Our homes and vehicles are getting smarter by the day. You can unlock your car or house with your phone, tell Alexa to dim your lights and turn on the music, and automate your blinds to open with the sunrise, if you want. A novelty, sure, but handy all the same.

You could bring many of those same ideas to the workplace, and build a connected office with smart lights and meeting room booking systems. But that’s only scratching the surface. It’s when you start using workplace automation to help your team do more work in less time that the office of the future goes from a gimmick to a crucial contributor to your bottom line.

Workplace automation is the process of using software and network-connected hardware to create automated workflows. Press one button, multiple actions follow. It’s a bit like playing a game of digital dominos, or a Rube Goldberg machine for productivity.

Gmail auto-sorting your emails with the correct tags. Calendar alerts reminding you of upcoming meetings. Mail Merge turning your spreadsheets of addresses into individual envelope labels. Those are some of the earliest uses of workplace automation.

Workplace automation is getting computers to do repetitive tasks that would otherwise require multiple manual actions. Take an onboarding flow, for example. HR need only enter a new hire’s name into an automated system to trigger actions and have all onboarding documents emailed, introductory meetings scheduled, and a welcome message posted on digital signage.

Workplace automation consists of a problem, a trigger and an action:

The Problem: Automation should solve problems.Identify time-consuming tasks that have to be executed manually and often.

The Trigger: Once identified, investigate whether these manual tasks can be automated and what the logical flow of actions is. 

The Action: Once the flow has been recognized, you need to find the software/hardware to trigger the automation and run the subsequent steps.

Automation platforms let the software you already use talk to each other and automate tasks across the software in your workflow.

At ScreenCloud, for example, we use automation platform Zapier to automate some of our most tedious tasks. Once we’ve identified a problem—perhaps showing a new subscriber count on a dashboard—we’ll connect the software with the data to Zapier, then set what Zapier should do. That might mean you have Zapier watch your email newsletter app for new subscribers, then have Zapier send a webhook with the subscriber count to your digital signage.

Creatively think through the time-consuming tasks in your company, and the tools required to start and finish the workflow. Then check Zapier, Power Automate, Apple Shortcuts, and other automation tools to see if you can start building the workflows that will automate your workplace.

The main benefit of workplace automation is saving time. One action can trigger many—and those minutes you would otherwise have spent copying and pasting data add up.

For example, according to a Carleton University survey, people spend 17 hours every week on reading and writing emails. This can be automated, to a degree, with tools like Gmail’s Smart Compose that makes predictive writing suggestions based on Artificial Intelligence (and your writing style) which becomes more accurate the more you use it. You can build better automations if you want, and trigger email responses, perhaps using a ChatGPT bot combined with your support docs to automatically answer common support questions.

Automation can also cut down on the use of paper by generating documents for electronic signatures, mitigating the need to print and send—and saving your company money on ink and paper. Software like DocuSign can automatically send the next document as soon as one is signed, and form apps like Fillout can gather signatures in forms, skipping documents altogether. 

Imagine if every manual and menial task on your to-do list could be automated, removing time-consuming tasks allows you to plough more attention and time into other priorities and increase productivity? That alone would increase your workplace happiness. 

The mindset behind building a workplace automations itself requires building a digital-first work culture – itself part of a wider digital transformation strategy. According to a 20,000 person Microsoft study, taking away mundane and repetitive tasks–like manually inputting data–helps make people feel more engaged at work by giving them more time to spend on other, more important tasks. 

You can also add a smile to your team’s day with creative office digital signage, or gamify your workplace with a sign that automatically celebrates top-performers on your team. An engaged, happy workforce means higher staff retention and an ability to attract the best talent. 

When you automate, all the steps in a process are recorded. This means you have data on everything, which then means everything becomes measurable.

This makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and fix them. When you have access to process performance metrics, it becomes easier to run more experiments in order to come up with the best possible solution to a problem. 

It also means you can spot—and celebrate—what’s going right. You can measure how much time was saved, how many new deals your team has landed, and more. And you can keep the data—good and bad—in front of your team with charts and graphs on your digital signage.

Communicating with sales leads while constantly keeping the pipeline flowing, onboarding new customers, keeping in touch with existing customers, talking to your own employees... There is so much to do and never enough time. This is where workplace automation systems can really make a difference.  

There are a lot of options to automate your work. Some require skills in coding, while other no-code solutions like Zapier are easy enough for anyone to use and implement. 

Here are some things to consider when choosing an office automation system:

How much support and training is available?

How long is it going to take to roll-out?

As the company grows, can the system mature with you?

What are you trying to accomplish and what ROI are you expecting to see?

Here are some workplace automation examples to help save time across sales, marketing, HR, and more:

Sales and data is a very potent mix. The ability to automate things like lead generation prospecting, analyze the results using a visual data tool like Tableau, and share your sales data on digital signage can really help speed things up for a sales team. 

Then let automation take things further. For example, lead enrichment tools like Leadspace, Demandbase and Clearbit can create detailed profiles on your prospects. This can then be used against other historic sales data to prioritize the “low hanging fruit”.

CRM automation can also be the difference between a lost or won opportunity. Create email templates that combine automated content with your personalized touch, or set up entire email campaigns to effortlessly follow up on leads. Tools like HubSpot, Zoho, Outreach or Salesforce will help you with this and much more.  

