Pregnant – Maternity Leave – Robot Interim

The news of pregnancy is great. All the excitement of planning for a new baby.

Businesses of all shapes and sizes have to manage the challenge created by news of pregnancy. Whether it is maternity or paternity leave, the challenge is what to do about the work that the person would normally do.

The normal options for a manager are:

• Distribute the work to other team members and expect them to cope with the increase
• Bring in a temporary person to undertake the work

Given that there is the expectation that the employee will return to work after the period of leave, the option of recruiting a replacement is not normally available.

As most office roles involve a considerable amount of work on computers. This temporary need to re-distribute work could be a great opportunity to consider introducing a software robot.

Software robots are able to be implemented quickly and can undertake repetitive tasks that people undertake on the computer. The activity is called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

By using a software robot to perform repetitive work, this could free up time from each member of a team and make it more acceptable to re-distribute the remaining work from the employee who is on leave.

If a software robot can free up a hour day, for several members of a team, it provides the option for work re-distribution.

With a person on leave, there is going to be an available PC for the software to execute on without impacting other team members and potentially without further changes in the IT infrastructure being required.

When the period of leave ends and the person returns, the software robot could simply be switched off. Alternatively, the more likely scenario is that nobody will want to go back to performing the repetitive computer tasks and the full strength team will be able to focus on the more valuable activities that really help the business.

This is a practical way to introduce software robots into a team, with a positive emphasis from the start, as the robot is being used to assist the team.

When you next have good news about pregnancy, please contact us to discuss obtaining an “Interim Software Robot”.

For more on RPA, please see RPA – Robotic Process Automation