Automating Your Tech Company: Getting Everyone On Board

Nobody likes change. Cliché? Yes, but it’s universally true.

And it’s a fact that can’t be ignored when deciding to automate your business processes.

It’s difficult to dispute the upsides of automation—easy-to-access, centralized information, visibility into everything that happens (as it happens), and improved customer service. And that’s only grazing the surface of possibilities for improved productivity and profitability.

But even knowing those positives, employees can be sticklers for sameness. They often have a comfort level with familiar processes, regardless of how difficult, time-consuming, dysfunctional, or costly they may be.

It’s normal for employees to have an emotional reaction to anything they view as a job threat. Some employees may see automation as an affront to their abilities or performance. While occasionally that could actually be the case, that’s not the intent. The goal of automation is to help high-performing teams painlessly achieve more.

Here are 3 ways you can get your team excited about automation:

1. Involve Them

Involvement breeds buy-in. From the beginning, bring your employees into the change process. They are your experts on how things are working now. Let them tell you what’s wrong with the way things are being done, and ask how they could see automation helping. Then act on their answers to these questions.

2. Share How Everyone Will Benefit

Address each individual role. Explain how streamlined communications, information transparency, and team accountability will enhance each role, not replace it.

Touch on how being a sole keeper of information or responsibility can be exhausting and unhealthy for any one team member.

Explain how an automated workflow not only speeds up and simplifies tasks, but provides insights into bottlenecks and flaws in process. In other words, they won’t be at the mercy of ‘the system.’ Instead, they will be served and supported by it.

3. Easy Does It

Not everything has to be done overnight. Automating in carefully planned steps can ease the fear and confusion of too much change at once. And remember, not every piece of every process in your business needs to be automated.

You have so much to gain from business automation. And that gain will be swifter and more complete if everyone in your business understands the process and backs the solutions.