What to do when you’ve automated yourself out of work

Are you working hard, or hardly working…because of automation?

The latter can be a real conundrum for IT professionals who automate their workflows. About a decade ago, when Nizel Adams, CEO and principal IT architect of IT consulting company Nizel Co. and subject matter expert at CompTIA, worked as a contractor for a major distributor, it took up to a week to image one computer. The process took up so much time that it often backlogged support tickets—that is, until he built an automated imaging system that significantly sped up the process.

“Once I got that going, it got it down to about 45 minutes before they had a computer,” Adams said. “That enabled people to start actually working on other support tickets, rather than working on setting up computers all the time.”

However, the additional time opened up a new can of worms for Adams and his team: their schedules had cleared a tad too much.

“Within the next couple of months, and for a while, we got down to zero tickets,” Adams said. “Once that happened, they were coming in at maybe about 10 to 20 a week, and when you have a team of five people, 10 to 20 tickets is absolutely nothing.”

Let me take this off your hands. According to a WorkMarket report of 200 business leaders and 200 employees, employees believe automation can save them 240 hours, or 10 full days, per year; business leaders, on the other hand, believe they’ll save 360 hours, or more than two weeks, per year. While the saved time can seem like a godsend, some IT pros may find themselves asking what’s next when they realize automation successfully unburdened their calendars.

Honesty is the best policy. Erin McFarlane, VP of operations at autonomous sourcing platform company Fairmarkit, told IT Brew that, throughout her career, she has intentionally automated large parts of workflow. She said this hasn’t caused her any problems because she has always been transparent with her leadership about the new spare time and her plans to use it.

“The mistake people make sometimes is they’re doing it very quietly on the side, and then they’re finding themselves with no work to do, and afraid somebody is going to discover that they’re really not doing anything all day,” McFarlane said, adding that the point of automation isn’t to have less work, but to free up time for more valuable tasks.

Instead of remaining mum about additional free time, she suggested IT pros approach their leaders with proposals for new initiatives they can work on instead.

“You don’t just want to say, ‘I can automate this.’ You want to say, ‘I can automate this, and in return…that’s going to free up time for me to work on the algorithms that define high and low risk,” McFarlane said. “I would always couch it in that way of, ‘Hey, I want to automate this so that I can do this.’”

Learn something from this! Emanuel Salmona, co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Nagomi Security, added that professionals can also leverage the additional time to keep up-to-date with AI skills, which he said change frequently.

“Everyone can do it in a different way,” Salmona said. “You can do it via YouTube, via any type of social media, and obviously the best way is actually writing an agent that can keep you up to date towards what AI is doing.”

Asset management. IT pros who have successfully automated parts of their workflow agreed it’s no longer enough to just show up to work every day. Adams said employees who are worried about how to demonstrate their value to the company need to be an active participant in their work community.

“A lot of people, they tend to put their head down and just work, and that’s when you’re not creating any, I would say, top-of-the-line value within the company,” Adams said, adding that people who don’t make any effort to make a name for themselves within their companies tend to be first to go during layoffs.

McFarlane said that IT pros can spend time sharing their expertise to address inefficiencies within the organization and use that to build their personal brand, ultimately marketing themselves as a critical company asset.

“What you can’t automate away are personal relationships,” McFarlane said. “I would wholeheartedly agree that one of the things you can do with the time that you have left over is build better relationships interdepartmentally within your organization.”