Should your next hire be a robot?

Growing Workloads?  Time to think about hiring…

Knowing when to add to your team is always a difficult decision.  Generally you want to see increased workload over an extended period, and you’ll look to plug a gap either with skills, or culture fit to take your team forward. Hiring a robot could save you money, as well as improve the satisfaction and wellbeing of the rest of your team members.  Read on to find out how…

Recruiting a new team member

 If you’re hiring, either to grow your team or to replace someone who is leaving, your plan will look a little like this:

1. Write up a job description
2. Engage a reputable recruiter (with fees at say, 20% of salary)
3. Advertise & Short List  (2-4 weeks)
4. First and Second round Interviews (2 weeks)
5. Offer / negotiation / wait out notice period – 4 weeks
6. Onboard new team member
7. Training & Induction – 4 weeks

From start to finish, you’re probably going to take at least 12 weeks to get a productive team member.  Your costs in Year 1 will be somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 of the budgeted FTE salary when you factor in all the hiring and onboarding costs

An alternative option: Hire a Robot

Instead of onboarding another person, you could think about bringing on a software robot….in which case the plan would look like this: 

1. Identify processes for automation within your team – especially the routine, mundane tasks that no-one likes doing! (1 week)
2. Process map the tasks, and architect solution (2 weeks)
3. Configure automation software (6 weeks)
4. Test and Deploy (2-4 weeks)
5. Hypercare (4 weeks)

Within roughly the same timeframe it would take you to hire a new team member, you could hire and train a robot to take care of the mundane, mind-numbing tasks that your team hate. Report writing.  Data entry.  Reconciliations.  This will then free your team up to cope with the extra volume!

Benefits of hiring a robot:

When you hire a robot you also get:

• Up to 500% output per day when compared with human workers, as robots work faster and don’t take breaks
• Better accuracy on routine tasks
• No complaining, or long lunches, or late starts

You will need a period of adjusting to working with your new team member, but once you’re happy with (her/him), hiring more just like (her/him) is easy. It’s just like cloning Dolly the sheep!

It won’t be all smooth sailing though.  In place of personality clashes, and issues with team dynamics, you’ll get some unexplained bot behaviour.  You’ll need to tweak the automation settings, and carefully monitor performance. Your

 robot worker still needs supervision, training and ongoing management. 

The best way to think about it is that your robot is a resource within your team, complementing the other team members, albeit with quite a different skillset.

But what about the economics?

Over a three year comparison timeframe, at annual cost of say $80,000 for your human worker, then you’ll save approximately 30% with a single bot. 

• Human worker Cost over 3 years: 3.25 – 3.5X Annual Salary  = $260,000
• Bot Worker cost over 3 years (including Governance Tools, and Automation Configuration) = $180,000

IMPORTANT FACT:  Subsequent bots are cheaper, due to leveraging the initial investment in infrastructure and governance tools.  Expect ownership costs of subsequent bots to be in the vicinity $40,000 per annum.

When you factor in the increased output, (let’s be conservative, and estimate that Bots produce 3X what a human would doing the same task), then over this 3 year model, your costs per widget for the tasks completed by the bot worker will be up to 75% less than if completed by human workers. 

Will the robot’s quality be like?

For repetitive, rules based tasks, within a stable operating environment, your robot will perform flawlessly.  There will be no mistakes due to fatigue, distraction or boredom.  You will need to tweak settings though with software upgrades, business rule changes etc, so your robot is not totally maintenance free – but then neither are your human staff! As an added bonus, every task your robot completes is logged, and auditable, which will also make your compliance team happy!

Don’t rule out a Robot!

So if you’re thinking of expanding your team, give serious consideration to hiring a robot – it will cost you roughly the same as in Year 1, but you’ll get significantly more output, and over 3 years the benefits start to add up.  As you identify more tasks for automation, and your robot workforce grows, the unit cost per bot will come down.

 You may not be able to share a drink with your new robot team member, but you will get the side benefit of improved team culture and happier employees thanks to all the boring work the robot is now taking care of for them!