How RPA can help teams focus on creative and complex problems facing organisations today

Promoting a culture of creativity is key for your workforce to thrive and achieve their best work. When employees feel engaged in the workplace, their individual capabilities can flourish, which benefits the entire business. However, employees are regularly derailed from their flow due to their responsibility to complete manual data-entry work.

These repetitive, mundane activities stifle your teams’ ability to properly focus on the more complex issues faced in your business and come up with creative solutions. Spending long hours on these tasks has a significant negative impact on job satisfaction, which can have a knock-on effect on your employees’ creativity and how much effort they can put into solving problems facing your business.

One way to refocus your workforce’s efforts to more meaningful activities is by leveraging technology and investing in automation. Robotic process automation (RPA) can overhaul your business’s processes to eliminate the repetitive, mind-numbing tasks your employees spend time on and can offer a far more engaging environment for your workforce to contribute more meaningfully to the business.

How RPA works

RPA is a software capability that automates repetitive, rule-based, high-volume activities through the use of software robots called bots. Based on mimicking how humans interact with technology, RPA lets your employees configure a bot to collect and extract knowledge, recognise patterns and learn from your existing business processes, and follow rules to create efficient workflows.

Providing businesses with an unlimited resource pool, RPA manages workflows using software code that is delivered from the cloud to any location worldwide at any time of the day, every day of the year. These bots never take breaks, never stop working and, if their input logic is flawless, they will never make errors.

Working in collaboration with human oversight, RPA provides a wide range of opportunities for businesses to streamline mundane tasks and re-allocate resources to focus on more complex activities. Your employees can offload repetitive tasks and focus their efforts on creative activities which can improve the overall efficiency of your business.

Benefits of RPA for teams

RPA creates opportunities for individuals and teams to restructure work processes that change the dynamics of your business. This can provide benefits in two key ways:

1. Lets employees work on higher-value tasks with more responsibility

When mundane tasks are completed by bots, you can re-focus your employees’ efforts towards both the team and overall company mission, providing them with the tools to deliver tasks on time with greater accuracy. This will result in a far more engaged workforce who will be free to collaborate frequently, share knowledge between functional units, and discuss new ideas openly.

RPA can streamline your business processes and simplify workflows. By reducing the time your employees spend on repetitive data-entry tasks, they can focus on core tasks that bring higher value results to the business.

Your employees can then take on more responsibility and can challenge themselves to develop their competences by completing high-value projects. Employees want to feel valued in the workplace and that they are contributing to business success, so by providing the opportunity to undertake meaningful responsibilities in their jobs, they will be far more engaged and enthusiastic about completing their duties.

2. Creates outlets to be more innovative, creative, and collaborative

RPA’s ability to reduce the amount of manual data entry work required from your employees empowers them. Increasingly, workers are demonstrating a high preference for innovative teamwork. Adopting RPA can free up more time for your employees to focus on collaborative projects that require innovation and creativity. This will also reinforce higher levels of task engagement which will bring your business higher-value results.

In short, using RPA can relieve your employees from the mind-numbing, repetitive duties that lead to disengagement, leaving them to focus on the higher value tasks that stretch their creativity and responsibilities. Their combined brainpower and effort can then benefit your business by providing lasting value to projects.

To find out how you can incorporate RPA into your workplace to encourage creativity, contact Konica Minolta today.