Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the workspace landscape has changed drastically over the past couple of years. The present-day workspace is evolving at a rapid pace with cultural changes and technological advancements all around.
Today, organisations are looking at utilising automation to create efficient, resilient, and flexible supply chains, ease the accounting and finance processes while making autonomous processing an integral part of their enterprises.
Shifting away from traditional approaches and manual processes, businesses are embracing next-generation AI solutions, virtual agents, and customer self-service solutions to build agile, innovative, and adaptable organisations.
Promoting agile and team-based ways of working
Since the workspace landscape is changing, organisations are using this opportunity to redesign and redefine business workflows and processes that enable employees to work successfully alongside machines.
Due to the pandemic, 45 percent of organisations in India have already increased AI adoption. Some organisations are also reconfiguring their workspaces and design to bring in better collaboration among employees, resulting in more agile and team-based setups of working.
This is helping employees have greater autonomy to schedule their daily work and develop a sense of purpose and mastery over their contributions. The end result — happy and motivated employees.
Paving the way for learning and engaging work
While there’s a fear that automation will take away jobs from people, on the contrary, it’s only applied, keeping a growth mindset. Only a handful of jobs are automated as only one percent of jobs have activities that can be fully automated.
The reality is only parts of jobs are changing. That being said, physical robots, AI, and RPA can replace a third of the activities in 60 percent of all current jobs.
Automation is best at activities like data collection, data processing and predictable and physical work. As it strips away the mundane and routine works, employees now have the scope and time to focus on creative, complex tasks, which automation cannot tackle.
Thus, automation provides the opportunity to free up employees’ time and help them make meaningful contributions towards work.
Driving better accuracy
Workplace automation makes tasks more accurate and fast as duplicative information and redundancy can be easily avoided. Unlike humans, B2B automation software doesn’t get tired, allowing errors to be avoided.
Automation is the perfect fit for businesses that require the accuracy of information. These tools ensure the data is accurate, reliable, and precise from the point of entry to the final step of the process.
Confidential data can also be secured through automation, making sure information can move through sections and processes of the business without any risk of threat.
Data accuracy not only provides confidence in the workflow but also shield businesses from committing errors of compliance and contravening regulatory laws.
Leading to easy team collaboration
Communication is a critical aspect of every business. However, manually taking care of the communication aspect, involving loads of reminders, activities, and emails, can get tricky. That’s where automation is making a big impact.
When all the employees of an organisation are within the same automation system, communication becomes easy between different sections of the business. As a result, it not only becomes easier and convenient for employees to work as a team, but collaboration is also enhanced.
Collaboration also becomes easy and fast when employees have real-time access to a project file, and they are sure it is accurate and up to date.
B2B automation tools can even help to strengthen collaboration with vendors, suppliers, and partners.
Final thoughts
With the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of companies are implementing automation solutions and systems to be at par with their competitors and maintain their operational efficiency.
This trend will no doubt accelerate and continue over the years to come. Therefore, it becomes imperative for every business to take serious steps to explore the different opportunities provided by automation and apply the ones best suited to their needs.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
