How Gen2 RPA Helps Companies Get Through the Great Resignation

Key takeaways

• In March 2022 there were 11.5 million job openings – an increase from 11.3 million M/M – and a record high. There are nearly 2 job openings for every unemployed person. Surveys reveal no signs of slowing down.
• Employees want jobs that offer meaningful purpose and flexibility – not transactional tasks.
• Resignations create challenges for companies – high employee replacement costs – double digit compensation increases – worker burnout – and service disruptions.
• Gen2 robotic process automation (RPA) is a transformative tool that helps companies automate mundane tasks with digital workers and promotes employee retention by shifting focus towards more rewarding work. Gen2 RPA also improves service delivery, turnaround times, and accuracy.

Job openings and quits hit record levels

Just as some pundits thought that job resignations would slow down, a recent U.S. Labor Department report points to a different trend. In March 2022 there were 11.5 million job openings – which is an increase from 11.3 million in February – and a record high. More than 4.5 million employees voluntarily quit their jobs - many from the professional and business services sectors. 

It’s estimated there are nearly 2 job openings for every unemployed person. This trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing either. According to Microsoft’s Annual Work Trend Index Report, 52% of Gen Z and Millennials are likely to consider changing employers this year, up 3% year-over-year. 

Why are employees quitting?

People just aren’t the same as they were when they started working from home in early 2020 amid Covid restrictions. Their collective experience has fundamentally changed the way they define the role of work in their lives, according to the Microsoft report. Employees simply ask themselves, “is this job worth it?”. 

McKinsey found that employees don’t simply want a job; they want a meaningful purpose – with meaningful interactions – that’s not just transactional in nature. They want flexibility and the freedom to manage their schedules and workloads – from home in many cases. 

Employees are prioritizing mental and physical well-being over traditional incentive schemes. They want less meetings and the ability to turn off. Digital exhaustion and meaningless transactional work are top reasons for resignations. These findings are also echoed in the Microsoft survey. 

The Great Resignation creates challenges for companies

Companies find it harder and harder to find and retain employees and deliver on their customer, supplier, and investor commitments. It’s also burning out employees who choose to stay due to massively increased workloads and scheduling demands. 

Pay and benefits are increasing at a record pace – by double digits in some cases according to WSJ. According to SHRM, it costs on average 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace them. If an employee makes $60,000 per year, that comes to $30,000 - $45,000 in recruiting and onboarding costs.

Now is the time for companies to pivot and drive sustainable growth

Companies can retain employees if they can give them a purpose in their work – flexibility in their schedule - and avoid stagnation and boredom. 

Employers must embrace a digital-first workforce that focuses on their employees’ strengths and assigns repetitive and mundane tasks to automation technologies. Doing so gives companies an edge in the race to attract, develop, and retain the talent they need to build thriving organizations.

How Gen2 RPA can help companies get through the Great Resignation

Traditional, or Gen1 Robotic Process Automation (RPA), uses software “bots” to automate repetitive tasks, rule-based tasks, and complex processes without altering existing systems. 

Gen2 RPA is the next generation of automation that lets companies automate virtually any business process you can think of, across any set of systems – with an army of digital workers - without the technical and licensing constraints of traditional Gen1 RPA solutions. 

Win-win for companies and employees alike

Gen2 RPA assigns monotonous work to digital workers in order to boost employee satisfaction and gives them an opportunity to focus on more analytical tasks instead.

This reduces attrition rates and the steep costs associated with replacing employees. It also dramatically increases companies’ capacity to deliver services to customers and other stakeholders quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

Common Gen2 RPA use cases that drive uncommon change

Here’s just a few of the business processes you can automate with a digital workforce. A more exhaustive list of automation use cases can be found by clicking here. 

Accounting & Finance

• Month-end reporting - At the end of every month, you can automatically log into your platforms, generate reports, export data to spreadsheets, and even validate the data for accurate and compliant reporting.
• Payroll - From employee timesheets and approvals to calculating holiday pay and scheduling the bank draft, the number of steps involved with payroll may seem endless. From now on, let the robots handle it
• Expense reporting - Automate the process of logging expenses, attaching corresponding receipts to each expense entry, and checking the expense and receipt logs to verify that no mistake has been made.
• Accounts payable + Invoice Processing - Instead of logging invoices by hand, you can automate the process of extracting relevant data from emails, log in to vendor applications, retrieve invoice information, and enter data into your own accounting software.

Information Technology (IT)

• Connecting mainframes - Even today, mainframes power many important business functions and are a central part of infrastructure in companies, but their legacy nature can make them difficult to manage.
• Master data administration - Organizations are dealing with more data than they ever have. Automating data transfers between systems can connect legacy systems and make transferring data between platforms seamless and secure.
• Data backups & restorations - These processes can be fully automated by providing employees with the required credentials, as well as source and destination details for the whole data backup or restoration task to be automated.

Human Resources

• Talent acquisition - When a candidate applies to a role in your applicant tracking system, automation can send the data where it needs to go. Used rules-based triggers to alert staff, communicate with the applicant, or start an onboarding workflow when a candidate becomes an employee.
• Employee onboarding - When a new employee starts, multiple systems need to be updated. Automation reduces the time it takes for key onboarding activities by more than 80% while increasing the accuracy of data entry.
• Employee data management - HR departments are inundated with data on current and past employees, contractors, and interns - often across various office locations and business units. Automation helps manage this data and keeps systems updated across your technology landscape.
• Benefits administration - When an employee has a change of address, adds a spouse or dependent, or has another life event, your HR team can automate this process and improve the employee experience.

Customer Service

• Update CRM - Businesses rely on CRMs to maintain an accurate database of customer information and communications. Automatically update your CRM with relevant data, from call logs to e-commerce orders, and everything in between.
• Email routing - From parsing emails to ticket creation, and record attachment, automate the triaging and routing of your incoming emails. Your team will get to the emails faster and offer more targeted responses.
• Call center management - Pull customer information into a single place and do any required manipulation for the call center staff, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer.
• Support tickets - From processing new incoming tickets to triggering alerts and communications to customers – automating your support processes saves your staff time and enhances the customer experience.

Conclusion

Giving your employees purpose and flexibility will help them thrive and drive long-term sustainable growth for your company. Gen2 RPA is a significant contributor to driving this transformative change. 

Robocorp offers second generation open-source development tools and cloud-native orchestration wrapped in consumption-based pricing to run your most complex and mission-critical business processes - without worrying about downtime and cost overruns.