about a new way of working that allows people to focus on more valuable, meaningful or enjoyable aspects of their role. With all the grunt work taken care of by a virtual worker (or bot) that is managed and supervised by an employee, people are able to develop new approaches to achieve even better business results, without the constraints of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. and mundane tasks.
With intelligent business practices implemented in this way and bots acting more like personal assistants, flexible working is starting to look really… “flexible”. As more aspects of execution can be handled virtually, employees can spend more time on high-value activities such as business development or providing great customer service.
It could also mean that employees can work a shorter week while still achieving all of their personal and operational goals. This would enable more mothers to return to the workforce and more parents in general to play a more active role in their children’s lives and do more in their local community.
If you could assign all your laborious tasks at the end of the month to your personal robot while you take your family on that trip you’ve been promising for years, isn’t that an outcome worth investing in?
[ad_2]