Building Incentives Into Processes

Building Incentives Into Processes

Around 2011, I started looking at how business processes that involved people were becoming more flexible and collaborative, since many of the predictable parts of the process were being automated, which left the messier ad hoc problem solving to people. What I noticed is that there were problems with the adoption of systems used to handle these more flexible tasks. In some cases, the processes weren’t designed for the flexibility required for collaboration, because organizational culture tended to lock down worker environments rather than allowing them to adapt to the situation at hand. Also causing adoption problems was that workers had few incentives to focus on business goals when they were just rewarded for getting their bit of the work off their desk as quickly as possible.

In this time of process disruption, when we have the opportunity to retool all of our processes, how do we align our intelligent automation systems with incentives and business goals?

Remote work changes how work is done, and intelligent process automation is helping by sending people the right work at the right time, letting them collaborate with their colleagues, all while maintaining security and compliance. This changes how work is managed, since old-style offices that relied on a manager walking around to make sure that everyone looks busy just aren’t a good fit with remote work. And it changes how employee performance is measured: if your employees are rewarded on results rather than the number of widgets that they process, you don’t need to be watching them every minute.

I’ve written previously about the need for both vertical alignment, so that each of your top-level business goals can be directly traced to one or more operational activities, and horizontal alignment across the entire customer journey process. When workers are performing knowledge work, the performance metrics need to take into account that knowledge work is best when it is goal-driven, collaborative and adaptable. Measuring how well a worker performs a task that contributes to a business goal is much more important than measuring how many minutes they spent in each desktop application each day. This means understanding how their actions roll up to business goals, whether they are using a reasonable degree of collaboration to perform their actions, and whether they are using “outside the box” problem solving techniques or even changing the entire business process to adapt to an unusual circumstance.

Your intelligent automation systems need to not only provide this type of flexible environment for knowledge workers, but also measure how they’re using it to improve the quality of their decisions and work.