Quiet hiring refers to recruiting short-term contractors externally or reassigning existing employees to different positions within the organization, with them mastering new skills and taking on additional responsibilities to address pressing business needs.

According to Emily Rose McRae, Senior Director of Research at Gartner, quiet hiring is nothing new. Still, more businesses will resort to it this year due to the ongoing talent shortage and fears of a potential recession.

A recent airSlate research report explores how workflow automation tools help employees adopt new skills at a rapid pace, thus making it easier for HR teams to build and manage agile, productive teams, aiding in the quiet hiring process. 

So, what are the benefits of quiet hiring for employers and employees? And how can organizations harness this HR trend in 2023? 

Document Workflow Automation for HRs

• E-payments
• Workflow optimization
• Business process automation

Enroll now

What are the pros and cons of quiet hiring? 

As suggested by a Monster survey, 80% of employees previously faced quiet hiring in the form of being reassigned to another role within their company. Half of the respondents admitted that the role didn’t align with their skill set. Despite that, 63% don’t oppose quiet hiring, seeing it as an opportunity to upskill or reskill. 

At first glance, it seems like businesses stand to benefit from quiet hiring more than employees do, but that isn’t exactly true. If done right, employees can benefit from it by getting a pay increase or promotion. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of quiet hiring for all parties involved:

The pros of quiet hiring for business:

• Cost-efficiency. Bridging the skills gap without hiring additional full-time employees allows organizations to avoid excessive financial strain.
  
• Flexibility. Organizations can quickly deploy internal talent against high-priority business areas. When it’s impossible to find the necessary talent in-house, organizations can turn to hiring contractors or gig workers.
  
• Improved employee engagement. Reskilling and/or upskilling initiatives can increase employee retention, engagement, and productivity. Google has been using quiet hiring for a while to identify employees outperforming their positions on the organization chart, allowing them to source and secure the best talent.

The pros of quiet hiring for employees:

• Pay raise or other bonuses. In most organizations, additional responsibilities or roles entail a payment increase. Other benefits, such as bonuses, flexible hours, or additional time off can be negotiated if a raise is not an option.
  
• Expanded skill set. Organizations provide training and support to help their internal talent feel at ease in their new roles or projects. For instance, adopting new technology and expanding employees’ digital skill sets helps foster a citizen development culture. 
  
• Possible future promotion. Moving to another position and/or project facilitates networking with colleagues in different departments. Excelling in a job function that is a step up can be used to negotiate a future promotion.

The cons of quiet hiring

A planned or periodic talent rotation is a common practice for organizations to fill in gaps. Unplanned talent rotation as a part of the quiet hiring strategy can lead to confusion among the workforce. 

Here are some of the cons of quiet hiring that both organizations and employees should consider:

• It must be a temporary solution. Organizations rotating talent internally should not consider it a long-term solution to their hiring issues. Employees temporarily reassigned to another role are likely to refocus, hence neglecting the initial position they were assigned to.  
  
• Employee burnout. Organizations that use talent rotation as a part of quiet hiring risk facing employee burnout and loss of efficiency in the workplace. That is why it is essential to track the extra workload taken by the employees and ensure that they don’t feel burnt out, demotivated, or taken advantage of.

How to make quiet hiring work

According to Gartner, transparency and communication can help big time in making quiet hiring work. Organizations must set expectations by explaining what the change will mean and why it’s happening to their employees. At the same time, leadership must be proactive in upskilling their teams, ensuring they’re equipped with all the skills required for a new role or project.

Following these tips will help organizations manage their workforce as well as eliminate potential risks associated with quiet hiring:

1. Make your employees feel valued. Stress how their individual performance contributes to business success. Assigning an employee to another role or project without a proper introduction could result in their resignation.

2. Provide a clear explanation of why change is necessary. Clear and transparent communication can not only boost employee morale but also contribute to building loyalty and trust.

3. Offer reasons for change. Offering reasons for change and explaining how it benefits an employee personally will provide clarity.

4. Explain potential new opportunities. Make sure employees understand new opportunities quiet hiring could offer them. This way, they’ll be willing to take on new roles within the organization and master new skills needed for growth.

5. Provide employee benefits. Career development, pay increases, and other benefits will motivate employees to make the change.

6. Let them know it’s a joint effort rather than an individual or team-based decision. 

The bottom line

Quiet hiring can be an invaluable tool to help organizations address short-term needs fast while achieving maximum productivity from their in-house talent pool. Understanding how quiet hiring works and developing an effective strategy can help organizations bring in new skills and maintain a competitive advantage in the future. 

The post Quiet hiring: How to harness talent to build an agile workforce appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

Just like with airSlate’s two previous successful acquisitions (signNow and US Legal Forms), DocHub’s team will work very closely with the rest of airSlate’s organization to achieve its aggressive expansion goals.

“The best people to grow a company or a product are the teams that are the most passionate about the products,” said Borya Shakhnovich, CEO and co-founder, airSlate. “We see this dedication in DocHub and the synergies between our organizations for product improvement and product adoption show a clear advantageous relationship between our organizations. We are happy to welcome DocHub and its team into the airSlate organization and to bring new ideas and innovations for PDF and workflow solutions to the market.”

We’ve sat down with Chris Devor, CEO and founder of DocHub, to learn more about the acquisition process, DocHub’s strategic vision, growth challenges, and product development roadmap.

