Imagine a business spending so much money and resources recruiting the most skilled employees, only to have them performing the same redundant tasks over and over again every day. Repetition is a curse, it kills your employees’ potential and your business’s productivity. A study showed that employees are wasting more than 3 hours daily on repetitive and redundant tasks. That’s at least 15 hours a week, and 60 hours a month. And that’s without considering the unimaginable potential and skills that are also being wasted.
So, what’s the solution? One word- Automation. You can simply go from 60 hours/week wasted to 0 hours, by automating your workflow.
But first, let’s see how redundant tasks are killing businesses.
Business becomes sluggish
Your business can’t grow if it’s held back by the burden of redundant and unproductive tasks. Repetition is the enemy of progress. To grow a business you need to innovate and instill positive changes to product development, customer service, marketing strategies, and so on.
Unfortunately, redundant tasks can eat up so much of your resources that your business won’t have the scope to implement or even think about new strategies. This will eventually cause your leads to dry up, and your sales and revenue will fall back.
Repetitive tasks are like shackles. You can’t take your business further than a certain point if you don’t eliminate them as soon as possible.
Waste of time and money
According to a survey, 40% of workers are spending a quarter of their work time on repetitive tasks. Tasks like manual data entry, data collection, preparing invoices, sending out emails, documenting inventory, and so on.
Repetitive tasks are costing businesses at least 19 working days per year for one employee, as reported by a recent global study. This large chunk of time could be spent on higher-value tasks if the repetitive tasks were automated.
Successful companies always focus on getting more things done in as little time as possible. So that employees can focus on the more important aspects of the business, such as strategizing, innovating, or decision-making.
Take Google for example. The company has a policy called ‘20% time’, where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their working time thinking about new strategies and ideas that will benefit Google.
Similarly, redundant tasks are also costing your business a lot of money. It’s increasing your labor cost because you’re having to keep more employees on payroll to perform these tasks. Having a lot of redundant and repetitive tasks can make your workflow unpredictable, and increase your management cost.
By replacing manual processes with automated solutions, you can free up a large chunk of your financial resources. This will definitely help your revenue growth and allow you to make better investments.
Precision and Accuracy in customer services
When your workflow is dependent on manual repetitive processes, there’s bound to be human errors. You might think that repetitive tasks become more accurate over time, as the same person is doing the same work every day. But in reality, it’s the opposite.
Repetitive and redundant tasks become boring quickly. Employees lose motivation, as they don’t get any sense of commitment and challenge in their roles. This leads to more mistakes and inaccuracy in your workflow.
Not only does it impact the mental health of your employees, but the lack of precision and accuracy can reduce the quality of your customer services, leading to declining sales and profits.
How to get rid of repetitive tasks
“Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks”, said Amber Rudd, the former Home Secretary of the UK.
Automation is by far the easiest and best solution to tackle this problem. You’d be surprised to know that most of the daily tasks in your organization can be automated using workflow applications.
Tasks that take up hours every day, can be automated to be performed in real-time. Tasks that are costly to perform and require you to keep several employees on a payroll, can be automated at a quarter (or even less) of that cost.
The key is to implement automated workflow software solutions that can perform these daily repetitive tasks for you, or help your employees perform them at a much faster and efficient rate.
For example, you can automate your payroll and invoicing system. Instead of having a team manually collect the work hours of every employee, calculating their wages, deducting taxes, and sending out the invoice, you can simply have automated software that performs all of these tasks for you. The employees will clock in and clock out every day on that software, and it will calculate their working hours and automatically prepare the invoice at the end of every billing cycle. It’s that easy!
But what tasks can actually be automated?
The answer is almost everything! From data entry to invoicing, customer support, data collection, sending newsletters, email inquiries, HR management, inventory, documentation, and so much more. Nowadays, there’s automation software or a bot for almost everything. This is how rapidly the automation industry is progressing.
How to get started on automation
You can get started on automating your workflow right away. It takes minimal effort and only a fraction of your financial budget. You don’t need any technical knowledge or coding to implement automated solutions in your business. It’s as easy as choosing a vendor, buying or subscribing to their software solution, and implementing it in your organization.
To give you an idea of how your automation journey will look like, here’s a list of the key steps that you might have to go through.
- Identify the tasks that need to be automated.
- Compare between different software solutions. Compare their features, price, and support options.
- Choose the best solution that supports your business needs and budget.
- Implement the new solution in your business.
- Train your employees on the new automation technology.
How to deal with tasks that cannot be automated
Automating your workflow will definitely help to get rid of those redundant and repetitive tasks, but you’ll still have some tasks that cannot be automated.
Tasks such as sales interaction, designing, construction, research, etc. can’t be fully automated yet. These tasks require a certain human touch that can’t be replicated by software.
In such cases, you can always introduce a new technology to make these tasks more efficient and convenient for your employees. For example, you can invest in smart devices to help your designers work more creatively and efficiently. Although these technologies won’t completely automate the tasks, they’ll still help your business to save valuable time and cost.
So, the time is now to stop wasting your resources on redundant repetitive tasks and start innovating your business using a powerful automated workflow tool.
