The Problem

By way of background, I spent four years as a full-time faculty member at a large public university in the United States. I taught a bunch of technology- and analytics-related courses in the school’s Department of Information Systems (IS). Brass tacks: if there was any department within the university that should have embraced automation, it was mine.

Sadly, however, the IS department — and the entire university, for that matter — largely relied on manual processes when automated ones existed. Here are a couple examples to illustrate my point.

Inefficient Process #1

First, every professor had to fill out mid-semester student academic status reports (ASRs). The rationale here was straightforward: to formally document the progress of students and allow for corrective action. That way, a student couldn’t say, “Professor! I had absolutely no idea that I was failing your class.”

To call the process inefficient would be the epitome of an understatement. Professors needed to do the following:

• Download all student grades from the Canvas — the school’s learning-management system (LMS).
• Launch a separate website where they needed to manually input students’ ASRs and recommended corrective actions. 
• Routinely hit the save and next buttons because the web app only displayed 30 students.

Professors with hundreds of students could expect to spend a minimum of three hours completing this manual process. If you think that this process was prone to error, trust your judgment.

The easier, faster, and safer way would have involved automation via a simple bot. After all, students with A’s could stay the course. Those with D’s and F’s, however, needed to meet with the professor.

Brass tacks: a simple if-then statement meant that professors could spend less time completing low-value manual tasks and more time teaching.

Inefficient Process #2

The second example demonstrates that the first wasn’t unique. Some professors used Slack in lieu of email or Canvas’ messaging functionality. (I was one of them and even wrote Slack For Dummies, but I digress.) Canvas remained the system of record. That is, students didn’t submit their assignments via Slack. Professors didn’t store student grades there. Talk about channel conflict.

Every semester, hundreds of professors created their project teams in Canvas. Although Canvas-to-Slack integrations existed, the school opted not to deploy them. As a result, professors would have to manually create their groups in both systems, unless they wanted to play with Python scripts. (Few professors wanted to invest the time, though.)

Beyond the initial stage of creating a group, a related problem stemmed from group maintenance. That is, when a student dropped a class or transferred into a different section, Canvas would automatically reflect the change — but Slack would not. Again, this forced the professor to manually alter Slack groups. (To be fair, my ex-employer was hardly unique; plenty of other universities face similar problems.)

Simon Says: retire manual business processes once and for all

If you think that a single employee wasting time every week doesn’t matter, allow me to politely disagree. Over the course of the semester, it adds up.

Every minute spent copying and pasting means one fewer minute instructing students. #automation #education @philsimon
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Beyond that drawback, think about the overall effect on worker morale. Organizations that persist in using traditionally manual processes implicitly minimize the value of their employees’ time. By way of contrast, progressive institutions identify inefficient business processes and automate them with simple low- and no-code tools. It’s not hard.

About the author

The post Automation in action by Phil Simon appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

Reduce employee multitasking and burnout

It’s no overstatement to say that workers were overwhelmed before Covid-19—never mind now. Consider the results of a 2018 Gallup study¹ of nearly 7,500 full-time employees:

• 23% of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always
• 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes

23% of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes #nocode #automation @airSlate
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Of course, reasons for employee burnout vary. There’s no one culprit. Near the top of many lists, however, is near-constant interruption while on the clock. Cal Newport makes this point in spades in his bestselling book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World².

Now, consider organizations that embrace automation via employing low- and no-code tools—a technique often called robotic process automation. Employees perform fewer manual tasks. They multitask less, stay focused, and are potentially less likely to burn out.

Watch the video below to learn the difference between no-code and low code tools, and find out how to choose a no-code platform for your business:

Reduce manual error

We’re just getting started with the benefits of low- and no-code tools. There are plenty of others. Here’s one of them: employees who constantly toggle back and forth between and among different applications are more likely to make mistakes. I’m talking about the accounts-payable clerk who either:

• Reenters key vendor information from invoices into an ERP system.
• Copies that data from one system and pastes it into another.
• Manually enters data into a spreadsheet.

In all three cases, a significant opportunity exists for massive errors. Perhaps most famously, let’s return to 2003. Electricity power generator company TransAlta lost $24 million because an employee copied and pasted incorrect data in Microsoft Excel³.

All things being equal, companies that embrace automation minimize the risk of these catastrophes.

Improve the work environment

Most countries’ labor laws distinguish between overtime-eligible and -ineligible jobs. The latter typically fall into the management bucket. Employees on annual salaries typically don’t receive any extra compensation from staying late or working on weekends. As such, many organizations lack sufficient incentive to reduce manual work via automation.

This all-too-common scenario is unfortunate. In all of my years, I’ve yet to meet an employee who enjoys manual work.