DocHub is an online PDF annotator and document signing platform that operates on desktop and mobile devices. Founded by DocHub and Macroplant CEO Chris Devor in Boston, Massachusetts, DocHub’s headquarters are located in the Greater Boston Area. Trusted by over 80 million users and having processed almost half a billion documents, DocHub has cemented its leadership position among the top-rated document management applications on the Google Workspace Marketplace.

Before DocHub, we had Macroplant. We’d released a host of different apps, mainly in the iPhone transfer segment. When we were doing that, we learned quite a bit. Whenever we were developing our app, we were developing for Mac and Windows – each platform required a completely different code base. That was a huge pain point for us, so with DocHub one of the things we were looking forward to and enjoyed throughout the duration of this project is a single code base that does mobile, Mac, and Windows.

“One of the things that we actually succeeded in is a single clean code base. How else did we manage to build a product trusted by millions with a team of 11 people? I don’t know… We worked pretty hard.”

Chris Devor,
CEO and Founder of DocHub

The market has been a wild ride. Our timing was a once-in-a-lifetime-timing, so if not now, we’d probably revisit [our decision] in five years. When we started the acquisition process, some of the market leaders in the eSignature and document management segment were worth five times more than they used to be. I don’t think anyone has seen anything like this. And then all of it started falling apart, which added a little bit more pressure to the deal. I think that by the time airSlate and DocHub go public, getting liquidity here, we’ll be in a great spot and the market will have recovered, too.

Yes, we did the full process. There were a lot of interesting companies out there – DocHub marketing materials went out to around 70+ companies and investors. The direction for DocHub could’ve gone a different way had we gone with somebody else. But I think we actually landed with the best company for us, airSlate, and that’s not just because of the money. Basically, airSlate is doing as close to what DocHub is doing.

The other companies out there are mostly B2B, with very little B2C experience. pdfFiller by airSlate has an impressive B2C segment, which is gradually developing into the B2B segment. That’s exactly what we’re looking for. And I think this is how we’re going to have the most value added.

There were companies all over the spectrum and I can’t disclose names, but some of them weren’t really involved at all in the document signing space. We wanted something that would be a strategic benefit. 

As for other companies, there were a few out there that had basically built their own PDF editor. They have their own core platform but they don’t have any user base. And if we’d merged going that route, I think, we would’ve lost a lot of the essence of what DocHub does.

“I think [with airSlate] we landed somewhere where we can keep our legacy, build upon it, and improve with all of the resources of airSlate, and we’re excited for that.”

Chris Devor,
CEO and Founder of DocHub

One of our biggest goals is B2B customer acquisition. We have millions of individual users — we’ve got over 10,000 Costco users and a bunch of other different companies. These customers are not actually paying us because we haven’t built any sales infrastructure and marketing. Pricing is definitely a weak point, and I think that’s something airSlate does very well.

“Whenever an entire company with hundreds of licenses wanted to sign up with DocHub we didn’t really know what to do with that. So that’s one of the things that we’re looking forward to with airSlate.“

Chris Devor,
CEO and Founder of DocHub

I know airSlate has deals with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and even more than that now. I think DocHub’s biggest annual fee is maybe $10,000 a year. However, in terms of what we’re actually delivering to our customers… we’re delivering quite a bit to them.

The users that we’re going after historically haven’t been the same segment. You know, as far as complimentary … I think both products have a ton of features that the other one doesn’t. We’re working out how best to integrate that.

With DocHub, our main focus has been Gmail integration. Back in late 2013, I wasn’t happy with any of the signing options out there when I wanted to sign a PDF from my Gmail. That was our primary focal point. We basically wanted the best product out there for signing PDFs in Gmail. And then we also wanted to have a very generous free trial. 

Most people would rather print a document, sign it manually, and then scan it rather than pay $100 a year for a license. We figured if they’re not going to pay for it, we’ll just give them DocHub for free, and maybe they’ll spread the word, or come back and pay later.

 A few years ago we spent an entire year on scaling. We optimized our hardware infrastructure so we could scale to 15,000 people on the website at a time making an insane number of documents in a given day, in a given hour. That’s been one of the challenges. 

Security was another one, and compliance was another one. We’ve made huge progress with both and these are actually some of the things we’re looking forward to with airSlate. airSlate’s solutions are HIPAA-compliant, and none of the other companies we were looking at were. I think we’re very close to addressing our compliance challenges. 

What are the other challenges? Just maintaining everything. From a design standpoint,  DocHub has multiple features, and we’re looking to have a simple user interface that doesn’t overwhelm people. We still have some work to do in that department.

If you want to compress a PDF, split and merge PDFs, you can do that in DocHub. Password-protect your document as well. Taking all this and bundling all of it into a seamless experience is kind of difficult, but I think this is what we’ve done pretty well.

Absolutely. Looking at all of the airSlate workflows, adding in those types of capabilities into DocHub, integrating it there, that sounds exciting. airSlate has an API development team, and I think pretty soon they’ll start building the DocHub API. All of the things we would eventually get to, but I think going at the rate that we’ve been going, that would take years. So, we’re looking forward to accelerating the process.    

Right now we only have one pricing plan, and it’s targeted at consumers. What we’ve been working towards is adding tier pricing – if you’re using more features, you’re going to pay more for that.

“I think adding tools from all of airSlate’s ecosystem is going to be tremendous for helping us bring actual value to tier pricing. I want actual value delivered to people – if we’re going to charge more, we need to deliver more.”

