Preventing Employee Burnout Through Intelligent Automation

Remote work, which was once considered inefficient and regarded more as an exception than a rule, has become a reality for most of us. Organizations have come to rely on technology to provide the flexible and seamless working conditions essential for maintaining productivity across the ever-evolving model of operations. Technology has been the saving grace for organizations to get to this point but, in order to get here they kept non-technological challenges in the back burner.

One of the biggest hurdles that emerged from the pandemic was remote working in a demanding, stress-ridden environment. This was characterized by tighter deadlines, longer hours, information overload, and a blurring of lines regarding when it comes to work-life balance. An estimated 46% of workers feel more prone to extreme levels of stress than they did in March 2020, according to a 2021 YouGov survey.

As a result, employee burnout today is real and rising. An outcome of chronic, under-managed work-related stress, burnout was recognized as an occupational phenomenon by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019. Those suffering from it tend to feel exhausted, demotivated, negative, and even cynical about their work, often becoming error-prone, stagnant and less productive as a result. If left unattended, burnout can impact both individuals and the business in the long term. Therefore, organizations must pause, rethink, and act with a greater sense of urgency and understanding to cull this out of their employee’s workplace journey.

A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Burnout

While humanizing employee engagement policies can be the starting point, quick fixes like allocating personal time off and mental health days etc will not be enough. For example, disconnected processes or lengthy manual tasks can be tedious and frustrating if they are not aligned with the employee’s core competencies, interests, or aspirations. Using data-based insights intelligently to understand the precursors of stress causing burnout is important.

To equip employees with the tools and resources they need now and in the future, organisations must be ready to adopt technology in ways that unlock myriad benefits for business while enabling employees to work faster, better, and easier. Simply replacing humans with automation tools is not an effective way to achieve this since it may not fully eliminate the need for human intervention and will instead increase anxiety and job insecurity among employees.

Rather, a strategic approach of estimating future workplace demands and using data-based insights to plan workflows or components can help garner optimum benefits through digitization and automation as well as unleashing employees’ full potential.

Intelligent Automation to Maximize Employee Potential

As new technology emerges, it’s important to think about how it can be used to ease the burden on employees’ working lives and make business more productive. Effective implementation will also

require a major shift in the employer’s approach to understanding and engaging employees better, before executing the changes through technology adoption.

For instance, recent research reveals how the use of workflow automation for tedious and voluminous activities can help ease the burden on employees, humanize the workplace, and keep professional stress in check. As reported by Verint, 64% of employees believe that automation helps reduce workload and stress.

Human and machine interactions can be enabled through automation and a well-knit cloud-based platform. Bots or digital assistants can execute high-volume, mundane, yet urgent and immediate tasks based on a set of instructions. This allows employees to focus on more meaningful activities that require cognitive thinking and decisions, establishing a complementary relationship between humans and their digital counterparts. They will build a cohesive, well-oiled system that will optimize end-to-end business actions and operations and maintain high productivity standards. This helps employees to complete tasks faster and more efficiently and free up time to participate in strategic planning and work on expanding their creativity, skillset, interests and their interpersonal relationships, which is another stress factor in the workplace.

Using automation strategically to address the most stressful aspects of the modern workplace can prove doubly beneficial by reducing overall operating costs. By helping ease burnout, intelligent automation can help enhance employees’ sense of belonging, and their ability to befriend technology and work collaboratively in a remote environment. In turn, this will help lay a solid framework for a future-ready workforce and ensure sustainable growth for the business.

(The article has been penned down by Deepak Visweswaraiah, Vice President, Platform Engineering and Site Managing Director, Pegasystems solely for BW People publication.)