Anthony Onesto breaks down task-level analysis: catalog what your people actually do, classify each task by impact and cost, then decide what to automate, offshore, or reassign. He walks through an insurance company that redistributed senior adjusters' work to juniors and saved money while freeing up expertise for harder claims.
You trying to figure out what AI solutions and automations you need to do for your company? I have a great way to think about this everyone. It's Anthony Ernesto and this is my burn the box drop for this week. I am talking about tasks. No, not your to do list. Yeah, too, too much going on there. It's growing constantly. The more I check off, the more I add. But that's for another post. I am talking about a way to look at the automation of your organization. Whether it's AI, it's outsourcing, it's adding new headcoun. It's a great way to think about your organization and it could unlock a whole bunch of business opportunities. It's a task level analysis and what you do is it's an approach to really, really understand job roles and specific tasks. And it's so important to think about these things when you're looking to add headcount. I think what we often do are default. So you go into human OS settings and you go into add headcount or needing to add headcount or have stuff to do and like add headcount is the dropdown default. I think that's and automatically set up for leaders and companies all over. When there's a need or there's a gap, let's fill it with headcount. I think this approach takes a very different methodology and I think it's an important one. It's looking at the tasks specifically because what will happen is it will unlock so many things for you. So let's look at a like a case study. We're gonna, we're gonna save the innocent here and just say it's Acme Co if you're a big cartoon fan from the 80s and 90s. But let's there it was in a prominent insurance company. It's a great example. They did a compre audit of all the tasks performed by their senior claims adjusters. In the insurance company world, those are folks that are looking at claim issues. You file a claim GEICO and they're the ones looking at the claims. And they discovered so many opportunities for pure optimization which is what we're talking about today. It's really to think about framework to say okay, we have a need in our organization. How do we solve for that need from a human capital perspective? So what are the business benefits? Let's talk about those. For instance, one is operational efficiency. So you can really think about the automation or the redistribution distribution of tasks to certain employees. So within this example what they they realized is that the Senior claims adjusters were doing tasks that the junior claim adjusters or the junior claims folks could do. And so they were able to take those tasks off their plates, which allowed them to be more strategically driven for the customer, more customer focused. So if you're in a position where you're leading customer support folks look at tasks that they're doing and seeing what those tasks and put them into different level. We're going to talk about how to get to the end game here around task level analysis. Cost savings. Of course, yes, there's always going to be cost savings. Can we delegate? Can we reduce cost? Can we automate some of these things? Could be a competitive advantage for some. If we. If you look at Apple, everyone is dinging Apple for innovation, but they are the most valuable organization. And under Tim Cook, he has created more shareholder value than any CEO ever in the history of companies because of the operational efficiencies, employee satisfaction. By elevating role and giving junior folks more things to do that help them grow, you're really helping out both sides of your senior folks and then the junior folks too. You can scale a lot of these things. You can grow without substantial costs and then you can focus on core competencies, right? The things that these folks should be doing, that is the core competency or the competitive advantage for you. So those are some of the business results. Really a great example of why this, taking this methodology and put it in place can actually help your business. So it can help you grow and it can help you scale efficiently, which allows both sides grow revenue and then also profitability. So how do we do these things? Well, first is you identify tasks. You catalog all the tasks for every job that you have. But here you involved all stakeholders. You need the leaders involved, you need the employees involved. Cost, you can't assume you need that comprehensive nature in these things. Then you classify and assess, classify each task based on the impact and evaluate the time it takes. The list of technical and power skills. By the way, power skills are what used to be called soft skills in my world. I now call them power skills. These are leadership, communication, writing, all that sort of thing. And then what are the costs involved in each one of those things? Then what you do is you look at automation and offshoring, feasibility. Offshoring is a key factor. And when we say offshore, it can be near, you're in the us, Canada, Mexico, South America. If it's outside offshoring, it's India. There's so many different options around. With the proliferation of digital, it makes it super Easy to be able to look at the feasibility of that. What you want to do is look at the task specifically, not whether you agree to offshore or automate. Look at the task and identify whether they can be automated. So there's a lot of things that can be automated now through AI, through knowledge bases. And now I am super excited. Get geeky about this stuff. November 6 OpenAI is talking about autonomous agents. I think autonomous agents are going to be the next wave of AI change in organizations. So ChatGPT, AI and LLM models that allowed us to do things, allowed us, allows us to go on and create creative work now will be automated through these autonomous agencies. So I'm so excited about this. Then you build a decision matrix, right? You use a matrix to understand and weigh options for whether things could be done in house, whether things could be automated offshore or do we retain those tasks. So one of the options here, what you want to look at in this framework, look at the task, can it be automated? The answer is no. Can it be offshore or near short? The answer is no. Then it's a headcount. And that's the framework that you need to be thinking about. Then of course, like anything else, most HR folks hate when I say this, but you have to beta test, give the opportunity. Amazon has something called two door. You can walk in and walk out. This is a two door scenario. If you try to automate it, it doesn't work. You can near an offshore. If that doesn't work, you can eventually add headcount. You don't. You want to take small pieces of this and beta test it and then you want to review and reassess. Is it working? I'll give you a perfect example. So we tried to offshore a bunch of things years ago. We were part of a company that was, if you get the the analogy, Ultron together from smaller different companies into one company through a private equity group. And we looked at offshoring group Offshore. And while they were really good at one thing, it was really difficult to do this particular offshore task. So we tried it. It didn't work. We actually pulled it back and we had to add headcount in the us it doesn't always result in automation or offshore near shoring. Those are the two pieces and steps you should take before adding any additional headcount in your organization. So some cautionary notes I already talked about. There is a possibility that it may not work. But you have to look at these opportunities, test, see what works and then if it works, double down it. The other thing is you don't want to necessarily double down on something that's not working. That's pretty, pretty obvious. And look at evidence based validation. What I mean by that is when you're going through your beta test, what's working? Use that information to then deploy more of this sort of methodology. What I will say just generally, if you're an HR professional and you're a business partner, different departments, or you're a department leader or you're a CEO of an organization, I would request that your entire organization goes through ask level instead of coming up with a job description and headcount, which is our default setting. I am guilty of this. You're guilty of this. Go to the task levels first. What tasks are involved? See if those can be automated. If not, offshore, nearshore. If not, that's an added headcount. Then do all those tasks add up to a needed headcount in your organization? That's my quick drop today. It's about using task analysis for your organizational structures and for thinking about automating, especially with the proliferation of AI and the announcement of OpenAI's new autonomous agents coming November 6th. See you next time. Thanks.
