Intelligent workflows: How to get the best from your workforce?

Automation can evoke mixed emotions in business owners and talent alike. Today, organizations have better access to a flexible workforce, which also gives them more options to tackle the evolving needs of customers, markets, and internal stakeholders (including employees). With the very approach to work being re-imagined, automation can be perceived as a fabled magical beanstalk but there is more to it than what meets the eye.

The key question that business owners ought to ask themselves is how can they leverage automation to deliver a fluid and connected experience across business ecosystems? Intelligent workflows are a crucial part of the puzzle when it comes to striking a balance between skills, technology, and data. Based on insights from IBM, let’s delve deeper into how Intelligent Workflows can aid your workforce.

An empowered workforce

Due to the pandemic-induced disruptions, 85 percent of the firms surveyed by IBM indicated a faster rate of change for empowering a remote workforce. With many businesses opting for a remote or hybrid work model in the near future, executives should take advantage of recent learnings and build intelligent processes that support these new ways of working.

The importance of leadership cannot be overstated. Successful leaders will recognize the importance of ongoing learning and development, as well as the use of predictive analytics to identify fresh leadership talent.  Organizations must alter not only how they acquire, train, and promote employees, but also the tools they use to enable employees to succeed in this new climate. It’s critical to improve people’s and teams’ work and skills. This will ensure that people and machines form a seamless interconnected mesh of the technologically transformed ecosystem.  It is very likely that job skills too shall change.

Opportunity to reduce skill gaps

Having a long-term view of skills requirements is important for organizations today. Since personnel management has largely been a reaction to changing business models:  The focus has been on the immediate impact requirements such as matching a flexible workforce strategy and capabilities. Organizations must examine and build the skills and abilities that their personnel require currently to support the business. Rapid learning, at all layers of the organization, remains even more critical to business resiliency and growth today. Proactively addressing these gaps is becoming a cornerstone of effective personnel management for many firms. The greatest benefit of personnel management, according to companies, is a proactive strategy towards spotting possible skill gaps, which is a key challenge.

As a consequence of recent disruptions, 80 percent of businesses are evaluating and addressing employee skills. Organizations may understand what skills are needed today and in the future by using data and systems to establish intelligent workflows. The use of intelligent workflows allows talent management to examine the current workforce’s need-gaps in key abilities and devise a strategy for either recruiting new team members or assisting employees in expanding their skill sets. It can effectively pave the way for organic and holistic skill development in a pragmatic fashion.

Prioritizing employee experience

What about talent retention?

While firms frequently focus on the methods required to assure a competent and successful staff, they are increasingly emphasizing the importance of employee experience, particularly when developing a talent management strategy. Companies that ignore their employee experience, risk reduced talent retention and productivity. Higher engagement is achieved by designing and executing intelligent workflows that focus on improving the experience and taking both a granular and a big-picture view of how work is completed.

Ultimately, it boils down to unlocking value for your technology imperatives and human personnel so that they work in an ideal consonance with workstreams to deliver better outcomes for customers in a seamless digital ecosystem.  Also, once the more mundane and repetitive tasks are mitigated from the employee end, they can focus on building greater innovation and engineering strategic value additions to the digital ecosystem.