How Automation Helps Credit Unions Fight Skyrocketing Turnover

The current labor market has left many companies across all industries critically understaffed. Much of the reaction to the labor shortages has centered around service industries, where shortages are most apparent and their effects are most obvious, but financial services have also taken a hit from the tight labor market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the finance and insurance industries experienced 141,000 separations – people leaving their jobs for any reason – in March 2022, constituting 2% of total employment. Now, qualified knowledge workers are harder than ever to come by, and those still employed are taxed with more work.

This creates a vicious cycle where knowledge workers are saddled with massive amounts of repetitive manual work, which becomes overwhelming and causes workers to leave. The remaining workers must then manage even more work, causing more people to leave, and on and on it goes. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology analyzed factors related to work-related stress in the banking industry. The study reviewed the relevant literature and listed both overloaded and underutilized workers as a major factor in leading to stress and burnout. Additionally, a 2021 Gallup study cited disengaged workers as a major factor in turnover, defining engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” Gallup stated that turnover rates in teams with low engagement are 18% to 43% higher than in teams with high engagement.

This cycle is exacerbated by the nature of credit union work itself. Credit union workers spend most of their time doing the same tedious tasks, such as requesting documents, reaching out to members or moving data across legacy systems that do not communicate with each other. This kind of work isn’t exactly rewarding, and leaves credit union workers particularly prone to fatigue and a lost sense of purpose.

Ultimately, when a credit union is understaffed, the cost falls on its members. Members wait longer for basic processes, have fewer people to contact for help and when doing so face overstressed employees. Staffing issues affect the entire organization, from the front desk to the back office. Therefore, credit union executives should find ways to improve their workers’ conditions by alleviating unnecessary stress and enabling them to perform the jobs they’re paid to do.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a great solution for credit unions that want to improve their workers’ experience, reduce turnover and increase productivity. RPA has become popular across many different industries, especially as the labor market has made finding qualified workers difficult. RPA uses software to automate various processes by controlling the user interface (UI) of any internal system to complete repetitive tasks, which reduces fulfillment times, eliminates operating costs and frees knowledge workers to focus on more important work.

The finance industry in particular has taken an interest in RPA, since it is able to dramatically increase efficiency. However, not all RPA is created equally. Most traditional RPA employs a program called a bot that is installed onsite and follows simple if-then rules. This kind of RPA is brittle to constant “hiccups” in the process and hogs a lot of ongoing IT resources. Bots are great at performing simple isolated tasks, but anything more complex that depends on the current state of a process quickly becomes an issue. In fact, some RPA systems can become easily overwhelmed if processing volumes reach a critical mass, making those systems slower than if people did the same tasks.

Luckily, a new crop of intelligent RPA solutions especially designed for financial services are beginning to redefine the industry. Credit unions face challenges that most RPA solutions are rather bad at handling. They must manage high processing volumes and track large amounts of meticulous details about individual transactions, and the systems that credit union workers use are legacy systems that cannot share data between each other, requiring workers to do so manually. However, the most innovative RPA solutions utilize artificial intelligence and a cloud-based architecture that can track the knowledge worker’s workflow and transfer documents and other information across legacy systems.

These RPA solutions eliminate the most tedious work that, frankly, no one wanted to do in the first place. In this labor market, there are hardly any workers available to do them in the first place. RPA takes care of the most arduous tasks so that credit union workers can focus on the more rewarding and lucrative work like accepting loan applications and meaningfully engaging with members. In doing so, RPA improves the knowledge worker’s experience, bypassing one of the key factors regarding high turnover and increasing overall member and employee satisfaction.

Workers don’t want to be stuck doing repetitive, mind-numbing work, and when they are, they tend to leave those jobs, and again, that leaves those workers who stay with even more repetitive, manual work. As this cycle continues, members suffer the consequences as there aren’t enough workers to serve them. Intelligent RPA solves this problem by automating the manual, repetitive tasks in a business process and enabling knowledge workers to spend their time actively helping members.

Joseariel Gomez is the Founder and CEO of Shastic, a Berkeley, Calif.-based RPA-as-a-Service provider for the financial services industry.