Take a lazy approach and unlock efficiency with process automation

When you look at the career of Benjamin Franklin, lazy is not a word that comes to mind. From his work as an author and scientist to his political endeavors, he contributed a significant amount to the world as we know it. Still, he is credited as saying, “I am the laziest man in the world. I invented all those things to save myself from toil.”

What Franklin called lazy, we would call efficient. When you look at the achievements of great pioneers it becomes clear that they were not afraid of hard work, but they also did not waste their efforts on anything that did not drive them towards their goals. Their laziness when it came to mundane tasks fueled their advances in work that mattered, ultimately changing the world around them.

It is these same principles that are at the heart of continuous improvement, business process management and operational excellence. While procedures and protocols within your teams may appear to be working, they might not be operating efficiently, and the difference could represent a considerable return for the organization.

The benefit is more than just financial, though. Like Benjamin Franklin, no one wants to be doing work that has little impact. This is where we can bring our teams on board with process optimization and automation in their daily work.

Process automation liberates workers from low value tasks

Knowledge is power and, for some, the idea of sharing hard-won process and system information that keeps them an essential part of the operations is akin to signing their own redundancy letter. The truth is that while people may be vital holders of process knowledge, they are also shackled to these procedures. Rote, manual asks may be monopolizing their time and energy. Encourage your teams by asking this key question, “If I was not doing this task, what else could I be doing?”

It may sound self-serving, but there is a degree of self-interest that is very healthy here. Business process automation is constantly exploring new ways to improve how people work, and the reduction of repetitive data shuffling, reporting and form filling is one of the easiest things to implement. It is also exactly those kinds of tasks that most people would rather not be spending hours on, making the introduction of robotic process automation an opportunity to free teams from the burden of menial tasks.

Leveraging automation to find new opportunities for operational excellence

Being liberated from rote, monotonous procedures opens up new avenues for your teams to work in. By optimizing themselves out of repetitive processes, they can optimize themselves into new value-adding activities. AI and automation can be ground-breaking tools, but they still cannot match the innovation, intuition and imagination of their human counterparts.

The strategic implementation of process automation enables your teams to focus on more interesting, engaging and efficient work that cannot be relegated to bots. Those improvements, innovations, and business-building experiments that have always been put in the blue sky basket suddenly become viable business activities, because the day-to-day running of your processes are being tackled with minimum fuss and waste by effective process management tools.

This sort of strategic shift needs to be carefully managed. Good change management protocols will ensure that you do not suddenly have a stampede of unregulated bots rampaging through your systems. With checks and balances in place, however, the opportunities for your teams to explore more value-added work rather than the regular daily grind of their routines should excite everyone across all levels of your organization.

Business process automation is about optimizing your business, not just for the bottom line, but for everyone involved. It empowers teams to experience the best that their role can offer, not just the minimum that it requires. Encourage your organization to explore Franklin’s version of laziness and watch the business become more efficient and the teams more engaged than ever.