Automation will save you from death by admin
Admin can be soul-sucking. From horrendous tedium, to sheer volume, to the low control over work that they award your team: we hate administrative tasks. In fact, many aspects of admin have been linked to a rise in depression.
For others, admin stifles business growth. You and your team must spend time on repetitive manual tasks instead of future planning and other high-importance work.
All this leads to death by admin. Valuable employees burn out, jump ship or lose any passion for their job, while businesses buried in paperwork struggle to get off the ground. But it doesn't have to be this way. Here's how you can use automation to save you, your team and your business from death by admin.
Death by admin
Admin is listed as one of the top ten jobs that cause depression. According to work studies, physical movement, human interaction, a variety of tasks, and a sense of accomplishment are all aspects of a job that decrease the likelihood of depression and burnout.
Yet for the work teams trapped in admin, almost none of these criteria are realised. The admin tasks handled are static, repetitive, don't promote interaction and give little to no sense of accomplishment. It's no surprise, then, that businesses need a way to save their teams from death by admin.
Meanwhile, the sheer volume of admin tasks, and the time it takes to complete them, can mean an operational death by admin for those that manage to escape the negativity.
Admin doom and gloom
So, what makes admin tasks so stifling?
Anthropocentrism is the belief that humans are the most important entity in the universe. There have been plenty of instances where an anthropocentric belief has proved flawed. For instance, the sun doesn't revolve around us, we evolved from apes — we aren't higher beings. So why would our intelligence be special?
- 1 - They're too complex and time-consuming
- When you're stuck on the same tasks that take forever to complete, it's easier to make a mistake. Convoluted, repetitive steps can be frustrating. This is because the tasks take so long to do that you fall further and further behind on other (more important) work.
- 2 - Too mundane and repetitive
- Filling out databases (for example) is necessary, but it soon gets boring. Copy-pasting information into spreadsheets hardly takes much brain power. It's important, yet offers a low sense of accomplishment. This can be damaging to morale — it's difficult to remain motivated when you're bored.
- 3- Too much work with too little control
- Low control over your workload also relates to levels of job-related depression. With admin, new tasks are coming to you in an endless stream, from every direction. These tasks can also come with specific deadlines that you have little control over. More and more pile in with each new customer, or complaint, or email. Before long, admin workloads become overwhelming and misery-inducing. This never-ending barrage of tasks also leaves you snowed under and distracted from business growth.
Automation is hero
Enter business process automation, software that you set up to help with and complete routine admin tasks. Automation can help you and your employees optimise the efficiency of completing admin tasks. This resulting in less stress and less chance of being buried in monotonous workloads.
Here are just some of the ways that automation can save your team from death by admin.
- 1 - Update databases
- Automation can extract useful information from your inbox. Then, it can sort it into the relevant databases or forward it to the correct department. All without intervention.
- 2 - Notifications
- Business process automation software can notify you to remind you of meetings or appointments. Also, if you receive an email with a date and a keyword — ‘payment due', for example — automation can let you know.
- 3 - Document processing
- You can tell your automation software to automatically convert files from one form to another. For example, Word, Excel or incoming messages to PDF form. This makes information easier for your team to access.
- 4 - Automatic responses
- You can set your automation software to automatically send structured responses to some of your incoming emails. Your employees can also compose emails and schedule the send time and date. This allows them to complete many admin tasks involving email in advance.
- 5 - Social automation
- Your automation software can also help your team track your social media accounts, and automatically post at scheduled times. This helps you keep an up-to-date, relevant channel for interaction with your customers.
- 6 - Sentiment analysis
- Sentiment analysis provides you with an idea of how your brand is being received by your target audience. Automation software can get a sentiment score for any message, and execute pre-determined actions based on the sentiment score. (For example, alerting your team if sentiment is low.)
If you can think it, you can automate it
Admin saps our energy. It stops us from doing work that feels meaningful, and makes keeping control over our workloads near impossible. That's where business process automation can help you.
There are many areas of admin and other routine tasks that automation software can help you and your team complete. Incorporating this automated assistant to help your team can improve job satisfaction and reduce stress levels. Used correctly, this software will save you and your team from death by admin.
So, let business process automation handle the mundane tasks and simplify the complex ones. Get the admin out of the way. It's time to fight back, and save ourselves from death by admin.
To fight death by admin in your company, start a free trial of ThinkAutomation.