Importance of Workflow Automation and No-Code in Managing a Remote Workforce – Toolbox

Over the past year, weve witnessed businesses accelerate digital adoption by leveraging a vast scope of technologies, such as eSignature, no-code, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and more. Simultaneously, for many organizations, the perception of hybrid/remote work has changed from being a workaround for the conditions created by COVID-19 to a full-fledged mode of operation. In this article, Borya Shahknovich, CEO, airSlate, discusses the importance of no-code and workflow automation in this scenario.

As the number of remote work offerings is steadily increasing, creating an even higher demand for digital collaboration, its safe to say that the hybrid/remote work trend will continue into 2022 and beyond. According to Gartner, 31% of all workers worldwide will be hybrid or fully remote in 2022. The U.S. is projected to harness the trend, with remote workers reaching 53% of the total workforce. It is evident that businesses must leverage an effective system for work collaboration to ensure better visibility and accountability. In fact, 50% of U.S. businesses are interested in implementing workflow collaboration tools in 2022, according to a recent airSlate survey. The elimination of paper-based workflows and the automation of mundane, repetitive tasks are among the challenges that businesses must address to elevate workforce productivity.

Understanding the importance of workflow automation technology in managing a remote workforce and its benefits to remote collaboration and human resources is crucial for business owners and leadership teams.

The COVID-19 crisis resulted in mass layoffs, leading to HR departments experiencing a tremendous overload of manual, paper-based processes. Instead of tackling more strategic work, like recruiting, onboarding, and developing company culture, most HR departments found themselves bogged down with the back-and-forth paper-pushing required to offboard employees. This comes as no surprise since, according to research, a typical HR department dedicates up to 60% of its time and resources to transactional and operational tasks. That is approximately 24 of the 40-hour workweek spent executing repetitive manual processes.

Whenever HR professionals feel overwhelmed with inefficient processes, the employee experience suffers too. A remote onboarding process can turn into a time-consuming ordeal because of the back-and-forth document exchange via email or messenger, as well as the ample room for errors and delays. This cumbersome process impacts the employees first impression of a company, not in a good way. Businesses can avoid this by streamlining their remote onboarding processes via a workflow automation platform that automates sending, eSigning, and sharing documents between all involved parties and populates documents and forms with employee data. The streamlined and simple processes can and do positively impact an employees overall experience. Reliance on manual processes in HR also often leads to errors, data loss, delays across the business, and, as a result, the loss of time and money. The typical list of burdensome HR processes includes hiring, onboarding, and offboarding, performance reviews, leave requests processing, benefits enrollment, and, as of recently, COVID-19 vaccination status updates. These processes can be automated using no-code bots and integrations with productivity apps to make remote collaboration more efficient and cost-effective.

Adopting workflow automation solutions in HR has proven to eliminate human error, cut operational expenses, bridge process gaps for remote work, enhance productivity, elevate employee experience, and finally, improve margins. Research indicates that simplifying and/or automating HR processes could elevate human resources efficiency by 20 to 30%. As a result of leveraging these solutions, HR departments can focus on finding and attracting new talent and fostering human-oriented initiatives, such as hiring, retaining, and upskilling the workforce with digital skills.

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With digital adoption on the rise, businesses are looking to motivate their employees to advance their digital skills, and workflow automation and no-code tools are a great way to do so. Employees can explore and learn about the capabilities of these automation tools while also helping to solve pressing business issues, like the lack of software developers, the need for new business apps, limited resources, and the loss of productivity.No-code technology democratizes software development by making development tools accessible to individuals with little-to-no technical training both in-office and remotely. These citizen developers are essentially business users without technical backgrounds who can build apps to streamline business processes and automate workflows. These could be business analysts, project managers, or system administrators capable of optimizing their typical workflow with macros, a spreadsheet data model, CRM integration, automated reporting, or even eSignature. Leadership teams and CIOs prioritizing workflow automation only stand to benefit from fostering citizen development initiatives like upskilling/reskilling programs in their organization and the use of no-code solutions.

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Despite modern no-code tools being quite universal, businesses need to have a clear understanding of what no-code can do for them and what it cant. No-code tools are not meant to help businesses create a product, so if youre trying to build, for example, a complex platform for online booking, you should look elsewhere. No-code tools are meant to help you easily address specific business issues without involving your IT team.

No-code tools enable citizen developers to create certain repeatable functions without writing code. That means they can tackle automating mundane tasks such as data entry, importing and exporting, or data processing and mapping with little effort. Lets say you want to automate the process of data export from one document to another. A no-code tool with a drag-and-drop interface allows you to configure the process of taking data from, say, a Google Spreadsheet and transferring it into a CRM system like Salesforce. This process of data export is governed by bots, so after the automation is set up, little human involvement is required.Before the emergence of no-code, critical business processes were handled manually. Now, automation is giving companies back time and resources to devote to what technology cant quite do: think creatively. Employees have more bandwidth to brainstorm solutions to key business issues and see strategic initiatives out. With the range of issues companies are facing because of COVID-19, the more space for creative collaboration they can create, the better.We are seeing the number of active no-code developers rapidly growing at large enterprises. It is projected that, by 2023, they will exceed the number of professional developers by up to four times. Business opportunities lie in automating repetitive business processes to maximize creative thinking from talented employees and, ultimately, boost your bottom line. How are you using workflow automation and no-code tools in the era of remote/hybrid work? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Importance of Workflow Automation and No-Code in Managing a Remote Workforce - Toolbox