Can robots replace humans in the workplace?

 

With the dawn of fourth industrial revolution which is marked by Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of things etc, a human centered approach to HRM is highly essential in order to equip people with employable skills and capabilities to retain the employees in the workplace and give them sustainable opportunities (Cooke et.al 2022 and Zareen 2020). The automation helps to remove harmful tasks, improve the speed and quality of the works. But if the organization is unable to upskill or reskill the replaced workers to the needed work they will face skill shortage (Cooke et.al 2022). The effect of digital technology is not only affecting to manufacturing sector but also for the service sector. However, this will likely to end up in better careers for people than less meaningful and less engaging tasks that they have done before.

Fist will look-at whether robots can replace the humans

As per WEF (2018) cited at Cooke et.al (2022) they have identified ten skills that going to be needed in 2022 from humans that cannot be expected from robots. They are Analytical thinking and innovation, active learning, creativity, originality and initiative, technology design and programming, critical thinking and analysis, complex problem-solving, leadership and social influence, emotional intelligence, reasoning, problem-solving and ideation, systems analysis and evaluation. Other than mentioned skills that cannot be replaced by robots, high cost investment is needed to implement robots in to workplace while humans are more affordable and reliable. Further as per Zareen (2020) robots cannot work in collaboration with the others, robots are programmed and cannot handle unpredicted outcomes, robots are not adaptable to changing conditions, humans have the ability to create new ideas and potential to make imagination into reality are some of the reasons why humans cannot be fully replaced by robots.

Second will look at the co-relation of preferred work attributes of humans and the goals of automations.

As per the survey done by Welfare et.al (2019) they have identified desired attributes of work by humans, disliked attributes of humans at workplace and goals of automation. And they have mapped the co-relation between these liked and disliked attributes against automation goals. So as per the research some of the desired attributes of work are achieved by the automation goals such as movement is achieved by reduce waiting and improve health, variety is achieved by reduce waiting and reduce repetition. Like wise this can be applied for disliked attributes as well. Below table 1 shows how the co-relation is happening between mentioned three parties;

Table 1 - Correlation of preferred work attributes and goals of automation (Welfare et.al, 2019)

Further Fernandez and Aman, 2021 mentioned another three categories’ robots can influence employee acceptance. Career advancement by having more opportunities for promotions and more attractive salaries, work-life balance by no longer need to work overtime and job satisfaction by eliminating repetitive and tedious tasks.

Third will see how to put the digital technology strategy at workplace

Frankiewicz and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2020 explains 5 steps for this;

1.     Put people first – pair technology with the right human skills. Innovation is not sufficient if people are not skill enough to use it. Hence re-skilling and upskilling is more important.

2.     Focus on soft skills

3.     Drive change from the top – big changes must be begun with top leaders

4.     Make sure you are acting on data insights – competitive advantage can only be gain by using the data in meaningful manner in right occasion

5.     If you can fail fast, make sure you succeed slowly – there should be a culture of quick experiments that failure results will take as the learnings for the next step.

Welfare et.al., 2019 explains 4 steps in successful implementation of Robots in workplace

1.     Augment don’t automate – instead of saying automation that will imply replacement of human labor, use augment which imply as support people to do their tasks better.

2.     Select tasks carefully – use robots augment work for the attributes that people dis-like not on the attributes that people will prefer.

3.     Re-train and retain – empower workers to learn new skills.

4.     Cultivate health and safety

Fourth will discuss on the critiques of having robots in workplace.

As per Smids et.al., 2020 robots may create threat to the humans by;

1.     Taking over more challenging tasks there by humans may feel less purposiveness.

2.     Social relationships are getting hindered if co-workers are replaced by robots.

3.     Tasks taken over by robots make related skills of humans obsolete.

4.     If robots take over most difficult tasks, social recognition and self-esteem may diminish.

Finally, will look-at real world example

Accenture employs 63,000 robots but doesn’t think they will replace humans as per the Accenture operation head Manish Sharma (Business Today.In, 2020)

 

References

Business Today.In, 2020 Accenture employs 63,000 robots but doesn't think they will replace humans Available from https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/accenture-employs-63000-robots-but-doesnt-think-they-will-replace-humans-251011-2020-02-28 [Accessed at 02nd May 2022]

Cooke, F.L., Dickmann, M. and Parry, E., 2022. Building sustainable societies through human-centred human resource management: emerging issues and research opportunities. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33(1), pp.1-15. Available from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09585192.2021.2021732[Accessed 17^th April 2022].

Fernandez, D. and Aman, A., 2021. The Influence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) towards Employee Acceptance. International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering. Available from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dahlia-Fernandez/publication/349401350_The_Influence_of_Robotic_Process_Automation_RPA_towards_Employee_Acceptance/links/60a486bd299bf1921e3505b7/The-Influence-of-Robotic-Process-Automation-RPA-towards-Employee-Acceptance.pdf [Accessed on 01st May 2022]

Frankiewicz, B. and Chamorro-Premuzic, T., 2020. Digital transformation is about talent, not technology. Harvard Business Review, 6(3). Available from https://enterprisersproject.com/sites/default/files/digitaltransformationtalent.pdf [Accessed 02nd May 2022]

Smids, J., Nyholm, S. and Berkers, H., 2020. Robots in the Workplace: a Threat to—or Opportunity for—Meaningful Work?. Philosophy & Technology, 33(3), pp.503-522. Available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-019-00377-4[Accessed 02nd May 2022]

Welfare, K.S., Hallowell, M.R., Shah, J.A. and Riek, L.D., 2019, March. Consider the human work experience when integrating robotics in the workplace. In 2019 14th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI) (pp. 75-84). IEEE. Available from https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/125902/welfare-hallowell-shah-riek-HRI19.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y [Accessed 02nd May 2022]

Zareen, Q., 2020. Can Robots replace Humans completely in the Workplaces?. CYBERNOMICS, 2(7), pp.29-31.Available from https://www.cybernomics.in/index.php/cnm/article/view/245 [Accessed 02nd May 2022]