When To Delegate – And When To Automate

 

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Juggling all the tasks of a business owner can be difficult. There are two main ways in which you can reduce the workload: delegate tasks to other people or automate these tasks using machines. But just when should you delegate and when should you automate?

Which option is most feasible?

There are some jobs that machines simply cannot do. Social media marketing is a good example of this – in order to create engaging social media campaigns, you need human intuition and creativity. Certain social media tasks can be automated such as automatically sharing blog posts, but you cannot rely on machines to come up with content ideas. 

Similarly, there are some jobs that humans cannot do well. If you’re recruiting employees and you need to analyse huge amounts of resumes in a short amount of time, it may make sense to use a resume screening tool rather than employing lots of people to read these resumes for you. Automation is ideal for digesting huge amounts of information quickly.

Which option will save you money?

You also need to consider the cost of delegating vs the cost of automating. A lot of companies hire an accountant to do their bookkeeping. However, if you’re a small company with a tight budget, it may make sense to simply rely on accounting software. An accounting program is likely to be much cheaper than hiring an accountant and it may be all you need if your finances are not too complicated.

In other cases, hiring people may work out cheaper than using machinery. If you need help serving customers in your store during a busy period, you may find it more affordable to hire temp staff than to install a self-service scanner (although a self-service scanner could be an investment). When splashing out on hardware or software, it’s important to consider how much usage you’ll get out of it. If you’re only going to use a piece of software a handful of times, it’s probably not worth purchasing. 

Which option will get better results?

You should also consider which option will produce better results. While you can set up an automated receptionist to answer calls, there may be some situations where people don’t want to talk to a robot and this may result in you losing leads. Delegating someone to answer the phone might have a better outcome – especially when it comes to handling sensitive calls like complaints. Phone menus can sometimes be good for sorting callers to the right departments, but you should try to maximize human interaction beyond this. 

In other cases, automation may produce better results. When it comes to sending appointment reminder emails, it’s often better to automate this process than ask an employee to do it. Humans can be forgetful, whereas machines don’t forget. When you need a task done exactly at a certain time, then automating it can sometimes be the best way to go. 

 

Jeremy

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