Automated admin - the key to happiness?

A quarter of business leaders (27%) are regularly feeling burnt out at work, according to SS&C Blue Prism’s Empower the People research report. As a result, these leaders are 40% more likely to struggle with managing their workloads, with 66% revealing they waste over an hour a day on administrative work, demonstrating a growing need for a stronger work-life balance.

SS&C Blue Prism's research looked at the views of more than 1,000 business decision makers across a variety of industries around the world. In addition to uncovering prominent issues of burnout, the study also found that, for 88% of business leaders, automating administrative work would make them both happier and more engaged at work.

Meanwhile, the study also stated that disengaged employees are on the rise, especially amongst Gen-Z. Burnout in the workplace is at an all-time high, leading to ongoing trends like “The Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting”. This is an issue given that engaged employees are more productive, according to the “Empower the People” study, which also said that those who are happiest and most engaged at work were 31% more likely to focus on their careers.

The research determined that automation plays an important role, with the most satisfied employees having a quarter less (25%) administrative tasks, which automation inherently reduces, to do than their less satisfied counterparts.  Automation was also reported to reduce feelings of stress and create time for important tasks (53%), facilitate upskilling and training (48%), and enable more strategic work (53%).

The study showed how intelligent automation drives value and efficiency gains not only by making repetitive tasks faster and error-free, but also by changing the way people work and interact, giving them more time to focus on value-adding work.

“Work has clearly changed over the course of the past few years. Many employees are feeling the effects of being overworked and overrun with unnecessary administrative tasks. This study not only highlights that burnout and disengagement in the workplace need to be taken seriously, but it also uncovers a viable solution: intelligent automation. With intelligent automation, workers are able to seek out growth opportunities, adding meaning to their careers, and they’re able to achieve that seemingly allusive work-life balance while utilizing and developing their skillset,” comments Tony McCandless, Managing Director of UK, Ireland, and Benelux at SS&C Blue Prism.

In addition to the direct benefits to employees, the overall business sees gains as employees collaborate with digital workers and entire processes are reengineered to align with predetermined business outcomes at scale. These business-wide benefits were found to include:

• Productivity gains (75%)

• More engagement (32%)

• Strategic advantage (36%)