AFTE Labor Pool – Threat to lifelong employment???

These Days if you look around the RPA led business world, you will find that nearly every business leader regardless from which experience background he is coming is attempting to implement BOT's and that as well without the help of IT but surprisingly with a very technology focused approach. There is a strong acknowledgment that BOT's are just a software, and they require few things like specifications, process maps, mockups, configurations, hardware, software, and the like.  But if you take a deep dive into the system, you will find that this is a big mistake. BOT’s are not a software; they’re a new workforce pool or workforce having strengths and weaknesses, abilities and constraints, values and needs, and they must be managed as such for them to be successful. This is even more relevant when BOT’s interact with human co-workers, which occurs often. 

True enough, RPA is software and it’s typical to manage an RPA project like a technology project.  This sort of works keeps increasing when we’re automating processes BOT by BOT.  However, problems arise as number of BOT’s grows, and more and more BOT’s having to co-exist with more and more of human workforce.  Our challenges stop being about bits and bytes, and increasingly become about roles and responsibilities, as resources must adapt to new ways of operating and new definitions of value.

If we do not anticipate these problems ahead of time, and manage them appropriately, they will be the downfall of our automation efforts. Now, as then, automation threatens to end what was believed to be life-long employment for a whole class of workforce. There is much at stake for this pool of people, as they will need to significantly retrain themselves, quickly, in the face of this wave of automation, and will have to acquire a degree of new-found expertise that may be the equivalent of going back to college all over again, in mid-life. 

HR Nightmarish: Placed Yourself Out of Work 

To create BOT’s that effectively replace manual workforce we must correctly, and completely, define what those pool of people does. Organization may have sufficient process documentation, but what of the various and inevitable exceptions, traditions, habits, and other undocumented requirements and rules manual workforce follow in executing their jobs?  Such undocumented rules not only persist in today’s organizations, but they are also, almost necessarily, focused and augmented in organization’s remaining, manual tasks.  This is, after all, part of why those tasks remain manual.  If these rules had been sufficiently defined and documented, they would have already been automated!

The result is that for today’s remaining manual practices to be accurately automated we need the cooperation of those who perform those tasks today.  It’s safe to say, most of them aren’t immensely motivated to help! We would often make the argument that BOT’s eliminate the repetitive, redundant, and routine parts of their work, and it’s true that BOT’s take the robot out of human tasks.  However, if we don’t subsequently reassign those workforce to more value-added work, they are no longer needed, and they know it!

While replacing manual workforce with vastly faster and cheaper BOT’s may appeal to business managers, it tends to be less desirable for those pool of workforce who are about to lose their jobs.  However, these resources are likely critical to correctly understand the processes they live in, and what it takes to make a BOT operate correctly.  If the reasonable expectations and fears of these resources are not anticipated and managed there is little chance that they will be supportive of the effort, and little chance that the BOT’s will work. Having a communication plan, a succession plan, and a training or job placement plan in place before we begin picking processes to automate is critical to success.

HR Nightmarish: Cost of Reorientation or Relocating

Unfortunately, implementing these plans may be very costly and can put an if not positive ROI project permanently under water. A task performed by ten resources may be done by a single BOT, supposedly creating an admirable ROI. However, if those ten resources are reallocated elsewhere, and need to be trained in that new role, that training cost may far go beyond the savings from the BOT.

On the Other hand, those resources may be fully terminated from the organization, as suggested in most ROI models, but what do we do when the BOT crashes and we need humans to fill in for a day, a week or a month while the BOT related issues are sorted out?  If we eliminate our human experts, we eliminate our ability to respond to failures or crises. The costs, in terms of real costs and the cost of risk, in eliminating manual workforce can be significant, as anyone who has undergone business process outsourcing has experienced.  It’s critical that these costs are included in ROI models so that we are making accurate investment decisions.

HR Nightmarish: Geo-Political Effects

When moving manual workforce to another task, those resource will either be shifted within their existing business unit or shifted to another.  If they remain in the same business unit, that unit’s costs just moved up, not down.  Indeed, its costs went up by the total cost of implementing the BOT’s! If those resources are not working to create new, as-yet-untouched value, then the ROI on BOT’s is negative. Alternatively, if we shift those resources to another business unit, we must deal with the geo-political issues and costs associated with that transfer. Indeed, such geo-political costs cut both ways.

HR Nightmarish: People Retained Have to Co-exist With BOT’s

Unless we completely remove humans from the process being automated, BOT’s and people have to live together.  This means, necessarily, that whoever remains in the process must be retrained, re-evaluated, and must go through a period of adjustment, as if they were a new hire.  Their adjustment might be even harder than that for a new hire if they’ve been doing things a certain way for, oh, thirty or more years.

Opposite to the hype, BOT’s can be extremely disruptive to a well-established process; even if the BOT performs the same tasks exactly as humans previously did.  We cannot speed up one task in a process without having significant impact on other tasks. If we don’t impact other tasks, then our automation likely had no impact on the performance of the total process.

When combined with BOT’s, resources’ duties certainly change.  The BOT performs the bulk of the work, while manual workforce troubleshoots errors and manage exceptions.  A resource who previously processed a thousand transactions in a shift may now complete only ten or twenty: the exceptions to the process. The BOT’s will likely operate at a much higher pace than the manual workforce they replace, requiring that the manual workforce performing tasks around them to speed up as well. These adjustments and changes must be accounted for in both our project plans and our ROI models and will directly impact the financial performance of your initiatives.

HR Nightmarish: Skill Sets Change

As stated above, many of resources will have to work differently or do different tasks after BOT’s are deployed.  Skill sets might change, and the more impactful the BOT, the greater the likely changes they will force onto our remaining manual workforce. This may lead to unforeseen challenges to some or most sacred cows. Consider assessing a person who currently performs the sort of data processing tasks you’d like to assign to a BOT.  How is that person measured, and how is their performance evaluated?  Likely, their performance is based upon how many transactions they perform over a given period of time, how well they follow the rules of the process, and how error-free is their work.  These all make sense.  However, these metrics essentially measure how BOT-like that person performs (remember, cheap, fast, good).

No matter how cheap, fast, and good that resource is, a BOT can perform those same tasks faster and more consistently, and likely cheaper, too. When this is the case, the humans that HR department recognizes to be “best” employees end up being those who are most readily replaced by a BOT! On the Other Hand, those resources who are better at troubleshooting, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, otherwise known by traditional HR as ‘malcontents’ end up being exactly the sort of people who we need to retain, so that they can deal with the exceptions that the BOT’s cannot handle. This is a real puzzle for HR, as their traditional measures of who is “good” and who should be “retained” are turned on their head when we add BOT’s to the mix. 

Again, for RPA initiative to succeed, engage HR department as early in this process as possible.  If we are picking technology platforms and target processes before engaging HR, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

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