Organizations that automate manual tasks signal to workforces that management values their time. This can help stem employee disaffection and attrition and reduce employee burnout. #nocode #automation @airSlate
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Improve business processes

A great deal of academic research has shown that automation can vastly improve business processes. Studies abound⁴. At a high level, automating manual business processes can:

• Reduce employee labor costs
• Reduce error rates
• Manifest other areas for improvement.

Instill a culture of constant improvement

Automating discrete business processes can yield significant dividends, but there’s a larger benefit at play here.

I’ll conclude this post by referencing my favorite Japanese word is kaizen. Short for continuous improvement, it represents a mindset that the organization can always do better. Perhaps no organization embodies kaizen more than Amazon. As Brad Stone describes in his books⁵ on the e-commerce juggernaut, Amazon constantly ranks high in customer satisfaction surveys⁶ because its management is committed to doing better.

The Japanese word 'kaizen' means 'continuous improvement', representing a mindset that the organization can always do better. #nocode #automation @airSlate
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About the author

Phil Simon is a recognized technology and collaboration authority. He is the award-winning author of eleven books, most recently Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work. He consults organizations on analytics, communications, strategy, data, and technology. His contributions have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, CNN, The New York Times, and many other prominent media outlets. He also hosts the podcast Conversations About Collaboration.

The post 5 Benefits of Using Low- and No-Code Tools by Phil Simon appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

We may be nearing the end of the world’s greatest WFH experiment, although its effects will last indefinitely. All things considered, workers have more than held their own during these unprecedented times. In fact, productivity increased during the pandemic⁴.

We shouldn’t spend too much time patting ourselves on the back, though.

In truth, we are only scratching the surface of today’s powerful collaboration tools. As I write in my new book Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work, the vast majority of people are using a mere fraction of functionality baked into Slack, Zoom, MS Teams, and other internal collaboration hubs

In this three-part series, I’ll be exploring this topic. I’ll start today by explaining the status quo and why so few companies have adopted a holistic view of collaboration. In the second part, I’ll cover the main benefits of adopting no- and low-code tools. I’ll conclude the series by providing a detailed example of a transformed business process.

Researching my book, it became evident our collective underuse of internal collaboration hubs stems from three main culprits.

Centralized IT Departments

Pick ten mid-sized to large organizations at random. Odds are that at least half of them have centralized their IT departments⁵. To be sure, this  approach offers a number of significant benefits⁶. At the top of the list are:

• Greater compliance
• Potentially lower IT expenditures.
• Reduced chance of shadow IT

Major drawbacks, however, include increased bureaucracy, frustrated employees, and difficulty obtaining contemporary technology.

While not a panacea, a less centralized IT presence may well result in more innovation and better collaboration among employees. As Borya Shakhnovich, the CEO and co-founder, airSlate, writes in Forbes:

It’s a good point, but often change is easier said than done. After all, IT departments have had to deal with unique challenges during this time, including securing home networks from bad actors⁷.High-profile ransomware attacks have only underscored the need for companies to require VPNs and two-factor authentication⁸.

Prioritizing Security and Surveillance Over Collaboration

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Action expresses priorities.”

No, he wasn’t talking about enterprise tech or Covid-19. Still, his words ring true. In the early days of pandemic, plenty of companies opted to invest in surveillance software⁹, not better collaboration tech.

The effects of employee-surveillance applications are decidedly mixed and I’m not going to debate them here. One thing, however, is unequivocally true: By definition, organizations that adopted this approach spent less time and resources on the very tools that would help employees work better together in this new environment.

Watch the video below to learn how to improve teamwork and collaboration at work with airSlate:

Lack of Employee Awareness

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.”

—Hanlon’s razor

Employees frantically navigated the new normal, many of whom while attending to their childrens’ needs. Oh, and relatively few companies invested in proper Slack, Teams, or Zoom training. I could tell you some stories of executives who balked at my own training quotes because they erroneously believed that their employees would master these tools on their own time. Good luck with that.

Brass tacks: Today many if not most employees fail to understand the vast power of their collaboration tools. That is, they use Microsoft Teams or Slack as Email 2.0. Ditto for Zoom as a souped-up version of Skype. In fact, they’re actually internal collaboration hubs to which you can easily connect third-party apps. (I call these spokes in my book.)

For example, I can install the Google Drive app in Slack. When a colleague comments on a Google Doc, I don’t receive an email. I get an in-app notification with the requisite context. As a result, I reduce my cognitive load¹⁰. Think of these hubs as operating systems or digital headquarters in which most of the work takes place regardless of where employees are located.

Another benefit of the Hub-Spoke Model of Collaboration is that you enable automation  via low- and no-code tools, among other benefits. I’ll explore that topic in my next post.

About the author

The post Why We’re Just Scratching the Surface of Today’s Collaboration Tools by Phil Simon appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.