How RPA Helps Remote and Hybrid Workforces Be Successful

Once a mandatory pandemic response, remote work or “productivity from anywhere” is now one of the hottest offerings in the modern working world. When offered, almost everyone takes the opportunity to work flexibly:

McKinsey & Company’s 2022 survey found that among employed respondents given the option to work remotely, 87% choose to embrace the opportunity. The survey also found that flexible working arrangements is a top three motivator for respondents looking for a new job.

To keep up with employee demand and gain a competitive advantage, organizations are seeking ways to support flexible work. For many, the answer is RPA, a solution with a proven ability to combat the common challenges that lie in creating an effective remote workforce, from boosting collaboration and communication to improving data access.

How RPA Empowers Remote and Hybrid Workforces: The Power of Remote RPA

RPA enables you to automate processes for seamless work-from-anywhere operations. What really makes these tools shine, however, is how easily they integrate across platforms, software tools, and applications. This makes them incredibly scalable and simple to implement and develop remotely. Plus, RPA typically doesn’t require coding, plug-ins, or APIs to allow for data to transmit smoothly between tools. The platform was built with business users who may not have developer or IT backgrounds in mind to make it extremely user-friendly.

And from a user perspective, RPA can improve the work lives of employees across your organization, no matter their location. Let’s go through 7 RPA use cases that empower employees to be productive from anywhere.

7 Ways RPA Boosts Remote and Hybrid Productivity Across the Organization

1. Cybersecurity: Strengthen the Lines of Defense

As distributed work environments have increased in popularity, new security threats have risen. From 2020 to 2021 alone, cyber-attacks increased by 15.1%. As a result, companies have had to tighten their cybersecurity efforts. RPA and intelligent automation can help your security team bolster their cybersecurity operations to tackle the latest in cyber-attacks. In action, this could look like:

• A bot configured to be an application administrator could grant and revoke application access to incoming and departing employees for a smoother onboarding process and more secure offboarding process.
• Bots can assist with vulnerability scanning by analyzing the log reports to identify false positives and remove them if found. The bots can then categorize them based on vulnerabilities, criticality, and devices.

But there are many other possibilities for automation within security. RPA bots can also automate processes like patch management, monitoring, and incident analysis.

2. Eliminate Data Silos

Data silos inhibit the productivity, compliance, and collaboration abilities of your team, which is more detrimental than ever in a remote work environment. RPA can automate your front and back office to enable the free flow of data organization wide. When everyone can access and share the same data, it makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and fosters collaboration.

3. More Effective Training and Onboarding

Whether you’re bringing on new employees or investing in current ones through upskilling, RPA makes training faster and more engaging. You can use attended bots to guide your remote workers through processes step-by-step until they learn them.

4. Faster Timesheet Management

When all or most of your organization is working remotely, timesheet management becomes a far more difficult task for your HR department. RPA can simplify this highly manual task with automation. Bots can enable HR to validate records by cross-checking various factors like employee active time. The bots can also send alerts to HR on various aspects of the process.

5. Accelerate Invoice Processing

One of the biggest challenges to invoice processing is the varying formats in which vendors submit their invoices. It results in a high volume of manual data entry, which is time-consuming and error prone. Your AP department knows this struggle all too well, and it can make remote work impossible.

When you add RPA to your accounting team, robots can scan, digitize, and validate key data from invoices, whether they’re in PDF, email, paper copy, or fax. Then, it can automatically upload it to your invoice platform. Handing off this tedious, repetitive side of invoice processes to bots not only expedites the process but allows employees to tackle value-added work. And as a bonus, it means remote work is achievable. These functions of RPA can be used to help other departments streamline their document processing, too, like HR, sales operations, administration, and more.

6. Expedite Data Extraction and Migration

Manual data migration is an error-prone, tedious task. However, it’s in higher demand than ever as organizations working to improve their remote work environment upgrade their legacy systems and other major system updates. RPA bots can make this dreaded duty a relic of the past by automating tasks like merging databases, upgrading legacy systems, and consolidating your knowledge infrastructure. Bots are designed to easily process, migrate, and extract data with accuracy and precision, so they can be implemented to a variety of data-heavy processes across your organization.

7. Connect Coworkers with Meeting Scheduler

With remote work comes an increase in video calls. Queue the headache-inducing process of checking calendar availability, factoring in time zones, and tracking RSVPs. A scheduler bot can accelerate this process, taking over duties like:

• Scheduling meetings and managing events without conflicts
• Identifying conflicts in your calendar upon receiving an invitation
• Sending messages to the organizers of meetings you can’t attend asking them to reschedule
• Sending meeting notes to all meeting attendees after the event ends

RPA can help your organization establish efficiency in your remote and hybrid workforce. With the right strategy, bots can free up incredible time for your staff so they can focus on value-added work they actually enjoy doing.

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