The concern that machines and robots will make certain jobs obsolete and leave countless workers without a job has been prevalent for years, dating back at least to the Industrial Revolution. While there have been jobs lost to automation, technology, and robotics, this doesn’t tell the whole story, and the real dynamic is more complex.
Automation Can Be Good News for Staff
In particular, the division of work between machines and humans is not a zero-sum game, meaning it’s not necessarily the case that the more work a machine does, the less work there is for humans to perform. Sometimes automating relatively simple, repetitive tasks can actually allow humans to shift their focus to more complex and meaningful work.
In an article for Entrepreneur, Boyd Bell notes that workers in small and midsize business roles ranging from call centers to financial services can move beyond rote, routine work to more rewarding tasks through automation. This is particularly true with rework, he writes.
“This rework is monotonous—sending follow-up emails after sales calls, processing invoices from contractors, logging phone calls and hundreds of other small things—and inefficient use of a seasoned workers’ time. They’re living in the information age, but they’re more analogous to early factory workers.”
Embracing RPA
Bell explains that more and more companies are exploring and embracing what’s known as robotic process automation (RPA). RPA can automate repetitive tasks that don’t truly add value and that keep staff away from more profitable—and rewarding—work.
“Believe it or not, plenty of work still requires an immense amount of non-value-added copy and paste or re-entry from one system to another,” he writes. He points to consumer loan processing in the banking industry as a prime example. “For many banks and credit unions whose core banking and customer relationship management systems do not communicate with each other, employees need to manually look at both systems to pull necessary information that isn’t stored in both,” he says. An RPA system could automate this process, not only freeing up human time but also avoiding human error.
Turing over tedious tasks to machines doesn’t mean that employees who used to perform those tasks will be out of a job. What it does mean is that they’ll have more time to focus on the uniquely human tasks that make companies profitable, such as talking to customers, solving problems, and planning for the future.