New research* has revealed that delays to automation in the workplace are having a negative impact on employee morale and efficiency.

The research, was carried out across five global  markets including Europe, US, Asia, and targeted employees at management level and above.

Since the start of the pandemic, the research overwhelmingly suggests that professionals feel they have a higher volume of work to complete, that their work is much more complex, and that they are having to juggle changing work locations, all of which is putting added pressures onto the global workforce.

The 2023 Future of Work Playbook also revealed that more than half of workers (53%) have had to recruit and upskill their teams, almost half (49%) are struggling with their workload and crucially, 42% are bogged down with manual work.

At the same time, technology is growing at a rapid pace, but employees are not yet feeling the benefits of this in their everyday work. Hays recently found that cyber is growing at 15%, RPA is growing at 25% and AI is growing at 37.5%, suggesting that despite living through the greatest technology evolution in history, many businesses are not working as smart or efficiently as they could be to improve productivity.

James Hall, CEO of Enate said: “Until now, there’s been a view that if you have a problem with your operations, you can fix it with disparate bits of automation like a robot. This isn’t always the case, and often nobody has visibility of what’s going on end to end.”

“There is a clear call for more businesses to build their understanding of Process orchestration. Orchestration isn’t based on removing headcount, it’s based on optimising and organising processes, wasting less time and enabling humans to do value add work on a clean and concise interface. These factors will surely contribute to a happier, more engaged and more productive workforce.”

Despite the evolution of the workplace over recent years, methods of tracking work completion has remained largely manual. Only 1 in 5 employees have one system in place that will give them status updates. As a result, half of those surveyed are wasting time pulling reports from multiple systems, which is unproductive and can be very costly.

What’s more, 33% of infrastructure and operations leaders cite productivity as a key automation goal for 2023, and yet there is a clear disconnect across the board when it comes to productivity levels and the automation tools required. Greater automation means more self-service for all. This supports managers in controlling their processes, reducing manual work and boosting productivity.

*Research from Enate – Enate’s 2023 Future of Work Playbook