Читать книгу The Digital Transformation of Logistics - Группа авторов - Страница 97

Whenever the prospect of automating tasks is brought into a business, concerns will arise among employees that they could potentially be laid off after being replaced by automation. Any company hoping to adopt RPA will likely have to deal with these concerns. How this is handled is extremely important since employee onboarding is a necessity for RPA to be successful. Opus Capital is a venture capital firm that manages over $1 billion in assets and was able to successfully implement RPA to handle the processing of new employee relationships and changes in employee payment details (Hallikainen et al. 2018). As news of RPA implementation moved through the payroll department, concerns grew among the employees. One employee stated, “Yes, I had these thoughts that … a robot is coming here to sit down there and do the typing, and then I would lose my job” (Hallikainen et al. 2018). The supervisors of the pilot dealt with these concerns by emphasizing to the employees that these bots were not meant to be replacements. Their functionality is limited to repetitive tasks, and there is still a great need in the organization for human workers who are better equipped to deal with cognitive tasks due to their adaptability which the bots lack. The supervisors framed RPA adoption as a way to free up employees from repetitive tasks. A supervisor at Opus Capital was quoted saying “[The robot] will free time for other type of work [by humans] that a robot could not do … it will [therefore] bring a positive change to everyone's workload” (Hallikainen et al. 2018). In addition to making this clear early in the process, it is also important to try to get employees involved in learning about the technology so they can be advocates themselves.

The abovementioned is a best‐case scenario as there is always the possibility that some workers, whose jobs are entirely replaceable by the RPA bots, will no longer be needed. In a case study done by the KTH Institute of Technology, it was found that 13% of the clients of RPA providers laid off employees as a direct result of RPA implementation and another 13% offered retirement to some workers during the adoption process (Sandholm 2019). In addition to layoffs and retirement, 19% of these companies slowed their recruitment initiatives after adoption (Sandholm 2019). In an ideal world, RPA would not lead to any kind of reduction in full‐time employees, which also is typically the case. However, it is undeniable that for certain positions, RPA will lead to layoffs and repurposing of staff. Employee concerns thus seem somewhat justified, but it must be kept in mind that if an RPA bot can replace them, their job could be anyways outsourced to a BPO center.

As a company goes through a digital transformation, assessment of staff is critical. Staff with the technical skill to work with RPA or staff with analytical, critical thinking, or creativity skills should be identified early in the process to avoid talent waste. It is advised that senior management and human resources align with RPA project leaders to identify the potential risks of the project and come up with the right messages for the workforce. Finding a balance of what information to share and when to share it could mean the difference in retaining key staff.