During a recent visit to a pet shop, my wife and I observed some of the pets available for adoption. We noticed one of the small hamsters playing on it’s wheel going round and round in the same motion before jumping off, having a drink, and then going back on the wheel… A sequence of behaviours we often observe in the workplace in various ways!
In our recent briefing paper, Altus reflect on the importance of ‘cementing a culture of efficiency’ and discuss operational efficiency not being a ‘one and done’ exercise, but rather a consistent mindset and behaviour. Within operational settings, it’s very typical to see similar behaviours and skills on a daily basis due to the nature of many financial services roles i.e. form-based requests from clients. Therefore, my immediate two questions to any business would be these. Could tech or AI help execute or integrate these processes? Is using your workforce to process these in the same way every day the best use of skilled individuals within the operation?
Businesses will always have challenges with their workforce but larger challenges often form when staff feel they are ‘On the Treadmill’. Lack of opportunity to expand knowledge and skills outside of an individual’s day to day role not only impacts the employee experience leading to loss of talented members of staff, but can also have other impacts including on customer experience through manual errors and inefficient processes. Further frustrations can often come from working with legacy technology to fulfil modern requirements and this becomes a huge challenge if not integrated to still provide a great customer experience for the end client.
There are opportunities for businesses to make many benefits from the focus on people efficiency both monetary and experience. Savings in recruitment and opportunities for staff to expand their skill sets and provide the business with new ideas are just two of the many which can come from having that culture. Proposition development is key to progress of the business. This is a great example for where having a workforce who have expanded their skills would provide the business opportunities to save money and provide opportunities for people within the business. This isn’t always going to be an option of course, but the dream for a lot of businesses (and many in the industry), is that there are opportunities for members of the workforce to input into processes through exception management and oversight rather than lead and rely on them!
Finally it wouldn’t be a financial services blog without talking about AI… How can we use AI to expand our proposition? How can we use AI to make things quicker? Typical questions businesses are asking. But on a deeper level, businesses should be asking how we integrate the workforce with tech and AI to build a better experience for both employees and clients. Altus in the briefing paper I mentioned earlier, highlight the process of process re-engineering. This is an example of the business doing something in a similar way each time following the same process – is this something which AI could be used to give employees more time to embed the deeper level of detail and focus on the exceptions rather than the rule? It’s important to note that cleanliness and diversity of data would be 2 key elements to this. Businesses have grown and styled their data for many years around the short-term operational needs required. But for them to get the impacts and improvements of that tech and AI could provide, it is crucial that modern requirements and new ideas which have been brought to the business through individuals are considered and embraced.
Operational efficiency shouldn’t just be viewed as the ‘cost cutting’ exercise everyone’s minds immediately go to. The ability for the business to be efficient in other ways and be smart with the way it uses its people and their skills within their operating model is important. The increase in AI and Fintech capability could become key to ensuring people aren’t just ‘on the wheel’ or firefighting in their daily roles.
More processes doesn’t always mean more people – If the hamster doesn’t have the wheel to consistently go back to, what could they achieve? They could surprise you!
