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Employers know they need to provide opportunities for people to perform work that has meaning if they are to attract and retain the best talent. At the same time, employees want to be given meaningful work that ignites their passion, harnesses their knowledge and challenges them to strive to be better.
In practice, however, the employer and employee can become misaligned on the issue.
Consider your own situation. If you were to step back and look objectively at your own role today, what percentage would you describe as ‘meaningful’, and what percentage might you categorise as ‘mundane’? More than likely, not everything you do keeps you excited and there may be things that cause you to question whether or not your work or overall contribution is meaningful.
Underlining the disparity, your employer may consider what you do to be ‘meaningful’, insofar as it actively and positively contributes to the company’s financial position. Whether or not that meets your own standard for, or definition of, meaningful work is another question entirely, but it’s one that employers are trying to understand and address.
Being purposeful.
Employers are becoming much more cognisant of these issues. In a tight recruitment market, they in some ways have no choice. Employers know they must do everything within their power to keep existing employees happy and productive.
More employers than ever are running regular employee sentiment surveys to gauge wellbeing and mindset. While anonymised, the aggregate views offer considerable insight and evidence of whether employers are getting it right when it comes to meaningful work.
These results are pushing leaders – and the organisations they work for – to develop new skills and specific initiatives to foster a meaningful work environment for individuals and teams.
However, managers by themselves can only do so much; at some point, they must find ways to relieve employees of boring tasks, so those employees can focus on the things that excite them most.
Exciting areas are often emerging areas with high-growth potential. While it makes sense for employers to point employees in these kinds of future-facing directions, take a look and see if automation can also shine in your business.
How much of an employee’s role can be automated will need to be determined on a case-by-case basis, though some estimates indicate the automatable portion to be significant.
McKinsey, for example, estimates “that 25–46% of current work activities in Australia could be automated by 2030.” It goes on to say that “as automation technologies integrate into the workforce, the mix of skills required in all jobs will shift. For example, people will spend over 60% more time using technological skills.”
These are not insignificant percentages and it offers significant time savings that are possible from automating uninteresting parts of current roles. Employers often talk about the benefits of achieving single-digit productivity improvements. High double-digit savings produced by automation promise to free up and create a time dividend that may be unimaginable today.
What organisations do with that time dividend is the million-dollar question, but there are a lot of meaningful options. It could be reinvested in training and developing the careers and skills of individuals, opening them to new opportunities. It could allow the creation of a Google-like 20% rule, giving employees time to work on pet projects that could wind up as winning products.
It could be time that gets given back to employees in the form of better work-life balance. The options are endless, but all of these things can increase job satisfaction, employee engagement and loyalty.
All of which is definitely worth striving for. Are you ready and willing to automate in 2023?
Business process automation is a long-term strategy. In a short 30-minute discussion, we’ll assess where you are on your journey and identify the key areas for automation in your business that will streamline processes, drive efficiencies and improve profitability.
A study by Forrester found employees “waste an average of 12.5 hours per week on manual and repetitive tasks because of outdated solutions and practices”, costing an organisation of 100 employees $2.7 million a year.
Achieving effective Intelligent Business Practices can seem like a somewhat daunting task. Being unsure where to start, the tools to use, and what benefits to expect, can result in everything remaining in the ‘too hard’ basket.
