Video: Automation in Social Enterprise (Off the Top of My Head)
Jobs need to get done, so people, systems, or technology need to do the work. In many cases automation can help improve your work, but we should be aware of what we lose when we automate tasks.
In this episode, Matthew Rempel talks about how you can identify what tasks could be good for automating, and how you can start evaluate if the changes to your organizational culture will be positive after automating a task.
Comment with the questions you have about organizational development or social enterprise to potentially be featured in a future episode of Off the Top of My Head!
Contact Matthew: info@strategymadesimple.ca
Producer: Matthew Rempel
Host: Matthew Rempel
Camera: Kailan Janzen
Editing: Kailan Janzen and Matthew Rempel
(Originally published July 19, 2023 on Youtube)
If you don't know what to do next as you're creating a social enterprise, Strategy Made Simple can help. We provide coaching, consulting, and workshops to help social enterprise teams get on the same page and move their ideas forward. If you or your team need help, please contact Matthew Rempel at Matthew@StrategyMadeSimple.ca
You can continue the conversation by joining Social Economy Connect. Social Economy Connect is a free mutual support platform for practitioners, social entrepreneurs, co-op members and developers and third sector supporters to discuss issues and solutions with a focus on social outcomes in the economy. Join here: https://social-economy-connect.mn.co
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Email: matthew@strategymadesimple.ca
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Transcript:
Kailan Janzen (00:00):
So I guess we'll just jump right into the question. Yeah. How do you automate? What do you automate? There is way too many things to do, way too many things, right? You want to pay people to do something more important,
Matthew Rempel (00:14):
Right? So there are so many questions there. There's what do you automate? There's how do you automate? And there's so many jobs that you pay people to do. Let's start with that last one. There are jobs you pay people to do. People work because there's work to be done. You don't just hire someone for the sake of hiring somebody. You want a job done, and so therefore, you need to have either a person or a system or some kind of technology doing that job. Whenever you're in an organization and you're doing work, there are roles that need to be filled. Sometimes it's with people, sometimes it's with external partners, sometimes it's automation. So then getting to what do you automate? What can you automate? Right now, it's really easy to automate basic tasks, repetitive tasks, things that are based on consistent inputs and outputs, because then you can identify and you can list and you can create systems that tie those inputs to a system that transforms them into an output.
(01:17):
Things like receiving email and putting it into a document. That's something that it's all rote. It used to maybe be like, imagine back in typewriter days you would have a secretary receiving a call, typing it out, and then putting it in a filing cabinet somewhere with paper. Now we can do that all digitally. You can receive an email, it can be transcribed, it can be filed. You can do all of that with automation, and it doesn't need to be complex because it's the same task over and over and over. So those repetitive tasks are what's most often automated first. So then within your organization or within any organization, what do you choose to automate, I think is the more interesting question, because right now we are in a new world functionally of programs that are calling themselves AI, that are now creating things that look creative, things that appear to be new writing or new music where computers are now more doing more reassembling of the sets that they've been given instead of just the same transformative task over and over with neural networks and machine learning, things like that. Those forms of ai, we're seeing different kinds of potential automation coming in, which leads to that interesting question. What should we automate within our organizations?
(02:47):
So to me, it comes down to what are the things that the computers are really good at that humans don't want to do, or it would be really expensive to get people to do, and where are customers or partners connecting with your organization? Because you should never automate away connection. The reason we don't automate out connection is because the way you make people feel is the thing that they're going to remember about the interaction with you and or your organization. Recently, I've seen a video of what I think was a Japanese airport. There was somebody that was assigned to have a pillow that they held a pillow against the rail at the baggage claim, so that as the bags rolled out of the chute, instead of hitting the rail, hard banging and then going around the cycle as they do, instead, there's somebody there with the pillow, puts it down individually for each bag, and people are there. They just got off their flight, they're watching this happen, and every bag is cushioned and guided on its way by someone.
(03:52):
That leaves an impression. People remember the care that was given to their staff, which by extension is the care that they were given as the passengers on the flight. They're seeing the care that's given to their customers. That connection is super important. That's one of the strongest things. Word of mouth is one of the strongest marketing channels because it involves that relationship, that kind of connection. And so if you automate away that connection, you're losing a vital touchpoint to your customers, to your partners, to the people in your network. So first filter, don't automate away connection. Where do I go from here?
(04:42):
What's the next question? What's the follow up question? I think what the next point would be Then practical story time. Story time, okay. On the flip side, my personal experience with something that is good for automating is scheduling. My goodness, there's so much wasted time, sending emails back and forth, back and forth, trying to find a time that works for both people to make a meeting. And so in my business, what I've done is I have set up an auto scheduler. I assign a calendar. I can mark down what times are available. It synchronizes with my work calendar. So anytime event is added, it's marked off, it's booked, and the auto scheduler knows what space is free. So with that, I can send an email to someone, they've said, yes, we need to have a meeting. When works for you, I can respond with this auto scheduler link.
(05:31):
And they click on it. They see a list of all the times I'm available. They don't have to check in with me. They can just book a time that works for them based on what's there. And so in that way, it makes things faster for both people without sacrificing something that people actually care about. Because I don't know of anyone that actively cares about the back and forth of a scheduling email. I've told you one of the things we shouldn't automate. So instead, here's one of the, you should automate repetitive rote tasks. Anything that is basic data entry, there's probably a way to automate it from our example earlier, receiving emails and then putting them into a logged document. Let's imagine this is an email form for your business. It's off your website. You receive, I don't know, let's say 10 emails in a day.
(06:22):
Those 10 emails are going to have the same structure every single time. It's going to have the name, it's going to have the response contact information, and it's going to have the message itself. It's easy enough to create a program that takes those, receives those emails, puts it in a spreadsheet of some kind, so you can then filter, you can look at what needs to get done, and you can assign it to people to respond to it. That's an easy thing that you can automate that then takes work off of other people. Another thing, another thing that you definitely should not automate are the things that rely on your expertise. The things that you know people hire you to do generally avoid automating those initially when you're in the discovery phase. Most projects, when you're working with a client or you're working with a task, you need to figure out what people want out of it. You need to create the prototype, see how people respond, and then polish. The only way you should automate in that situation is once you get to the polish stage, you already understand what people expect, and you can build a system around that. Do not automate in those beginning stages, you don't necessarily know exactly what people want. You don't necessarily know how they're going to respond to a system. And so before you put on all that work to automate it, to build broader systems, creating those prototypes, creating those customized solutions is much more important.
(07:50):
I've got a third point. I primarily work with social enterprises, organizations that are trying to work in some kind of social good, either with the profits they're earning or through the operations directly. Automation has to be handled a lot more carefully in social enterprises because if you accidentally automate a way the thing that's creating the impact, you are actively working against what the organization's trying to do. And so a lot of the organizations I work with are work integration social enterprises. They very deliberately seek out and hire people and train people to do tasks that might otherwise be automated. And so when we're thinking about people who have barriers to employment, when we're thinking about roles that act as entry-level positions that let people get into an industry to then develop into higher positions, to build up their experience, those are tasks that you should be very careful about automating. Because if the purpose of the organization, if the mission of the organization is being undermined by your automation, that's a definite downside. That's a conclusion. That's point. That's a conclusion. That's the last point. That's last point. There we go.