An ordinary Tuesday comes along, the person who has been recording the invoices for three years knocks on your door and says she has found another job, that she's sorry, that she'll work her notice properly
And while you wish her well and mean it, you're already doing another sum in your head, which is who on earth does that work now
Why it's that person in particular who leaves
Someone who spends the day copying numbers from a PDF into a screen doesn't leave because they get on badly with their colleagues, they leave because after the first month that work teaches them nothing, it can't be talked about over dinner, and it leads nowhere
A role made only of repetition has a ceiling you reach quickly, after which the good person stays until they find something else, and the good person always finds something else
The paradox is that the faster someone gets at that work, the less they are asked to do anything else, because by now they're the one who knows how, so the trap closes on its own
The real cost isn't the hiring
When somebody leaves, the first item that comes to mind is finding the replacement, the interviews, maybe the job ad, but that's the part that finishes soonest
Then there's the training, and it isn't one morning, it's the stretch where the new person takes longer on every case and turns to ask the colleague beside her, who meanwhile isn't doing her own work
There's the running-in period when the errors go up, and that's normal, except you find those errors later, and each one drags along a phone call, a correction, one more check
And then there's the item that appears nowhere, the knowledge that walks out of the door with the person, meaning the supplier who writes the amounts the other way round, the box that must never be ticked even though it looks as if it should be, and everything else you only learn by getting it wrong once
That knowledge isn't written down because it doesn't look like knowledge
If you ask the person who does that work to write you the procedure, you get ten lines and they're the ten obvious ones, the rest doesn't get written because it doesn't look to her like something worth writing
Those rules pile up one case at a time, over the years, and the day never comes when somebody says right, let's put them down in black and white
So when that person leaves you don't lose an operator, you lose the manual, and she was the manual
The useful side effect of writing the rules down
To automate a process you have to write its rules down, there's no shortcut, a system doesn't guess what you meant, it does what you told it
The way to get them out isn't to ask how it's done, it's to look at the real cases, take twenty jobs already handled and ask why that one went differently, and at that point the rules come out by themselves, including the ones the person doing the work didn't know she was applying
At the end of that work you have an automation, fine, but you also have something you had never had before, the process written down, with the exceptions in it and the reason for each one
That document is worth having even if you never build the automation, and the guide on a process nobody ever wrote down covers it at length
Automating doesn't solve staff turnover
It would be convenient to say that an automation stops you losing people, and it would be false, people change jobs for the pay, for where they live, for a boss, because life moves on, and no software patches that
What an automation takes away is something narrower, the part of the role nobody claims as their own, the copying and the retyping, and that part is exactly the one that makes a job unbearable
The person who stays goes on handling the odd cases, the decisions and the checks, which is the part she was hired for, and that piece of work can be talked about over dinner too
The risk changes as well, because if the rules are written down and the system carries them out, the day somebody leaves the panic doesn't start, the new person learns to judge the doubtful cases instead of learning to retype the lines one by one
Where you start from
If the role you're worried about is mostly data entry, count how many operations a month there are and how much time they take away, the calculation is in work out the savings with your own numbers