With an ever-increasing battle in the labor market to find personnel, automation is often sought as a solution. At the same time, technology continues to advance, with ChatGPT being the most recent example. So, how do you differentiate your company? And what skills do you need to sustainably embrace automation? Is it simply training your employees in a newly chosen software solution, or is there more to it?

Training employees

In practice, IT skills are often associated with how well you know a particular program. Can you create formulas in Excel, do you know how to generate reports in your ERP, are you able to independently solve minor problems on your own device? In many organizations, this already qualifies you as reasonably technical. The focus on digitization quickly centers around understanding specific applications, and a lot of training is dedicated to this. Sometimes it leads to significant productivity gains, but often it also brings frustration. Employees become frustrated, and this can often demotivate them. The feedback is often that it is not directly applicable to their daily work: “I’m already doing my job well, why do I need to learn this?” The focus is task-driven. Can the employee learn a more complex task within an application?

But is this effective? Are these the skills that need to be learned if the organization’s goals involve increasing automation? Will it make the employee’s work better?

Assuming that the employee is already competent in performing their work, we assume that they can work in a task-driven manner to a reasonable extent. Therefore, teaching tasks within an application is not the primary issue. It can be learned or made easier. Take someone who handles financial administration, for example. They might be a financial wizard, very accurate, but not digitally proficient. With work instructions, training, and sufficient guidance, it is possible to have these employees work in new systems.

What is needed

However, by performing tasks in different applications, the organization has not become digitally adept. With the increase of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (e.g., ChatGPT,…), simply executing tasks becomes less of a core activity. Let’s take financial administration as an example: even in freely accessible accounting software like Moneybird, many automations are already available, which were quite expensive ten years ago. Scanning receipts and automatically linking them to transactions? A piece of cake. This work will not completely disappear for the time being, but it will no longer differentiate you.

The differentiating factor for your organization and employees is increasingly about creative work. With these tools becoming more accessible and affordable, quickly finding applications within the organization where differentiation can be found is crucial. The low-hanging fruit will be found faster. However, the more employees actively think about this throughout the organization, and the more individuals are capable of implementing it, the greater the potential gain.

These skills mainly revolve around understanding their work:

• Identify the steps in your work.
• Identify common steps across different processes.
• Identify the information required at different steps and its source.
• Find the cause of data inconsistencies and suggest improvements.

Other useful aspects relate to organizing work and behavior:

• Learn to divide your work into the smallest possible components and communicate about them transparently.
• Improve planning and become more predictable in delivering results.
• Be proactive in reporting repetitive tasks.

The above areas greatly assist in digitalizing a process and communicating with a developer who implements automation.

A practical approach

But how can you ensure that your employees can practically implement these skills? How do you incorporate them into the 2023 goals? We will delve further into these questions in the next blog post!

In the meantime, if you’re curious about how to apply this specifically to your company and need assistance with this transformation, feel free to contact us!