Five best practices for using automation to address employee burnout – Fast Company

Its 8:52 p.m. Exhausted, Beth finally updates the last patient record in her companys electronic health record (EHR) system. She loves her work as a clinical therapist helping patients recover from substance abuse and related issues. She loves the company she works for too, but with the organizations recent growth, its been difficult to find staff to keep up with the demand. As work piles up, Beth is getting burned out.

Though Beth is a fictional character, she is not alone. According to Forbes, during the pandemic, more than 70% of employees reported feeling burned out, and they felt like their employers werent doing enough to address it. Solving this problem is key to maintaining employee engagement and motivation, something both employees and employers value.

To address the problem, it is essential to first understand what causes burnout. Consider this definition from Dr. Alok Kanojia: Burnout is when someone who wants to do a good job and is capable of doing a good job, but theres a system that prevents them from doing it, and then they get exhausted, then they give up.

Unfortunately, most proposed solutions for burnout miss the root of the problem. At best, they address some of the symptoms of burnout with unreliable outcomes, or they put the onus of the solution on employees. However, mental health days and self-care only go so far when an employee knows they will fall further behind with each moment they are away.

Instead, start by addressing the broken systems and processes causing burnout in the first place. Automation technology and process optimization can help you address employee burnout while also improving customer satisfaction, increasing productivity, and lowering costs.

Implementing automation is not a quick fixbut its a powerful one. Here are five best practices to ensure your automation program works for your employees and alleviates burnout.

Automation can be intimidating, so its important to introduce the technology to your employees with a collaborative approach. Demonstrate how the technology can make their jobs easier. Involve employees in identifying which processes to automate. Ultimately, getting full buy-in from employees is key to understanding how processes are really executed in your organizationand how to automate them most effectively.

Big initiatives are often met with resistanceboth from employees and from leadership. Start with a project that impacts a single person or role and make a big deal about how it improved the job. A small investment with clear, measurable results will not only help you win the goodwill of your employees but will also go a long way toward getting key leadership on board with a larger investment.

Employees more readily trust their colleagues than their management. Identify the employees who realize the value of automation first and encourage them to promote the program among their peers.

The main objective of automation is to transfer tedious, mind-numbing work from employees to digital assistants. This frees up your employees to do more meaningful and valuable work. For this to be successful, you must also ensure your employees have the skills and training to confidently take on new roles and responsibilities.

Without support from the executive level, most automation programs fail in their first year. Many things can go wrong without appropriate oversight; for example, a key employee may leave and no one else knows how to complete their work, or automations may start to fail with no plan for long-term maintenance. To avoid scenarios like these, automation needs to be implemented as a program and not a project.

Lets return to our story about Beth to demonstrate how this works in the real world.

The problem: Beths employer is an integrated healthcare company with more than 1,000 employees. Business has been good, but it has been very difficult for them to hire people quickly enough to keep up. As a result, Beth and other employees were asked to work longer hours to support growth.

The solution: Automation was applied to tasks completed by clinical therapists like Beth. As it turns out, therapists spend a lot of time interacting with the EHR system. This slow and tedious process is not work therapists generally enjoy, but it is essential for billing and compliance.

After automation was implemented, therapists now update patient information in a prepared Excel spreadsheet instead of the EHR. This takes a fraction of the time compared to slowly navigating the EHR system. Once the spreadsheet is complete, the therapist simply saves it to a specific folder. From there, a digital assistant takes over, logs information into the EHR system, updates each record, and then moves the file to a work completed folder.

The outcome: Each therapist saves approximately 1.5 hours each day. The company has more than 50 therapists, which means they can add more work to each therapists plate without hiring additional staff, saving the company over $500,000 per year. Beth is also happier. She has fewer late nights and is devoting more time to her passion: helping patients.

The company has also been able to win more new work because it can scale quickly, and turnover is down because employees can do more of the work they love. Thanks to automation, the company has now streamlined more than 100 processes in three years, with a 500%+ ROI.

Burnout is one of the major challenges facing todays workforce. Organizations need to invest thoughtfully to address it. Leveraging process optimization and automation to tackle the painful or broken processes that contribute to burnout is a powerful option that can offer relief today and prepare the business for future growth.

Andrew Woessneris CEO and Founder of R-Path Automation

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Five best practices for using automation to address employee burnout - Fast Company