Lay off the layoffs: The distinct reason people will always have a place at organizations, even as robots take over the front lines
As organizations navigate the global shift towards big data and the adoption of advanced technologies, a more personal – but no less valuable – consideration remains: What role will human capital play in the future of business?
TECHNOLOGY IS FORCING organizations to rethink the way they leverage their human workforce, and the pandemic is accelerating the rate at which this is happening.
The aviation industry is a prime example of this. Because of the pandemic, many airlines have eliminated people from transactional functions. Check-ins at the airport are facilitated by a machine. Biometric readers confirm that each passenger's temperature falls within an acceptable range. Facial recognition cameras ensure the person waiting to get on the plane is the same person whose passport is tied to the ticket. Passengers are required to verify COVID test results and complete pre-travel surveys on an app. And the flight takes off.
No human contact required.
But does this mean that doomsayers are right? Will machines take over the roles that humans once occupied, leaving much of the workforce unemployed and unneeded?
Absolutely not.
Yes, we will continue to see new technologies adopted at an increasingly rapid rate. And yes, we can expect to see machines replace humans in roles that can be automated. But fear not: technology, no matter how advanced, will not eliminate the need for humans in business. In fact, the increased adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies will make room for people to contribute more meaningfully to the success of their organizations.
It all starts with a question: Release or repurpose?
As we transition to a post-pandemic future, organizations across all industries must carefully consider how to move people from purely overhead roles into positions where they'll add value in ways that machines cannot. When deciding whether a role should be automated, it's important to ensure the right questions are being asked: What's the distinctive value this role adds? Does it require critical thinking? Can an individual add value to it in ways that a machine cannot? If yes, that role should be maintained.
If not, look for ways to automate that role and move that individual to another more meaningful position. If a role can be automated to eliminate or mitigate a risk while cutting costs, consider how the individual who used to perform that function can be repurposed within the organization in a way that will add more value than their former position ever could. By starting with this approach, companies can retain years of experience and use it to drive valuable results.
A new purpose for people: Eradicating failures
We all experience failures in our day-to-day lives: failure to stop at an intersection, failure to post the correct hours of operation on a website, failure to remember if someone is allergic to nuts, or even failure of the GPS to take you to the right address. The results of such failures can vary greatly. Sometimes there are no repercussions at all, and other times these failures can lead to significant and even tragic consequences.
The same applies to failures in business. Failures in data, failures in processes, or failures in people (i.e. human error) each have the potential to result in inconvenience, disaster or physical damage of catastrophic proportions. Eradicating such failures, however, creates perhaps one of the greatest opportunities to repurpose workers.
If all or some of a person's job can be automated, it's probably worthwhile to do so. But rather than automating a position and then moving directly into “layoff mode”, consider first how that individual might add value elsewhere within the organization. One potential solution in this type of scenario is to provide these people with training that will allow them to qualitatively review data and teach linear regression algorithms what failures in the data look like in order to support their eradication – a bold and often misunderstood proposition.
Having a human focus on such a qualitative activity (which machine-learning algorithms absolutely require to produce a valid output) evidently enables an organization to make decisions based on verified facts. By focusing on eradicating failures, the employee will be adding qualitative value to the back end of the business and supporting effective decision making by leadership.
Starting the process
The first step here is to determine if the task or process in question has been completed and, if so, how well it has been completed. By monitoring a process at every possible stage, ideally through automation, it's possible to identify points of failure and subsequently take action to reduce, if not eliminate, the frequency of those failures.
This is where humans will lead the charge in improving the way business is done.
Let's look again at the example of airlines who have automated much of the experience of arriving at an airport and boarding a flight – this time through the lens of using humans in harmony with automation to eradicate failures in the process.
If a flight has a total of 232 passengers, 230 of whom successfully board a plane without the help of a human at any point along the way, the next step will be to examine why there are two passengers who have not successfully boarded the plane through the automated process. Perhaps they don't have a smartphone, or the information they submitted via an app or check-in machine was incorrect. Whatever the cause, it is then up to the human employees, not the machines, to determine what the problem is and how to solve it.
Energy should be focused not on the 230 passengers who successfully boarded the plane but on the two exceptions where the process experienced failure. The goal is to target a 100% rate of success every time.
Rinse and repeat
Checking the process is fundamental, and this is one way that organizations can repurpose employees who are doing work that can be automated. These people should be focused on eradicating failures: responding to outliers resulting from automated processes, establishing ways to overcome these issues, and building these solutions into the automated processes so that they do not happen again.
Once a solution to the boarding issue has effectively been incorporated into the automated process, the next step is to look at other processes and outliers. Perhaps the airline's data indicates that one passenger lost their luggage on this flight. The airline should assign a human worker to identify why the passenger's luggage was lost and implement a solution to ensure that if a passenger were to lose their luggage on another flight, it will certainly not be for the same reason. Continue to monitor for outliers and ensure the process incorporates a solution for each new problem. Then move on to the next process: How many airplanes didn't leave on time? And so on.
Arguably, this is how NASCAR pit-stop times went down from many minutes to mere seconds, and how the reliability of the race cars themselves progressed from awful to nearly flawless. As former NASCAR crew chief Andy Petree tells it, "[...] you can't believe the things that we could identify and work on and get better, watching the process. We would review these stops every week [..] and I think that's when it really started."
The concept of continuous improvement through the elimination of failure isn't new, but its application in a business setting is not always recognized by most organizations for what it is: the key to improved efficiency and growth.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
In short, humans will continue to play a vital role in the success of organizations throughout Canada and the world. The adoption of Industry 4.0 will not eradicate the need for humans; rather, an organization's ability to find value-added roles for their people will determine their success (or lack thereof) in a post-pandemic future. Realizing the value of an employee's experience and skillset and refocusing their abilities on a more consequential task will ensure businesses effectively capture the potential of their workforce rather than disposing of it prematurely. And there are certainly countless ways for organizations to reintegrate human capital, the qualitative eradication of failures being just one of many potential strategies to consider.
So where do business leaders go from here? Starting with reliable data is key. Ensure you're making moves based on timely, accurate, unbiased information so you can take steps in the right direction and monitor the results of any changes that are ultimately implemented. Many organizations find it worthwhile to bring in a partner that specializes in digitalization, business intelligence, and change management so that nothing gets overlooked and any pre-existing internal biases that could unknowingly taint results are kept in check. It's essential that any partner you choose to engage with has expertise across all three of these areas in order to maintain a holistic approach and ensure your vision remains central to any organizational changes that may be instigated.
A growing number of organizations are sitting on a wealth of overlooked, undervalued, and largely untapped resources, be they people or data. Understanding those resources and applying data-driven modifications to people and processes is the best way for any business to improve functionality, amplify growth, and achieve excellence in a dynamic economy.
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This article first appeared on Canadian Industry Online and was co-authored by Norm Poytner, Luniko Partner & Asset Management Expert.
