People Managers: How Chatbots Cut Down Your Admin Work

Your people managers spend too time much on administrative tasks. Every hour, they waste energy and resources that could be better spent on growing the business. Ignore this reality, and you’re going to fall behind your competitors.

The High Cost of Managers Working on Administrative Tasks Will Surprise You

Some amount of paperwork is inevitable in management. There are annual forms to fill in for performance reviews, and other forms to complete for training. When you stand back and add it up, administrative tasks become quite expensive. Let’s break it down with a quick example.

Assume that your company has 50 people managers who earn $100,000 in salary. Assuming a 50-week work year at 40 hours per week, each manager works 2,000 hours per year. That’s an hourly rate of $50. If they each spend four hours per week on administration, the company is effectively spending $200 per week or more per manager on administration. That’s only part of the cost, however. The manager might have given up the opportunity to coach and guide staff to greater productivity as well.

In some cases, you can train your managers to work faster and get through their administrative work that way. Cutting down on digital distractions, for example, will increase productivity to a degree. However, you aren’t going to see life-changing productivity gains that way. You need to find a technology solution to make the entire process easier to manage.

The Chatbot Solution to Admin Work for People Managers

Chatbots empower employees to get administrative tasks completed quicker. Instead of waiting on a phone queue with the IT help desk, they can get immediate service. In fact, you don’t even have to be in the office to get value from chatbots. Avatier’s Apollo is made to be flexible. You can send password reset requests and other IT security requests by Skype, text message, and Slack. For employees that travel and work from home, that’s a huge benefit in flexibility.

To put the benefits into perspective, here are three ways that people managers benefit from reducing administrative time with chatbots.

1. Reduce Record-keeping Administration

When your department is reviewed by internal audit, you have to be able to produce records on demand. That’s why many managers have filing cabinets and hard drives filled with records. You might have complex folder structures in your email archives filled with approval emails. Keeping all these records organized is a major headache. With Apollo, this record-keeping work burden is reduced overnight.

Apollo keeps a full audit trail for each request as it comes in, so you don’t have to worry about keeping records. For requests that need manager approval, you can also track those records.

2. Empower Frontline Employees

Requiring your employees to ask your permission constantly is a terrible management philosophy. This approach means your staff has nearly no capacity to come up with ideas or develop their problem-solving skills. In terms of administrative work, this approach means managers will be drowning in requests. Instead, change your entire management philosophy. Whenever possible, give responsibility and capability to your employees to carry out their own requests.

With the Apollo chatbot, employees can submit IT security requests and get service 24/7 even if they work in a different time zone than the corporate head office. As employees become more comfortable with their identity management, you’ll start to see a more proactive attitude emerge and gain better results in the long term.

Resource: Are you worried about losing your best staff to competitors? Improving the daily employee experience is one way to combat that trend. Find out more in our post: “7 Reasons Why Virtual Agents Boost Employee Satisfaction.”

3. Cut Down Administrative Work with New Hires

Think back to the last time you hired a new person to join your department. You were probably excited about the possibility of delegating work to him or her and becoming more productive. There’s just one barrier to achieving those productivity benefits: administration. There are a lot of forms, paperwork, and setup required to get a new hire productive. Some of that work, such as explaining your expectations, needs to be done by each manager. Other administrative tasks, such as setting up user accounts on all your systems, can be done faster with Apollo.

Tip: You can also save time at the end of an employee’s tenure with your department. Read our post, “5 Ways to Improve Offboarding.” Remember that every employee will eventually leave your department, voluntarily (e.g., retirement, promotion or transfer) or involuntarily.

Your Next Step to Bring Chatbots to Your Company

Merely reading about the benefits of cutting down administrative work with chatbots won’t bring those benefits to life. You need to take action! To get the process started, start by building a business case for chatbots. You can use some of the benefits and costs (e.g., the administrative burden of new hires) outlined here to get started.