Chris Devor,
CEO and Founder of DocHub

The thing we’re working on right now which is a little bit more complicated than we thought it would be is folders. Right now, a company or a school will go on DocHub and create an organization. Within a school or organization, there are other subdivisions or classes. 

The current workflow for [a school] has been creating an organization that manages billing and then, if you have a separate classroom, you need to create an additional organization for each classroom. Eventually, you get people who have 30 different organizations [in a single DocHub dashboard] which is overwhelming. 

Building the Folder workflow is going to give people additional ways to share documents. And if there’s a group they’re no longer using, they can archive it. If there’s one they want to prioritize, they can mark it with a star.

They can share a folder either with everyone in their organization, or they can have the folder just for personal use — like a secret folder shared privately. Let’s say we create a secret folder in airSlate called Marketing, this is going to be a folder that only marketing people will have access to.  

We already have tags, but tags and labels don’t specify who someone’s documents are shared with, while folders allow for sharing preferences to be adjusted. 

Also, we’re working on A/B testing, we’ve got a lot of big things going on. For instance, [one of the features we’re working on is to allow text fields to be grouped and ungrouped. So if you have your name on seven different pages in a document, you can link those fields together. I think it’s pretty far along. We’re also working on a lot of little workflow things. Maybe we’ll get to multi-selection of annotations and form fields.

Anyway, we have a lot of open issues and we’re looking to have our team bolstered by airSlate.

There’s definitely a lot of factors that can help us indirectly grow our product just by taking a lot of work off our hands. All the finance stuff, accounting, hiring people. Just taking all of this miscellaneous stuff off our plate. And then — finding sub-projects, whether it’s a mobile app, or the API. We can be entirely hands-off on it.

Also, marketing. I think signNow and airSlate are doing a tremendous job in terms of homepages and landing pages. 

As for support… Our support guys are great, they’ve done email support for a long time. But to bring chat support or phone support, I think is critical to getting business-to-business workflows. The higher-value customers are going to want to make sure that you’re a real company. And I think that this is something that airSlate will enable us to offer.

I honestly have no idea how everyone’s going to take the acquisition. Everybody at DocHub has got some form of equity or bonus or stock option, so they’ll all be happy about that. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if one or two people had been like “I got my payout, I’m gone”. Actually, it’s been the opposite. Usually, everyone’s very excited for a change. Me especially. 

I’ve been entrepreneuring a 10-person or less company since 2008, so it’s been 14 years. Half of my career here. For me this is fun. Going into Slack and there’s literally a hundred times more people there than it was a couple of months ago. I think everyone else is excited about that, too.

The post Exclusive interview: Chris Devor, DocHub CEO and founder, discusses acquisition by airSlate appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

Choosing the right remote onboarding tools is essential because you want new hires to feel comfortable and engaged.

Using onboarding automation tools ensures that the process is smooth and seamless from beginning to end.

“69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.”

SHRM

Many employees leave a company when the onboarding experience is not professional or not well-organized. High turnover rates lead to low productivity and company morale, making it even harder to attract new talent.

If you’re still using lengthy paper-based documents to onboard employees, consider switching to remote onboarding tools to digitize your new hire process.

Document Workflow Automation for HRs

• E-payments
• Workflow optimization
• Business process automation

Enroll now

The intricacies of remote employee onboarding

Onboarding efficiently is vital to the success of your business. It ensures that remote hires get the information, support, and training they need to succeed in the company. 

Remote employees should become familiar with their new company’s expectations of them and how they can find resources like instructional videos. You want employees to have excellent onboarding experiences to assimilate to the company culture and fit in with the current team. 

You can attract top talent when hiring remote teams because you are not limited geographically. It’s also a great way to save the company money as you won’t have to pay for costly onsite programs for onboarding. 

But the remote onboarding experience comes with challenges, such as building a strong work culture and relationships. When onboarding doesn’t go smoothly, whether remote or onsite, it can lead to employee turnover, low employee productivity, and decreased job satisfaction.

To make the onboarding process more accessible, try delegating a direct manager to be the new hire’s onboarding buddy. It can be difficult for new employees to talk to managers, but it can be less complicated for the new member to ask questions and receive feedback when you pair them together. 

Put together a remote onboarding checklist and include an introductory meeting, one-on-one meetings, virtual training, and a new hire survey.

A quick comparison table

13+ Useful tools to streamline your remote onboarding process

Check out these top 13 remote onboarding tools to help with your new employee onboarding.

1. airSlate

airSlate is the all-in-one no-code document workflow automation solution for teams and businesses of all sizes. airSlate helps human resource departments across different industries speed up their employee onboarding process with its HR templates. Imagine having all your document workflows in one place. Well, airSlate does that for you.

airSlate doesn’t require any coding knowledge in order to set up your automation and integrations. 

airSlate’s key advantage is its thousands of pre-built workflow templates and no-code Bots for a wide range of use cases — HR departments can automate their most-used workflows, from employee onboarding to absence leave requests, in minutes.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, airSlate offers a Free version and a Free trial period. The Basic plan starts at $30/flow creator/month. The airSlate Business Cloud will cost you $50/flow creator/month for a minimum of five users.

2. ProProfs

ProProfs is a software company that makes online tools for a variety of different needs, including employee training, education, and customer satisfaction. ProProfs’ goal is to help companies make smarter employees by giving you tools for training and tracking their progress. 

ProProfs Training Maker is an all-in-one software that allows you to customize courses, create learning resources, and build a learner community. 

