How automation can make sustained remote work a reality
Just as automation eases common stressors from IT teams’ workloads, employees across departments can also use it to free up their own to-do lists.
While most organizations only ever expected the shift to remote work to be temporary when the pandemic first struck, they’ve since realized the benefits of this style of work even after the threat of COVID-19 subsides. In fact, PwC’s U.S. Remote Work Survey found that 55% of employees would prefer to be remote three or more days per week after the pandemic. In addition to giving employees more control over their workdays, there are financial incentives for companies to allow this preference, as it has been proven to save millions of dollars for enterprises.
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However, while the benefits of a remote business model are clear, how to achieve them is less so. As time goes on, business leaders are recognizing that the strategies and technologies that enabled them to support a remote workforce so quickly aren’t sustainable in the long term. Technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) can be deployed to bridge those short-term strategies with a more permanent infrastructure that accommodates organizations’ new realities.
When implemented strategically, automation software can not only help companies overcome the business challenges facing them today, but also bring them into the future. Here’s how.
Automation alleviates the burden on IT departments
The initial shift to remote work placed a major burden on operations teams, who were tasked with setting up employees in their new home offices while maintaining security over the organization’s data. In the months that followed, their roles became defined by helping others overcome challenges with their remote technology instead of focusing on more strategic transformation projects that could move the company forward.
Automation offers IT teams critical technical support that alleviates their workloads and enables them to execute more complex work. They can deploy software robots within their contact centers to quickly respond to support tickets, eliminating wait times for assistance and enabling employees to maintain productivity. These robots can be configured to pull key information to solve employee requests, aggregating data from multiple sources as needed and then using AI to discern how to remedy the situation. If the task needs to be elevated to a human to solve, then the robot has at least already compiled all the necessary information for the IT team member to engage with, which helps them reach a solution faster.
Because robots can execute repetitive and time-consuming activities like data collection, IT teams have more time to work on digital transformation initiatives—like leading the charge on technologies that not only maintain business continuity, but also empower the business to accomplish more.
It allows employees to access legacy systems from home
The data management systems organizations consider to be their backbones were likely not adopted to support work occurring outside of the office. Consequently, legacy systems struggle to integrate with the modern technologies that make remote work possible, which can stunt productivity at scale if employees are unable to access the information needed to do their jobs. However, modernizing older systems comes with its own slew of challenges. Because these programs are so deeply integrated within business operations, powering them down to revamp or even replace altogether can bring business to a short stop. Further, these types of change projects can take years to accomplish given how many dependencies need to be accounted for within companies’ ecosystems.
Instead of overhauling legacy systems—and risking disrupting workflows and losing data—organizations can leverage automation to securely bridge the gap between the office and employees’ homes. For systems that are unable to grant access to remote devices, robots can be deployed to capture the data on those systems and then share it with employees. Having robots automatically pull data from systems has the added benefit of creating unified access to information. It’s often the case that business data is stored across multiple systems within an organization, which amounts to time lost trying to track it down, especially if employees aren’t in the office. With automation software, employees can save time and confusion. It facilitates collaboration between widespread workforces
In that same PwC study, 65% of executives conceded that they believe the office is “very important” to increasing employee productivity, meaning that organizations need a way to compensate for the collaboration and communication opportunities that come from meeting in person. A first step in achieving this is simply making sure employees have the time to connect with one another, which automation can help with.
Just as automation eases common stressors from IT teams’ workloads, employees across departments can also use it to free up their own to-do lists with responsibilities like software testing or invoice processing. When completed with automation, these tasks can take minutes instead of hours, and they can also be completed with increased accuracy—meaning less time correcting mistakes down the line. With less clerical work bogging them down, employees have more energy to dedicate towards strategizing with one another—which fosters the sort of innovation businesses need to remain competitive and increase ROI. In fact, a UiPath study discovered that 66% of employees said RPA enables them to have more human interactions because of how it restructures their work.
While many organizations never planned to sustain prolonged remote work, automation enables them to make it a reality. Thanks to automation, companies don’t need to slow their digital transformation initiatives just so they can maintain the status quo while employees work from home. Companies can use this moment as a catalyst for transforming into an agile, fully automated enterprise—even while outside the office.
Param Kahlon is chief product officer at UiPath.
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