Making the best use of human resources is always good business, and in an increasingly competitive labor market, it’s more important than ever to ensure every person in your workforce is as productive as they can be. In a mobility-based work environment, that starts with making sure their user experience isn’t bogged down by tiny form fields and buttons, function key interactions, and layers of screens to click through.
A modernized user interface works wonders to boost productivity and employee satisfaction—and it’s the tip of a virtual iceberg of end user enablement benefits. By automating routine and physically demanding tasks, it’s possible to free your workforce to focus on adding value. It can even create opportunities to introduce elements of gamification, which can add a sense of game-style fun and friendly competition in the right work setting.
But integrating automation and end user enablement into people-centered workflows can do more than boost productivity. Enabling workers to focus their time and effort on more complex and meaningful tasks lends greater purpose and satisfaction to work life.
In addition to efficiency gains and reductions in human error, end user enablement strategies can help make it faster and easier to onboard and train workers. They can create new opportunities to add fun and excitement to the workday. And ultimately, these strategies can help attract and retain workers—by giving employees the support they really want to get the job done.
Empowering Employees to Add Greater Value
Value-added tasks are those that contribute more directly to the effectiveness and profitability of the business. They’re the kinds of jobs that require critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, adaptability…areas where humans excel and find greater job satisfaction.
Here are a few examples of value-added tasks:
- Exception handling – resolving discrepancies, damage, or other order issues to minimize disruptions and keep customers happy
- Process improvements – analyzing operational data to identify bottlenecks and come up with solutions
- Knowledge sharing – mentoring new hires helps them adapt and learn faster, and fosters a collaborative work environment
- Safety and compliance audits – ensures adherence to standards and a safer work environment
- Maintaining equipment – prevents breakdowns and extends equipment lifespans
Eliminating Time Sinks in Processes and Workflows
How do you get your best people focused on adding value?
Start by minimizing the time they spend on non-value-added jobs, including:
- Walking, carrying loads, and moving materials
- Manual inventory management
- Data entry
- Quality control
- Reporting
Automation solutions like our Fred automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from Zebra were made to move it all, safely, around human workers. From tools and workstation supplies to heavy, unwieldy objects, physical automation frees employees from the menial, repetitive, stuff-moving tasks that take a lot of time and add little business value.
With technologies like RAIN RFID, machine vision, and fixed industrial scanning, inventory management, quality control, and reporting can all be part of your automation strategy, too.
But one hugely impactful improvement you can make doesn’t involve new hardware—and that’s modernizing your user interface.
Skilled experts can take that early-2000s software user interface and implement a redesign that delivers bigger form fields and easy-to-click buttons that are more like today’s consumer mobile user experience. They can also automate redundancies out of the experience, reducing interactions with screens and clicks, trimming seconds off every interaction.
And if you’re asking, “What’s the big deal about a two-second time savings,” a little easy multiplication can help you quantify the potential time savings. Multiply:
- Daily interactions per user
- Users per shift
- Shifts per day
You’re likely to see gains in hours per day—so it’s almost like adding a productive team member to every shift.
And when you advance to cutting-edge hardware upgrades like wearables and voice-enabled systems, get ready to see those gains compound even further.
Building a Better Employee Experience
Workers who are engaged in tasks with obvious value and meaning are more likely to feel appreciated and satisfied with their jobs—which can help you keep your best people longer, while building a culture of operational excellence. And providing opportunities for continuous learning and professional growth can help attract top talent in a competitive labor market.
Learn more about how you can implement gamification strategies that motivate, engage, connect, and reward employees to be more efficient, accurate, and productive by reading our warehouse gamification guide.
