Ok, we’re starting strong with something everyone has said or at least heard in the past few years, in talks about quality control, process and performance reviews, or technology presentations. Human errors became the big red dot to point at whenever people wanted to motivate us to buy the next new thing that was gonna save us from these notorious errors that had to be reduced and eventually eliminated.
We won’t challenge the “errors” part here. Errors do happen but we wanted to get to the bottom of WHY they are happening and how technology is causing and resolving them … And so, we researched and researched and found that the human errors we are all talking about daily are actually a huge misconception in that they are NOT human at all.
They happen naturally and we challenge you to think of them as Natural errors instead and here’s why.
Let’s start quickly and give you a bit of context.. Why do we call it a human error?
Human errors came around for the first time in the 80’ (Swain and Guttmann, 1983) when Witney Houston wanted to “dance with somebody”.
But why the 80’?
Basically, that’s when technology kicked off.
Companies started to invest more and more in digitizing their different processes.
People stopped writing their invoices on papers and started having cashier machines.
Traders stopped calling and started clicking.
Supply chains were no longer done through the post but via email.
And this changed a lot of things around the world.
People were spending more and more time being the bridge between all these new solutions and quickly started to invent new activities like copy-pasting, spreadsheet mesmerising, folder organising and email forwarding.
This created a lot of activities that people are still doing today (around 45% of their time) but, reality is, none of these activities are designed to be done by the human.
With the main goal of increasing efficiency, and quickly, we filled our work lives with more and more sources of information, i.e. different databases and systems, without thinking sufficiently about the information process. That’s how humans became the bridge between well-thought, efficient, safe alternatives to hand-written invoices and manual cash reconciliations.
We had successfully created a wide web of systems which meant people could do more, quicker!
And the more we were able to do, the higher the returns on investment. So we pushed for even more … to the extent that people had even more “bridging” to do between the systems and with that, more and more mistakes because the nature of the work was eye-tiring, unexciting and anything BUT human-like.
So it's the people who are responsible for the human errors, right?
Are we really though? 😲
No! Take a look at your own job, you probably do a lot of things that should be done by robots, and not you … Countless tasks nowadays require no thinking, just a simple execution with standard logic to “get to the second line”. And that’s where talking about human errors is just so out of place. All these errors are generated by a process that isn’t designed for humans … yet we’re STILL stuck at the “bridging” stage.
All these human errors happen naturally because they stem from processes that require NO thinking, innovating, cognitive reasoning and judgement, all of which are the activities tasked to the human …
No human tasks, no human errors .. or at least, you’d think that’s simple logic!
Think about any of the following for a second:
- Have you ever transferred lots of names, dates and numbers from a scan into a spreadsheet? Then you probably remember asking a colleague for extra pairs of eyes in the end, just to make sure you haven’t gotten anything wrong?
- Have you ever had to repeat a series of keystrokes more than 100 times? We all have, so most likely you also had a moment of realization that you lost your focus for a sec … when you saw a duplicate entry you now had to erase?
- When was the last time you had to send a report to your manager? Do you still spend good 10 minutes each time reviewing the template just to make sure you did not miss to correct a spelling mistake?
Well, there are infinite examples of natural errors that we collectively try not to talk about aloud too often because they’re so simple that we don’t want to be associated with them.
I mean, you had typos in your email, COME OOON??! 😫
This is a reality in all companies still today. It costs a lot, yet it’s often not even voiced, faced or even properly estimated because it comes to say that the operations of the business isn’t error free and let’s be honest, we all like to be right!
Human❤
Think about all the stress and self-doubt that are experienced by the individual who’s been “found guilty” of making these errors. All this not only leads to total lack of enjoyment at work, but can also impact the person’s mental health if the conversations aren’t handled in a constructive positive way.
And if that isn’t bad enough already, with time and frequency, this could also disrupt some otherwise good personal relationships, both within the team and potentially clients …
So there’s A LOT at stake!
Time spent/ wasted
Even if the error is corrected, think about the hours that are being spent, on both drafting and then reviewing the information. And what if you review and spot areas for improvement? You’ll probably return the work to the preparer and review once again later … tick tock!
All this time is probably spent in little increments here and there but if you add them all up, you might be surprised at the amount of time that gets wasted … daily!
What if you could invest all this time into something that actually makes a difference?🤔
Desire to just leave -> Higher Staff turnover
The types of processes that are boring and perfect opportunities for natural errors often raise personal questions.
Am I really here to do this kind of job?
What do I bring to the table?
Why am I stressing about such silly things?
Maybe I should look somewhere else?
And that can be costly to the individual, the HR department and the training team … you can think a long way. You know the soccer players and the whole team need stability to create a truly great team that work.
Think about your players and your team the same way!
Risk Management
Natural errors do happen and if someone knows this, it’s the risk management team. They estimate the financial impact across the organisation and then spend a lot of time trying to reduce the compliance risk. Where are we most exposed to and how badly can it get?
Reputation, both personal and company
We often hear on the news and social media about errors that this and this company made back in 2010. Well, natural errors have the nasty habit of causing a lot of bad publicity if unspotted at the right time and the reputation cost could be pretty bad. Talk to BP or more recently Peloton …
But what about the individual? Think of someone who’d like to be “remembered” for the typos and the lack of attention to detail … You can’t think of anyone because no one would ever like to have such reputation follow him/ her.
Clearly, financial
If the error remains unspotted and is sent to your client or to the client of your client, its cost is direct and can end up being very expensive.
But you are right ... It’s easy to point to the problem
So what about the solutions?
Well, luckily the technologies have caught up so quickly that today they not only bring the systems but also the solutions that do the “bridging” so you no longer have to.
Next time you find yourself doing something dull that doesn’t require you to think, innovate, reason cognitively or make a judgement, read a bit about the possibilities of technology today and speak up because
You shouldn’t be competing with software and robots to do THEIR job.
You’ve got innovative, creative, judgement work to do instead so stay focused on that.
In the next blogs we’ll talk about the different technologies that are already solving your daily frustrations but just as a little teaser to kick start your day, these can broadly be grouped for ease into the following “families”:
Optical Character Recognition
Think about the errors you make or see your associates make (daily) when copying information over from a scan into a spreadsheet, system, etc. OCR reads all sorts of files (including scans) and transfers the data into a spreadsheet or a system automatically.
Extract Transform & Load
Extracting a report, updating its values within another report, and loading it into a different system. Wrong file, duplicates… Yep, that’s where ETL software comes to avoid these errors.
Robotic Process Automation
Navigating through your internal system every day and constantly checking if you did not forget anything? This is where the robot’s job begins by taking over all the manual tasks that are standard, predictable and follow a simple logic … thinking about all the clicking and scrolling you do daily.
So what to remember?
Errors do happen and those that we call human are often wrongly attributed to the human.
So we call all the simple typo-like errors that we make daily NATURAL instead because they result from tasks that aren’t designed for performance by the humans … simple!
These errors can be avoided and the technologies already available today go a long long way at delegating them back to the robots.
So if you have a task that frustrates you as you go about your workday today (or any day), feel empowered to speak up about it.
Chances are that people around you (yes, including your manager) haven’t read this post and aren’t as aware as you are now that technology can and should step in!
We’d love to know about the tasks that drive you a bit crazy as well so please send us a message on Linkedin and share with us.
Thank you for reading this first blog!
If you learned one thing from it, we’d love to know about it so please let us know 🙂
Have a great day and week ahead!🙌
