Too Busy to Save Time… And Other Objections to Introducing RPA

22nd January 2025

by Richard Higginbotham

Automation is a game-changer, yet the journey to embracing it is often fraught with hurdles and objections. Many teams believe they are too swamped with tasks to carve out the time necessary to plan and implement automated processes. This mindset can stymie the potential to revamp entire workflows. They find it challenging to step back and envision the long-term efficiencies and savings that can be achieved by Robotic Process Automation in local government.

Here are some of the reasons and objections that we’ve come across on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and automation projects. Our Product Marketing Manager, Richard Higginbotham, ran this through with Jim Davis, Customer Improvement Manager, to get his take on introducing RPA and automation throughout South Hams District Council. Together, they bring their experience in this area to share some strategies on overcoming the objections.

I’m too busy to save time

Many teams feel they are too busy to make the time to plan out and automate processes. Even when they know this will save them and their team time in the long run, it can be hard to see the big picture or to stop the daily work to make improvements.

Often, this is an obstacle to revolutionising a whole workflow. Sometimes, they need to first see the efficiencies and savings from setting the bots to work on one part of a process. Sometimes, the people making the decisions about what to automate are not the people who will be physically doing the work. So, making time in their workload to improve the process overall, and the workload of others, is challenging. They are too focused on their own priorities and workload.

“Sometimes, a team will ask us to automate one bottlenecking part of a process. They only want us to work on a single part of it, which they can see will save them lots of time – for example, digitising an element which removes the need for sending letters. They are just physically so busy that they cannot see the big picture. They cannot extract themselves to be able to see what they could have.”

Jim Davis

Customer Improvement Manager, South Hams District Council

While they feel it’s not their problem, it causes backlogs further down the workflow. And all that workload will eventually make it to their desk. It’s not their problem, yet.

“A busy team is an indicator of opportunity – and the level of effort to identify whether automation is feasible is nowhere near what many fear it is. Most processes aren’t as complex as they seem; the repetitive, rule-based tasks that RPA thrives on are usually glaringly obvious once you take a step back. Once a team understands the power and simplicity of automation, this first step is even easier.“

Richard Higginbotham

Product Marketing Manager, Netcall

The elephant in the room: I don’t want to cause job losses

There’s a persistent fear that automation may at some point lead to job losses, adds to the reluctance to adopt RPA. Nobody wants to cause the human who currently processes this no longer necessary, and nobody wants to reduce headcount within their teams either. They’re too busy, so less people would only exacerbate their problems.

“Often, people view the business case in the wrong terms – automation generates time savings. Rather than reducing staff, look at this as creating capacity for higher value work. Then look at the possibilities for utilising that capacity—improving customer service and driving innovation within the organisation. This shift in perspective can open up new opportunities for growth and efficiency.”

Richard Higginbotham

Product Marketing Manager, Netcall

“Sometimes, resistance to automation with RPA is because people tend to focus on their purpose being to process this or that. Taking that away from them can feel to them like taking away their purpose. When you reframe it as their purpose being to help that customer with this issue, and ensure that they are still needed to complete the task, it will make it more satisfying for them to do their work. Our Council has no drive to reduce headcount, only to make things more efficient and utilise our teams productively and in a way that is fulfilling for team members.”

Jim Davis

Customer Improvement Manager, South Hams District Council

An awful lot of the work is just admin. It’s mundane copying and pasting or form filling. A robot could do it.

Now there’s an idea…

If you did give that copy paste workload to robots, the administrators in your team could be thought of as case handlers. Using their brains to help customers once the admin is dealt with. And if a bot handles the admin, it will be taken care of with 100% accuracy and infinitely faster in the background.

Rather than causing the job losses that people worry about, RPA can bring the efficiency and customer service that all organisations are chasing, because everyone in the workflow or process is a little bit less stretched.

This is quite a cultural paradigm shift.

I don’t understand or trust the technology

We all have a TV and a smart phone but not many of us could explain how they work. But we know that they do work, and we trust them to work. We don’t need to understand why or how.

Maybe one day, maybe not too far away, the general public may feel the same about automation and bots. Digital teams and other early adopters in an organisation lead the way, and with each process that is automated, it starts to build the trust in the system.

“We can send rockets to space. It’s not such a big leap to understand that the robot can just do basic things, such as confirm if a date was before today or after. It’s a simple check for a robot, but teams are often bogged down with how it’s doing it. The answer is, because I’ve programmed the robot to check if the date is greater than today. If it is, it’s in the future. If not, it’s in the past. Essentially, they don’t need to understand how. Once they can accept that it just does what it’s tasked with, we can move forward.”

Jim Davis

Customer Improvement Manager, South Hams District Council

People that don’t understand it, can gradually realise that they don’t actually need to know “how”. Seeing it working in one place, and the next task… they realise it would work in other tasks and start to think of the next process they can apply automation to.

“It’s a gradual adoption. Proving it can work on one small area, is often the first step to opening up ideas of other elements that can be automated. And then the next. Sometime down the line, teams can realise that the whole workflow could be revolutionised if they mapped the process, automated multiple parts of it and left the decisions and customer service elements to the team to handle successfully.”

Richard Higginbotham

Product Marketing Manager, Netcall

Unlocking the potential

In essence, adopting RPA is a cultural shift. A mental switch. It involves changing mindsets from being task-focused to outcome-focused. For a team member, feeling they’ve been useful by helping someone, rather than being useful by copying and pasting that figure from there to there, is surely more satisfying?

This transformation, though challenging, can unlock huge potential for efficiency and customer satisfaction across organisations. Speak to us today about robotic process automation in local government.