The most obvious benefit to using automation in your HR business is that you save a huge amount of time with both your tasks and the work that your team is doing. That’s time that can be spent with your clients on more billable work, or time used to delight your clients with brilliant customer service.
There’s more too… let’s cover those.
1) Professionalism through consistency and reliability
You’re going to appear more professional with your clients if you’re more reliable and more consistent. Let’s be honest, we’re so used to poor customer service that it’s essentially normal to be disappointed when purchasing from a business!
Using automation you can generate reports, emails, data, spreadsheets and tools for your clients. You can even automate reminders for following up with clients in a project or sales process. We don’t automate human interactions, but we can automate tasks that prompt us to call or email a client.
Consistency is surprisingly easy to create with code.
2) Increasing your company value
If you have a desire to sell your business one day, you’re going to increase your company’s value by having automation and highly documented processes. By utilising your human team more efficiently, you’ll look attractive to a potential buyer who appreciates a lean head count. It’s less attractive to a buyer if all the key business knowledge is locked away in the minds of your team. For example, if your company can easily train and recruit new staff members because you have a healthy mix of automation and processes, a new buyer will be more interested as they won’t be as worried about losing staff during an acquisition.
It makes your business more “buyable”. In the same way a house is more attractive to buyers if the house has recently had lots of renovation and DIY to make it highly presentable.
You might also attract buyers who are interested in your automation and processes and wish to utilise your way of doing things to improve their existing businesses they are intending to merge with yours.
3) Reducing your ‘cognitive load’
If you’re like me or any other business owner, do you have a huge list of things to do in your head? Is there always more to do? Clearly having parts of processes using automation or tools will free up some valuable headspace. I’d argue that headspace is the most important benefit with automation.
When you have headspace:
- you’re able to think more clearly
- win more business
- relax more easily
- get out of the ‘weeds’ and put more time into growing your business
4) Feel proud
An unusual one here, but I see it frequently. Business owners go through cycles of feeling proud of their business as well as wanting to “sell up and go get a job“. Running and growing a business is hard. Really hard. By having any level of automation in your business gives you an opportunity to feel proud (and perhaps a little smug) that you’re improving your business, and “getting somewhere”.