Automating Your Office: Improving Your Workplace Productivity With Office Automation
In this week’s ProductivityCast, we discuss:
What is office automation? How does it differ from home automation? What office automation do you currently have/use? What office automation would you use if technology/cost/other barriers to entry were not there? Where should you start with office automation?
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Automating Your Office
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Four fundamentals of workplace automation
Raw Text Transcript | Automating Your Office
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28
Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to a another episode of this productivity cast, where we will be discussing office automation. And what I thought we would do today is we would discuss the contrast between what is office automation and what is home automation and explaining that for everybody, and then getting into the context of what automation we use in our own office environments or the environments that we work in because that could be home as well. People have home offices, and people work from home. And those offices also can take advantage of automation. And then talking about what technology we would use if all technology was available to us and cost and other barriers to entry were reduced. What would we use in our office to help us be more productive in our workplaces? And and then we'll, we'll close out the episode with what are the first steps we would consider offering to our listeners to you listeners to start in the office automation space? So let's get started first with what is office automation and how does it contrast in your minds with home automation?
Augusto Pinaud 1:42
From my perspective, home automation, it's a lot more about comfort, okay, it's about security and comfort you go you know, get the lights Get, get automated, something's when you now come to the office. It's more related about efficiency on productivity. One of the First examples we can talk about, about automation in the office was the death of the paper fax, okay, and I need even that most people will not consider that automation. That's the first step. So the earliest steps of the office automation, the moment we stop having to worry about replacing, you know, getting a fax in the middle of the thing, and now discovered, oh, we run out of paper, it's called a birth a human being who send us that, to get that when now you can get the numbers digital and get that fax in the same way via email or directly in the email. You know, that's the difference between, in my opinion between home automation and office automation, it's office automation is more about how can we make the work more efficient, more productive, and even in some cases, how can we stop depending on humans for a certain task, you know, as much as You know, when you look on a small business offices, okay, how much can we use technology to not hire that person that we may or may not need or the fluctuation of their business at that particular point? can or cannot afford? And how can we use technology and automation to help that?
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20
I think that office automation is about helping make the business more profitable. And increasing productivity is, you know, one of those mean a big ticket big majority reasons and, and vehicles to that end. And the way in which I see office automation, really mostly different from home automation, is that there is so much more software involved in office automation than there than there probably isn't home automation, just because we spend most of our days working in an office environment or just working generally in our lives. And that information needs to be moved around. And now today since most people work on a computer, whether that be at a desk or on their phone, we are, are constantly being bombarded with new types of productivity software. And those software can be connected together. And we've talked a little bit about this before, with, you know, Zapier and other other integration tools. But I'd like to get a little bit more into that today, as well. And I'm sure we'll talk about it exclusively as you know, kind of workflow integration and workflow automation on the software side, in a later episode, but the real piece here is is how do you connect the physical electronics together for day to day productivity, along with the software that's available to us today? And I'm, I'm uniquely interested in seeing taking a step back. You know, my my audience is small business owners and I spend a lot of time In small businesses, helping them and so I see how many times a small business owner is using a lot of home automation, or least consumer based electronics and consumer based software in their businesses, because it's less expensive. There aren't enterprise licenses. And so I'm seeing a lot of that being used in the automation space. And we'll talk a little bit about that later today. But the that's really the part that I see is office automation is how we connect all of these various parts, these disparate parts to be able to help us get gains where we otherwise wouldn't think about getting gains. But we're doing these things routinely.
Francis Wade 5:43
I think the rationale is completely different than home automation. In other words, the Why is different. I think as automation needs to produce some, some results that accrues to the bottom line and there are well established Process Improvement reengineering, process management techniques that I've been around since the 90s. that tell you how to do that. And office automation for me is, comes from that, that kind of line of thinking, where there's an investment and then there's a payoff. And if there's no payoff, then it's not worth making the investment. And also, if something can't scale, then if your business is going to scale, then you need to look very carefully at whether or not that nice Gizmo is is actually adding value or not. So I think in home of home automation, that the need for comfort and to be the first on the block and to to have something that diversionary or entertaining, entertaining, is more possible. But in business, I think that the more black and white in terms of will I will I make an investment that produces Have a bang for the buck.
Art Gelwicks 7:01
Yeah, I think within the space of business automation, you have to remember two key areas. One, there is a big difference between physical automation and information automation, especially in the business space, that line seems to be a little bit more clearly defined. But secondarily, the influence you have over office automation is often just limited and defined by the role that you have. In many cases, things like facilities are responsible for printers, they're responsible for other controls. They're responsible for conference room setups and cameras. You don't have either control or influence over that. So you're really kind of limited in my automation is the things that I cannot influence and the things that influence me.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:50
I came across a really interesting paradigm mine McKinsey, the big global Consulting Group, and they talk about kind of the four four fundamentals of workplace automation, you know, office automation. And they they talk about it from the perspective that there is automation of activities, and then read of it redefinition of jobs and processes, right? The idea of business processes being redefined based on that automation, the impact on occupation in general. So, like, if you have high wage occupations, those are obviously going to be, you know, changed by, you know, impacted by the by automation. And then finally, how that how that impacts creativity and meaning both for the workplace but also for the industry, the economy at large as well. And so, that's like, on the very, I think, kind of like you know, from the ground level up to the macro level in terms of how we consider automation and for like for you art where You are in an environment where you're not controlling the space. And I am in an environment where I do get to control most of my space. And then going into environments where, you know, I'm working with business owners trying to automate and become more efficient,
