Along with a range of other worrying news for businesses, the UK is currently facing a significant labour shortage.
The reasons for this are manyfold. One may be due to the lingering effects of the pandemic, which led many people to reassess their lives and career goals, or even to take early retirement.
Second is Brexit, which has also had an impact, as we’re not allowing people to come into the country to fill some of these roles.
Thirdly, for whatever reason, there are no longer enough young people coming onto the labour market to fill the estimated one million vacant roles.
And none of this looks likely to be resolved any time soon, which means we need to look for alternatives – such as automation.
In the past, talk of automating processes largely focused on the idea that it would replace people’s jobs and leave them out of work – but that’s certainly not the case in the current climate.
What solutions can software offer in the current labour crisis?
Software is all about automating jobs that, from a development point of view, should be automated anyway – but that doesn’t necessarily mean businesses do it. Instead, they tend to work with what they’ve got and manage.
However, in the current climate, there’s not enough labour to go around, so this approach won’t work; old people are retiring and there are not enough young people coming through wanting to do these careers. With automation, as many processes and workflows as possible can be done by digital tools, which then allows people who are doing those jobs to then move into the roles that companies can’t fill.
It’s not a quick fix by any means, but it has advantages over and above simply getting the job done.
It allows you to upskill your existing workforce, taking advantage of their loyalty and existing knowledge to fill roles that would ordinarily be done by a newcomer, with all the hiring and onboarding that entails.
In a similar way to Covid, which heralded the rise in working from home and the need for cloud-based solutions which could have been commonplace already, the labour shortage will force companies’ hands into introducing digital tools they could already have been using.
Ultimately, it frees up your team’s time and allows you do deal with the labour shortage flexibly – before your competition does.
Get in touch
Automating your systems won’t happen overnight, which is why it’s good to have a plan in place before the need gets too urgent.
So, if you’re wondering how you can free up your people and automate those time-consuming tasks, get in touch today to see how we could help your business beat the labour shortage.