You can find tools on their website like a training maker, a knowledge base, a quiz maker, Q&A forums, and a project tracker. Plus, you can add quizzes and games, making the training more engaging. 

ProProfs has three plans: Essentials, Premium, and Business. The Essentials plan is billed annually at $1 per month per learner. So for 25 learners, you would pay $300 for the year. The Premium plan is $1.50, and the Business plan is $1.97. 

You would pay $591 per year for 25 learners (you can customize the number of learners and the price will adjust accordingly). The Business plan gives you unlimited features for just a few cents more.

3. Slack

Slack provides you with a digital headquarters where your entire company can connect. You can create channels to connect across departments, whether for sales, special projects, or new remote hires. 

Slack promotes a healthy remote work environment by providing the necessary tools for employees to work how they like. You can chat, send audio and video, or host virtual meetings. 

Remote hires can benefit from using Slack because it creates a virtual network of employees and makes it feel as if everyone is together. 

You can try Slack for free for as long as you want, you will only have access to essential tools like messaging and video calls. For more features, upgrade to a paid monthly plan. 

The Pro plan is $6.67 a month and is an excellent option for small teams who need a better way to collaborate. The Business plan is $12.50 a month and provides a way for you to scale your business and increase productivity while keeping your remote teams connected. The Enterprise plan is for the most demanding business and requires you to customize your pricing with a representative.

4. Avoma

Avoma is one of the best conversation intelligence platforms out there. They position themselves as a meeting lifecycle assistant and can significantly accelerate your remote onboarding process. 

This AI-powered meeting lifecycle assistant helps you across the phases of your meeting —  before the meeting (to prepare using its agenda templates and reduce no-shows using reminders), during the meeting (by taking notes on your behalf and collaborating with your peers), and after the meeting (with conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence). 

You can use Avoma to collaborate with teams and onboard new members faster by creating and sharing helpful playlists, sharing asynchronous comments/feedback, and snippets of information on the fly.

Try Avoma for free with a 14-day trial. 

Select from one of their many plans that include varying features. They offer pricing plans from $0 to $130 based on what you need and do not compel you to commit annually.

5. Monday.com

Monday.com is a platform designed to let you customize your workflow any way you want. It has some excellent HR use cases where you can track talent and engage with employees. 

The software lets you attract and engage top talent, streamline the onboarding experience, and manage employee development. Give new hires a place to learn and develop their skills while maintaining their well-being. 

Monday.com has several plans to choose from and pricing ranges from a free plan to more customized programs. The standard plan is their most popular, for $10 per seat, per month. It allows you to collaborate and optimize your team processes with over 250 automated processes and integrations.

6. Flair

Automate your human resources team with Flair. Flair is a complete HR platform that adapts to your company’s needs and provides efficient software. Out of the box, you will get automation features for simple, everyday tasks with options to customize.

You can keep track of all employees with an internal database. 

Enter information about employee salaries, schedules, and workloads. The HR dashboard gives you tools to onboard new hires, manage documents, plan shifts, track time, and export payroll.

Plans start at $3.25 a month and go up to $7.58 for their performance package. The performance plan is excellent for complex needs and those who want enhanced HR processes.

7. WorkBright

WorkBright builds HR tools for small and medium-sized businesses. Hiring new staff can often be repetitive and time-consuming. 

If you don’t want your new employees to leave because of a slow onboarding process, try this software to guide you through the speedy process of getting people to work faster. 

WorkBright specializes in collecting and verifying human resource documents. The software will transform your hiring packet into a library of intelligent forms. It will also guide your employees through the I-9 form and instantly submit E-verify cases. 

You can choose a plan that fits the needs of your business, whether you have 50 employees or 50,000. 

The lowest package includes all government forms and complete custom employee paperwork for $178 a month. The most extensive plan is for companies with 50,000 or more employees and costs $3,970 a month.

8. Assembly

Assembly helps you create automated processes for every HR task and provides a seamless and customizable interface. Create new hire surveys and gain insights into their thoughts and feelings about the company and onboarding process. 

You can also celebrate their accomplishments by introducing an employee recognition system.

Try Assembly for free to get a feel for the software before committing. 

If you’re ready to commit, start off with the lite or standard plan. The lite plan is excellent for companies focused on employee engagement and costs $2.80 per member every month. The standard plan is for companies that are focused on amplifying their cross-functional engagement and costs $4.50 per member.

9. Zoom

Zoom allows you to take work with you wherever you go with seamless video conferencing software. Have formal meetings with HD video and clear audio, create webinars filled with features, host virtual events, chat with employees on the messaging app, and collaborate outside of meetings. 

Zoom has packages for small teams, small businesses, and large enterprises. 

The pro account can host up to 100 people and costs $149.90 a year. The business plan allows you to host up to 300 participants and costs $199.90 for the year. The enterprise plan hosts up to 500 participants and costs $240 a year.

10. DottedSign

Like most businesses, you probably have many documents that need to be signed and managed. DottedSign is an excellent tool for intelligent eSignature solutions. 

This eSignature tool is one of the popular DocuSign alternatives that introduces a number of different advantages. You can sign documents from anywhere on any device, multitask by organizing all tasks in one place, and track the progress of each signer. 

Sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience DottedSign before you buy. 

The plans are flexible and start at $8 a month for a Pro account. If you want to expand your capacity and access more advanced features, try the Business account for $15 a month. Contact the support team for a customized payment plan for businesses with many users on one account.

