While business leaders in Singapore understand the importance and benefits of adopting robotic process automation (RPA) to thrive in the current tumultuous environment, more can be done to communicate RPA strategies to employees and help them understand how this will improve their work lives, according to Blue Prism.
Singapore findings of Blue Prism’s annual survey report shows that most business leaders struggle when looking to scale RPA-enabled digital workforce programmes throughout the organisation to achieve greater ROI.
The Singapore findings are based on research conducted with 355 local knowledge workers and senior IT business leaders. These are part of a global research study that surveyed more than 6,700 such respondents from 13 countries.
Currently, while 78% of local business leaders believe that their employees would trust working alongside a digital workforce, 44% of local knowledge workers indicated that they worry about related job losses in the next three years, despite becoming more comfortable with RPA.
Also, 73% of local business leaders believe that their employees appreciate the opportunities that RPA and/or automation will provide. However, this is an overestimation as a relatively smaller percentage of local knowledge workers (65%) are equally excited about these opportunities.
“There is a need for a strategic roadmap that defines the type of work humans should do versus their complementary digital counterparts, and a clear communication plan to engage employees, rather than leave uncertainty and imagination to fill in the blanks about the fate of their jobs,” said Bill Taylor-Mountford, Blue Prism’s VP for ASEAN and Korea.
Those surveyed in Singapore generally agree that RPA has a positive impact on work, business agility and resilience. However, local business leaders find it difficult to advance from automating a few processes in a single department to scaling a digital workforce that benefits the entire organisation.
Almost three quarters of local business leaders believe that despite them understanding the benefits of RPA and rolling it out to a degree, they are struggling to apply it further (73%) and feel more thought needs to be put into its application (71%).
