The CEO of Generali Link, Karl Nolan, recently stated that RPA has made his employees happier. He’d feared the introduction of these bots, which boosted productivity, would demoralize clerical teams fearing for their jobs.
Instead, they were able to generate better information, faster, and add their own observations. They were being human, recognizing patterns, recommending actions, and solving problems–none of which they’d had time to do before RPAs were deployed.
I hate jargon, but it is an employer’s responsibility to “up-skill” people. By helping your employees up-skill, you can ensure their continued value. Up-skilling is just a term for continuing education. Once your employees are completing their clerical tasks in seconds rather than days, you must make sure they learn new, valuable skills.
Subscribing your business to an online training resource like Lynda or Pluralsight, making sure your employees spend at least a couple of hours each week learning new skills, is a cost effective way to start.
Senior employees are often resistant to changes like this, and their choices should be respected. There is nothing wrong with keeping a legacy employee in place whose job has been automated. It might just be better to offer that employee a retirement package earlier rather than later.
People entering the workforce who were born after 1970 should be willing to learn new skills. New hires should absolutely be told that up-skilling is a priority for their employment at your business. It’s not a punishment–it’s a perk. By helping your employees learn new skills, you will be helping them stay relevant, valued and employed for life.
I’ll add on a personal note, that when I was seven years old, my mother enrolled me in a typing class at a local community college. I was the only young kid in the class–my brother, also enrolled, was 10–but I learned relatively quickly on the IBM Selectrics. I didn’t really need to type until I started playing around in the computer lab at my public school. I took off in that lab because I didn’t have to hunt and peck. I could just look at the screen and type. It was great to feel successful at something. It was a skill that no one else my age had. Imagine how something so simple could help your employees shine.
In fact, because I could type so fast, I was often hired by friends to type their papers in high-school and college, which required me to learn all the word processing software and OS’s out there, which then made it easier to learn database software, structure, computer languages, and other software. Always be learning.