11. Gusto

Gusto is an all-in-one people platform that can hire, pay, insure, and support your employees. You can access the full-service payroll service, employee benefits, attendance tracking, talent management, insightful reports, and an intuitive onboarding process. 

Gusto offers multiple payment options depending on your business size and needs. 

The lowest option is $39 a month and is fantastic for small businesses with simple payroll. Companies with more complex payroll and sophisticated HR needs can choose the top plan for $149 a month. 

You also can customize a payment plan if your needs are more elaborate.

12. ClearCompany

ClearCompany is an award-winning talent management system. The intelligent software uses best practices to hire, retain, and engage top talent. Make faster decisions by planning effectively and stay compliant by managing remote work policies and onboarding paperwork. 

Also, improve company performance by hiring top talent and providing real-time employee feedback.

Because there is no one-size-fits-all for businesses, ClearCompany doesn’t have regular monthly plans. If you want access to the software, you can request a free demo and fill out a form to get a customized quote. Prices will vary and depend on a company’s size and needs.

13. BambooHR

BambooHR is software that handles all of your human resource needs, including analytics, hiring, onboarding, compensation, and company culture. 

Implement an applicant tracking system, streamline onboarding, gather eSignatures, and conduct off-boarding. Create a positive company culture by measuring employee performance, understanding overall job satisfaction, and creating a plan of action. 

If you’re interested in signing up for BambooHR, you must contact them and get a custom quote. 

Your pricing package will depend on the size of your company and the features you choose to add. The more features you add, the higher the price will be. You can add and take away things you don’t need as your business progresses, making it completely customizable. 

You don’t have to pay for something you won’t use.

14. OnPay

OnPay is a payroll, HR, and benefits platform that makes it easier for professionals to run their businesses. With their automated platform, you can effortlessly pay your team on time, issue the correct benefits to the right staff, onboard talent, and stay compliant in your state. 

OnPay integrates with multiple high-quality tools, such as QuickBooks and Mineral.

The first month and setup are free, so you can test out OnPay before you buy. 

And when you’re ready to take the plunge, you can start at $40 a month as a base fee. Businesses will then pay $6 per every person onboarded to the software. 

Wrap Up

With the insurgence of companies going fully remote or hybrid, there is an increasing demand for intuitive tools that help companies attract, onboard, engage and boost the morale of new remote hires. 

As a result, you can now find many software companies providing top-rated platforms and resources for struggling human resource teams everywhere.

HR software can only improve from here, so be on the lookout for new and exciting tools. 

These top 13 software companies will help you effectively onboard new remote employees quickly. 

If you want to attract top talent, speed up onboarding, use perceptive communication tools, and increase employee satisfaction, you need to integrate HR technology into your processes.

FAQ

The post 13+ Best tools for remote employee onboarding appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

In this blog, we’ll share how to develop a working business automation strategy that delivers results. Also, we’ll explore the present-day state of automation adoption and provide real-life examples of how businesses can maximize their revenue with business automation solutions. Let’s get started!

What is business automation?

The terms “digital transformation” and “business process automation” (BPA) are sometimes used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. In a very general sense, business process automation is a means, while digital transformation is the final goal. Business automation continues to be one of the dominating tech trends in 2022 that drive digital transformation across different industries.

Business automation leverages digital technology to make routine processes/repetitive tasks more efficient by eliminating human intervention. The use of automation also increases transparency and reporting capabilities, streamlines document workflows and accelerates signature cycles via eSignature solutions.

Business process automation vs business process management: what’s the difference?

It’s important to distinguish between business process automation (BPA) and business process management (BPM). While BPA focuses on digitizing and automating workflows, BPM is about managing those workflows from end to end. Business process automation relates to other forms of automation, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Digital Process Automation (DPA).

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses bots that imitate human behavior to complete repetitive, rule-based tasks that have defined inputs and outputs. RPA is used for many labor-intensive knowledge tasks such as data entry, data processing and mapping, client onboarding, etc.
• Digital Process Automation (DPA) is a method of using digital technology to automate processes and optimize workflows. DPA focuses on automating tasks that involve human interaction in management, sales, and marketing. It extends the efficiency delivered by BPM solutions to customers, vendors, and other stakeholders, thus improving user experiences.

As we progress past COVID-19, experts are taking note of the 5 TOP business automation trends 2021 such as intelligent automation, hyper automation, no-code automation bots, cloud automation, and more.

How fast does business automation happen in 2021?

In the first few months of 2020, the COVID-19 crisis accelerated digital adoption at both the enterprise and industry levels by several years. According to McKinsey & Co., between December 2019 and July 2020, the digitization of customer interactions sped up by an average of three years, while the amount of digital product and service offerings skyrocketed by an average of seven years.

This tremendous leap would not be possible without the fast-paced digitization of businesses. Recent airSlate research suggests that early investment in the digitization of the most critical business processes facilitated faster recovery for 55% of business owners. On top of that, 54% of companies implemented eSignature during the pandemic, noting that its increased efficiency and productivity benefited their business.

In 2021, enterprises began adopting automation technology with more caution which, in turn, slowed down the deployment of emerging IT automation technologies. According to Gartner’s 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap for Large Enterprises, of all the IT automation technologies profiled in 2021, only 20% of them moved ahead in the adoption cycle, compared with 30% in 2020.

On top of that fact, as the response to the pandemic has matured, so too has it caused the demand for new digital workplace technologies to plateau. Only 12% of digital workplace technologies have moved ahead in the adoption cycle in 2021, compared with 41% in 2020.

