How to create an automation-friendly culture
- March 4, 2022
Automation has changed the way we communicate and collaborate and – surprise! – it’s here to stay. It represents the alliance of technology with the daily and repetitive activities of a company.
The creation and promotion of positive company culture is increasingly becoming a priority for companies. Your Company Culture represents the mood in which people get out of bed in the morning. It is the environment that people live in on a daily basis, it is the values, customs, and traditions they practice, it is the motivation people have to do their job well. It is the connections that exist between team members. It’s much more than a set of printed and posted statements.
You’re probably wondering how automation and culture are related. Not only are they related, but implementing automation will likely fail if you don’t have a strong culture to support it. I’ll explain it all.
Automation is here to stay
“With the pandemic, 57% of companies say they have made changes and adaptations to their culture.” Says Mike Sharkey in an article published for Meta.
And that’s just the way it is. The pandemic has accelerated the inevitable. Companies have begun to reassess their priorities and show a willingness and intention to promote workplaces where employees feel good, safe, included, inspired, and productive. Physical workplaces themselves have undergone a transformation, which, although it was predictable, was driven by the pandemic. Businesses are adapting, faster than ever before, to a remote future. All of these factors impact the culture that develops.
As a result of this evolution, technology and automation increasingly play a crucial role in business.
This is where automation and a company’s culture intersect. For the successful introduction of automation in companies, it is crucial that all team members embrace it as part of their own culture.
Contrary to popular belief, automation is not there to replace people and human jobs. On the contrary, it complements and facilitates that work, and its good functioning depends on people’s work.
Automation can be many things, but it is based on the creation of processes, avoiding that employees have to do boring and repetitive tasks, being able to impute those efforts to creative and complex tasks and jobs, which cannot be done by robots.
For these processes to be well created and implemented, there needs to be alignment and acceptance throughout the company.
Unfortunately, it is often the case that people in an organization do not welcome automation and Artificial Intelligence with open arms, whether it is for fear of losing their positions, resistance to change, or difficulty in understanding. For this reason, creating, implementing, and nurturing an Automation First Culture is crucial. It is important to explain and show the benefits of developing these processes, and thus showing that these tools serve to enhance work and human skills and nurture a culture of support and encouragement as these disruptive technologies are implemented.
Advantages of Automation
What are the advantages of Automation anyway?
Firstly, the employees will have more time to perform their duties and complete more complex and important assignments, as routine and tedious tasks become the work of automation.
By having those tasks completed by automation, decreasing human errors, and having employees more time to invest in other tasks, the quality of work will increase. In addition, the critical things will be developed and paid attention to more frequently.
On the other hand, processes carried out by automation become traceable, repeatable, and more independent of specific people. It means that if an employee takes a holiday or has to be absent due to illness or another reason, the processes for which he or she was responsible continue to function normally.
Related article: 10 Ways to Save Time and Money with Marketing Automation
What is an "Automation Culture"?
Automation Culture is one where there is no friction between people and technology, and where they work hand in hand.
The Automation First Culture arises to enable teams to deliver work. To achieve this culture, it is necessary to design work schemes, in all teams, performed simultaneously by humans and machines.
While its implementation is challenging, in today’s competitive and dynamic world, businesses must act and respond quickly, through rigorous and repeatable processes, ready to be implemented and used.
The role of this Culture is to bring automation tools together and build processes and workflows. Since the foundation of any organization is people, their value cannot be underestimated in the adoption of this type of culture.
When implemented well, Automation plays a huge role in the smooth running and success of an organization.
The nuances of human knowledge and experience are inherent to each specific individual – this means that throughout your organization you have a lot of historical information and interactions that can be easily lost. For this reason, documentation and knowledge sharing represent crucial mitigators and repositories of insight. In addition, automation contributes to the preparation and mitigation of failures.
How to bring a Culture of Automation into the Company?
For Automation Culture to be well accepted and implemented in your company, it is important that:
- There is transparent communication with employees
- Employees are and feel heard
- Employers adapt and connect with their employees.
But, after all, how should this implementation be done? Here you have 5 practices that you should follow so that your company adopts Automation First:
- Change in Mindset: Show your employees the benefits of automation, explain to them why there is no need to be afraid. Automation means augmentation, not replacement. By promoting this mindset, you are moving to a place where technology implementations are part of an empathetic, people-centered change management program.
- Commitment through leadership: Leaders lead by example. The more committed they are to automation, the more they will prioritize its acceleration.
- Bridging the gap between IT and business stakeholders: stakeholder perspectives are crucial and cannot be replaced. Therefore, they must be part of the automation process
- Raising awareness and building enthusiasm: the greater the promotion of tangible results, the more enthusiasm the teams will show in adopting automation. It is important that each team knows how automation will benefit them.
- Learning as a Continuous Goal: a continuous learning system is the only way to maintain the necessary speed to meet the needs of the age of automation. This system involves documenting new knowledge as people acquire it. Good documentation helps companies avoid duplication of work and increase the speed of future process automation.
Examples of Automation
These are some of the most common examples of automation in Marketing:
- Email Marketing – For example, sending an automated Welcome email when the customer registers on the website or app.
- Creation of forms: with automation, it is possible to insert contact forms at different stages of the purchase, to get more specific data about the interested parties.
- Creation of CTAs or calls to action
- Flow Automation – For example, scheduling a series of emails to send to a lead, with content related to what they have shown interest in and/or with important reminders.
- Database Segmentation – by creating a set of rules, segmentation can be performed automatically.
- Lead Scoring – The automation allows you to create rules in order to automate the Quality Rating of the Leads, based on the actions they take, allowing you to send appropriate content.
- CRM Integration
- Social Networks – Makes it possible to automate and schedule posts in the different social networks.
- Reporting and follow-up – It is possible to receive automatic reminders to, for example, contact a customer with whom you haven’t spoken for some time.