Source: Gartner, 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap for Large Enterprises

The lack of tech talent is cited as a serious impediment to leveraging automation across a number of domains such as computer infrastructure, platform services, network, security, digital workplace, IT automation and storage, etc.

This poses a number of challenges for business owners that go beyond achieving automation success. It also touches upon the need to recalibrate business strategies along with attracting, retraining, and/or upskilling existing talent with skills that make automation and continuous delivery possible.

8 key factors empowering successful business automation for SMBs and enterprises

Organizations that successfully leveraged automation during the pandemic point to three tactics for making it work:

• Designating automation as a strategic priority

According to a McKinsey survey, 38% of organizations that prioritized automation during their strategic planning process, reported automation success. Companies that pursued automation programs for the sake of long-term cost savings, to keep up with competitors, or to amplify the effectiveness of their business processes, haven’t succeeded with their automation efforts. On the other hand, organizations that scaled automation enterprise-wide were nearly five times more likely to report success.

• Pursuing people-focused initiatives

Massive digitization has encouraged organizations to foster people-focused initiatives such as attracting, retraining, and upskilling talent with digital and automation skills. Moreover, 65% of organizations reporting automation success are adopting “human-in-the-loop” solutions that combine machine and human intelligence to scale their automation efforts. Finally, successful organizations are seven times more likely to prioritize communication and gather employee feedback while leveraging automation.

• Developing an operating model that enables scaling

Organizations reporting automation success are facilitating better coordination across business units or functions to support their automation efforts. As operating models are becoming more complex, only 46% of leadership teams completely understand the cost of the automation efforts implemented within their organization.

As businesses are moving towards a post-COVID world in 2022, it’s crucial to reflect on the key factors that will impact business automation success for medium-sized businesses and enterprises in the months to come:

• Modularity and packaged business capabilities (PBCs).

Businesses that build solutions for a new modular economy use APIs and split components into microservices, also known as packaged business capabilities (PBCs).

• Automation guidelines

Developing consistent and coherent best practices to make business automation work for a given organization typically includes the following: 

– choosing a process to automate and the solution and meet specific business needs
– defining the automation goals and the desired ROI
– establishing the roles and hierarchy of the stakeholders involved in the process to ensure accountability
– training the workforce and fostering upskilling/reskilling programs
– deploying and managing the automation solution

• Agile implementation

Avoiding technology and the occurrence of vendor lock-in when deploying an automation solution. A vendor lock-in prevents a customer using a specific product/service from easily transitioning to a competitor’s product/service. Using proprietary technologies incompatible with competitors’ APIs, configurations, and features, as well as contract constraints, are some of the reasons for a vendor lock-in.

• Democratization of app development

Using no-code tools for business automation opens new opportunities for citizen developers. By lowering the entry barrier for employees with no technical backgrounds and bringing the business side into app development, businesses can tackle the tech talent shortage and lessen the burden on strapped IT teams.

• CIO leadership

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are strengthening their positions as enablers of business automation by helping to choose, deploy, manage, supervise, and govern automation solutions.

If still think of business automation as a sophisticated and frightening technology? Watch the video below to dispel the myth:

How composability enables automation. What is a composable enterprise?

The business automation success narrative wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a composable enterprise. Striving for resilience and agility in a time of uncertainty, organizations abandoned traditional, efficiency-oriented business models in favor of composability and modularity.

According to Gartner, a composable enterprise is based on the three building blocks:

• Composable Thinking, which ensures a better understanding of the business modules to compose, and the best time to do that.
• Composable Business Architecture, which ensures a better understanding of the structure, purpose, and mechanisms to use when making your business flexible and resilient.
• Composable Technologies, which ensures a clear view of product design goals driving the technology features that support the tenets of composability.

When it comes to leveraging automation in IT, organizations often teeter between the two extremes. On the one end of the spectrum, there’s an organization with great automation, but with added complexity because multiple vendors control different parts of the whole solution. It takes a lot of work to develop and maintain systems across that kind of environment.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s an organization with an easy-to-manage automation environment, with very limited capabilities. Composability helps to get the best of both worlds by making it easy to automate a composable infrastructure and everything within it.

How composability enables automation

Organizations that were able to quickly recalibrate their strategic plans using the principles of composability were better prepared to survive the pandemic. Gartner indicates that by 2022, 70% of medium-sized and large organizations will prioritize composability in their approval criteria for new technology application plans.

By transforming the digital delivery process according to the principles of composability, businesses will be better positioned to benefit from digital economies. The composable enterprise is an adaptive, flexible, and long-lasting business model that can help businesses succeed in the post-COVID world.

In a composable enterprise, any kind of business automation — from robotic tasks to customer-facing apps — can be assembled using digital building blocks, known as packaged business capabilities (PBCs) comprising APIs, connectors, and other integration elements.

PBCs allow teams (both the in-house IT and citizen developers) to deploy existing digital capabilities along with discoverable and reusable modules, thus enabling a composable enterprise. Instead of relying on custom integrations and code, the composable enterprise model utilizes the API economy by extending its core capabilities through PBCs to partners, customers, and developers.

Key areas where business process automation delivers great results

Can all business processes be automated? When it comes to leveraging business process automation in a given organization, there’s often very little clarity as to the processes that must and must not be automated. There are 5 types of work that are typical for most organizations:

1. Repetitive work is routine work that doesn’t require any special knowledge, skills, or human interaction, but at the same time, is highly prone to error. This is typically clerical work, manual data entry, copy-paste input, and so on. Implementing automation should increase the accuracy and speed of routine work by leveraging rule-based Automation and Integration Bots.
2. Administrative work is important for supporting other types of work in core business operations. Despite being high-stakes work, it usually requires moderate skill to complete. Administrative work may be connected with compliance and documentation for various regulatory systems.  Leveraging automation should relieve the burden of paperwork and regulatory compliance by digitizing and introducing proper management for various types of documentation.
3. Departmental work, such as expense tracking and approval, ensures that a department is running, but it doesn’t influence the core business product. Implementing automation should help reduce departmental work with low-code and no-code apps that handle processes that would otherwise involve hard-to-manage documents and spreadsheets sent over email.
4. Cross-enterprise work involves multiple departments working together on tasks such as processing insurance claims or loan approval. Leveraging automation should help deliver end-to-end customer experiences with straightforward processing, while also enabling the integration of individual business operations from across an enterprise into one process aligned with customers’ needs.
5. Expert work, such as personalized consultation, cannot be totally automated, as it requires human interaction. Leveraging automation can eliminate routine work and increase the efficiency of an Expert’s work by keeping track of important details and providing them with deeper insights and recommendations for action.

Business processes that cannot be automated

• Processes that require complex decision-making and critical thinking capabilities. Although it’s possible to automate some approvals and rejections with basic business rules and conditions, humans must be involved in making more complex decisions. In case there’s complex decision-making to be done, using automation can speed up the process by giving strategic oversight through detailed reporting.
• Processes that could potentially involve emotions shouldn’t be completely automated. These include some HR processes such as change management, giving feedback, the offboarding process, etc.
• Processes that don’t have a fixed structure or change frequently are often difficult to automate because it’s hard to identify specific rules or conditions that can be applied to such a process.

Business processes that can be automated

Here’s the list of the top 5 business processes that can be automated with a no-code workflow automation solution, such as airSlate:

1. Contract management

According to the World Commerce and Contracting Association, the average cost of processing a single contract manually can reach a whopping $6.900. An automated contract management workflow can help businesses save up to 2% of their annual costs while also avoiding inaccuracies and non-compliance. airSlate’s automated workflows helped Claremont Graduate University speed up its adjunct contracting process and eliminate redundant physical paperwork and multiple digital backups. The deployment of a custom Request to Visit Campus Flow Template resulted in over 500 requests to visit the campus received and processed on a weekly basis from students, faculty, and staff members.

2. Student enrollment

The pandemic has revealed the drastic need for digital transformation and automation in education. According to Boston Consulting Group, 70% of higher education leaders are prioritizing digital technology for their institutions. Leveraging airSlate workflow automation helped Rock The Street, Wall Street finance school for girls to streamline its student enrollment process. airSlate’s no-code integration with Salesforce allowed forms to be sent in batches and be instantly archived the moment students submitted their completed forms for enrollment.

3. Patient intake

Healthcare automation helps hospitals, clinics, and other medical institutions to make the process of managing healthcare information smooth, legally compliant, and error-free. Statista indicates that in 2020, 90% of large healthcare organizations developed an AI and/or automation strategy, while 34% of medical institutions already had healthcare automation solutions in place. airSlate helped T2 Biosystems streamline, accelerate, and secure their patient intake procedure. airSlate’s flexible no-code automation and integration with Salesforce enabled T2 Biosystems to easily share forms with end-users and secure partially completed information for future use.

4. Employee onboarding

Over 50% of standard HR processes can be automated using RPA solutions, according to Deloitte. airSlate can be used to automate repetitive HR tasks, such as employee on/offboarding, attendance tracking, data management, HR analytics, and more. You can learn how to configure your onboarding workflow in airSlate, or use a pre-configured Employee Onboarding Process Flow Template to automatically collect new employee information for future use.

5. Price quoting

About one-third of processes in the sales industry, including lead identification, sales strategy and planning, configuration, price and quotation (CPQ), can be automated. According to Aberdeen’s report, CPQ-enabled sales reps require 27% less time which equals about 3.6 hours to produce a typical quote or proposal than those not using CPQ. airSlate allows for automating the most common sales processes with its pre-configured Sales Invoice Process Flow Template and Sales Quotation Flow Template.

Business automation: where to start?

Before making serious investments in automation technology, a business should consider launching a pilot automation project that can deliver fast results with minimal deployment risks. Doing so can help any organization make a strong case for scaling up.

• Choose a process or project that is not mission-critical – something that will be worth the effort and will demonstrate value when completed. Refrain from choosing a project that can break everything.
• Keep the outcomes you wish to achieve with automation in mind. The first project should be a front-or back-office operation that is important to the business. Be sure that you’ve mapped out the desired state or experience.
• Look at the industry leaders, especially those who are growing fast, to get an idea of the possible outcomes. Look at the totality of their work, which may include dozens of individual automation projects. All in all, they will add up to a completely transformative approach.

How to maximize revenue with business automation solutions

Assessing the ROI delivered by automation is crucial for operating in the post-pandemic world. When considering the implementation of automation, organizations typically focus on direct labor savings. In fact, automating complex human capabilities can significantly increase cost savings, while using AI to reinforce sales and marketing activities can boost revenue.

Deploying automation solutions in large enterprises can lead to staggering ROI (in the triple-digit percentages). In one example, a major service provider used automation to orchestrate their network services, which resulted in an overall productivity increase of 60 to 70%. Over five years, that translated to an ROI of 383% and savings of up to $16.7 million for Tier 3 to 5 providers. Meanwhile, Tier 1 and 2 operators reported savings that exceeded $70 million over the same period.

In a final example, by leveraging an automation solution and open-source operating system, a global manufacturer reported a net present value (NPV) of $231 million and an ROI of 42% over five years.

For SMBs, automation delivers a number of benefits such as streamlined workflows, better data management and processing, increased accuracy, and more. For instance, a workflow automation solution like airSlate can alleviate the pains associated with analog processes using automation or integration Bots. If properly configured, Bots will complete any task by performing a sequence of operations based on pre-set triggers and conditions, no human intervention is required.

Is hyper automation the future of business automation?

Gartner forecasts that the global market for hyper automation-enabling solutions is projected to reach $596.616 billion by 2022. More and more organizations will be looking to digitally empower their essential business processes while also reconfiguring human labor and manual routines. To prepare for future disruptions, companies continue to reduce their reliance on a human workforce for completing routine digital tasks. Hyper automation is becoming commonplace as it is viewed as the next stage of business process evolution.

Hyper automation refers to the deployment of advanced technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate recurring and tedious tasks that were typically handled by the human workforce.

Unlike robotic process automation that utilizes rule-based bots to imitate human behavior to complete repetitive tasks, hyper automation leverages the new “blended workforce” where bots operate alongside humans. This way, hyper automation allows organizations to improve their customer experience while reducing operational expenses and increasing profitability.

A recent Deloitte report indicates that leveraging hyper automation has a number of potential benefits, including:

• Workforce enablement

Employees can increase their productivity by automating business processes within their roles with digital tools and resources at hand. Eliminating menial tasks allows them to focus more on planning and strategy.

• Employee upskilling

Fostering people-focused initiatives and citizen-led innovation within an enterprise will allow for any business user to become an automation leader. Moreover, bringing the business side into the development process will translate into improved internal collaboration.

• Systems integration

Hyperautomation utilizes a combination of automation tools with machine learning apps and packaged software used to deliver working results. Creating a hyper automation ecosystem within an organization will allow for the seamless integration of on-premise technology and disparate data systems.

• Improved ROI

With advanced analytics, organizations can assess the efficiency of hyper automation based on the number of business-optimized processes and costs saved. According to Gartner, by 2024, organizations will cut operational expenses by 30% using hyper automation technologies and redesigning their operational processes.

Are CIOs the only enablers of business automation?

One of the biggest changes wrought by the pandemic is the increasing importance of CIOs (Chief Information Officers). The role of the CIO emerged as a job title in the 1980s — highly technical professionals who would manage an IT department’s resources and staff. As businesses become more and more digitized, CIOs would become true strategic business partners that drive innovation and digital transformation, introducing revenue-generating objectives throughout a business’s digital expansion.

Today, CIOs are positioned to be the enablers of business automation by helping to select, manage, monitor, and properly govern the new wave of automation solutions. However, in many organizations, the responsibility for selecting and implementing new automation technology and SaaS solutions doesn’t lie solely in the hands of the CIOs.

With sales cycles becoming shorter, teams and individuals are now entrusted with the deployment of specific technologies and also with introducing them to others to try. The pandemic has pressured organizations to democratize their software development practices. Technologically cumbersome solutions requiring the constant supervision of IT have proven to impede workplace productivity and efficiency. They are being replaced with low-code or no-code tools to empower employees without technical backgrounds, known as citizen developers.

In a post-Covid economy, using PBCs and taking an API-led approach can help CIOs enable their organizations to leverage automation across multiple business units. CIOs should ensure that the automation strategies they deploy include the following key characteristics:

• Composability. Automations and insights composed from reusable PBCs are easier to access and repurpose.
• Central governance. Irrespective of the architectural patterns, it’s crucial for an enterprise to offer, manage, promote, and secure PBCs through a centrally-governed platform to ensure consistent app connectivity and automation.
• Standardized automation. Whether it’s simple automation of robotic tasks or a highly orchestrated automation with branchable business logic, whatever the type of automation is it should inherit the best practices and standards applied by centrally governed PBCs.
• Fostering citizen-led innovation. Business users must have the tools and knowledge to execute on automation opportunities irrespective of an IT backlog.
• Avoiding lock-ins. CIOs working under the composable enterprise paradigm must ensure that PBCs are open to consumption by a variety of tools and avoid any possible lock-ins.

How to assess business automation success?

Organizations that have achieved automation success typically share the following qualities:

• Customer-centric approach prioritizing the needs of customers.
• The ability to deliver a personalized customer experience while keeping scalability within sight.
• The ability to keep an automation system as flexible as possible by building on an extensive platform and keeping proper alignment between the business side and the IT.
• The ability to identify and eliminate inefficient and redundant processes.

A successfully automated organization will most likely need some of the following capabilities, depending on the processes that require automation to drive growth:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) and no-code Bots to automate manual processes
• Improved content sharing, management, and collaboration
• Tools to design and manage end-to-end workflows
• Basic decision-making automation with business rules
• Capturing and extracting data from documents

So, what do we mean by saying that an organization has achieved automation success? How do we correlate the time invested with the results? Automation success is a process rather than a final destination. This is because it doesn’t come from implementing a particular solution or finishing a specific project. It’s an ongoing process that adapts accordingly to an organization’s ever-changing business needs.

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