Manual task: You have 30-40 new leads coming in daily via different channels, which used to lead to duplications within your CRM. It would take several hours a week to manually fix this. 

Automated solution: An automation tool like Zapier can check for existing contacts, then automatically add new leads to your CRM. Your CRM app can then visualize sales paths. From this you can then build a sales flow. That’s how we built an automated sales process for ScreenCloud with Close.io, Slack, Trello, and Zapier.

Digital marketing is becoming increasingly complex. According to a study by Forrester, global spend on marketing automation is predicted to rise from $15.6 billion in 2019 to $25.1 billion over the next four years. The reason? Customers now expect a highly personalized, relevant experience, and the only way for marketers to keep up with that demand is through automation.      

The life of a marketer mainly consists of identifying opportunities, executing on them, then analyzing the data to see what worked and what didn’t. After all, marketing is a numbers game played by creatives. Inevitably, a large chunk of time is spent on the operational stuff. Automation offloads that repetitive work and frees up marketers to do what they do best: Think.

Pardot, HubSpot and Marketo are three well-known “Swiss Army knife” marketing automation tools that let you manage the entire customer journey–from customer acquisition to advocacy. These are complete solutions where you can build email automations, target email campaigns, manage sales leads, track customer behavior, and collect data at every stage of the process.

Another fairly easy automation win could be setting up a chatbox using conversational marketing tools like Drift or Intercom, with ChatGPT to create better responses and moderate user comments. With customers’ expectations continually changing, enabling a bot service to answer queries 24/7 can automate the right responses, lead to complimentary content and ultimately (hopefully) turn these conversations into qualified leads. 

Then, to keep your finger on the pulse of your company, you can build a comms dashboard to showcase your marketing wins.

Manual task: With thousands of potential customers signing up to free trials, downloading e-books or attending webinars monthly,, it’s important that the correct information is sent out at the right stage of every journey. Doing this manually is not scalable. 

Automated solution: Programs like Autopilot help automate email campaigns based on customers’ actions and journey stage, or you could build Zapier workflows to email new customers and share info automatically.

Human Resources is probably the department that deals with the highest amount of administrative tasks that could easily be automated to save time, money, and make HR more accurate and efficient. 

Here are a few examples of repetitive HR processes that can be both digitized and automated:

Zoho People, Bamboo HR, and PeopleHum are examples of complete Human Resource management platforms that cover much of the above processes. Again, if you’d rather start small, you can’t go wrong with things like e-signature software like DocuSign, Juro or Adobe Sign to make the contract signing process more straightforward, or performance management tools like 15Five and Lattice to help measure employee productivity and keep track of goals and milestones set against benchmarks. Add some HR-focused digital signage to welcome new team members, share critical info, and keep your team engaged, and you’ll have an HR setup your team will actually appreciate.

Getting rid of repetitive administration leaves more time for HR to focus on attracting top talent, and reducing staff turnover by nurturing the existing talent by improving things like company culture, training and career development. 

Manual task: Good onboarding is important to help new staff find their feet and integrate into the company culture, so they can start contributing and feeling part of the team. But this is also a process that can be very time consuming. 

A new employee completes a Google Form with their personal details, equipment request, and more.

Zapier sends the relevant information to on-demand print company Pwinty, who make a branded mug and a personalized card then mail it to the new starter as a welcome gift. 

Zapier works out which dates would be  100%, 50%, and 25% until the person’s start date from the day the form was completed and then sends emails at each of those stages. The emails are tailored to the person’s location and timezone and contain the following information:
- Welcome email from our Head of People
- Introduction to colleagues
- Invitation to key communication channels

Zapier connects to Google Calendar to set up a lunch / meeting  with new colleagues and managers.

Zapier sends a Webhook to ScreenCloud digital signage to automatically welcome the new team member on their first day

That’s how ScreenCloud automated our HR, with more consistent onboarding powered by Zapier, Google Forms, and more.

With any digital transformation strategy, there is always the risk of technological oversaturation. Your team will only want to use so many new apps before they burn out trying new things.  Finding tools that can automate workflows but also seamlessly integrate with the tools your team already uses can help mitigate this.

Much of this boils down to “content”, whether that be sales data, wayfinding or safety announcements. No one wants to spend their entire day looking up data in your team’s new software. That’d take away any time savings you gained by automating work in the first place. Instead of looking up data, your team’s data needs would be better served by digital signage.

Digital signage software like ScreenCloud automates team communications and helps surface things like important company news and figures, social media feeds, and customer reviews in an easy-to-access format. 

Using Slack on Digital Signage | How do I get Slack messages on a TV? - Screen Hack Friday EP1

We believe that most successful digital signage strategies include around 75% of automated content, like business intelligence datasets. These can then be turneMost successful digital signage strategies include around 75% of automated content, like business intelligence datasets. These can then be turned into secure and sharable dashboards with no manual refresh required. d into secure and sharable dashboards with no manual refresh required. 

You can connect your ScreenCloud screens to data dashboard tools like Google Data Studio, Cyfe or Geckoboard, or build smart, automated dashboards with the software your team already uses in ScreenCloud. This gives your sales team a real-time view of where they are at against their targets. Your customer support agents can see how many tickets are in the queue right now and where customer satisfaction is at. And the marketing team can track how their latest campaigns are doing.  

Digital signage can also be used to automate some office personalization, with custom meeting room signs and welcome messages for visitors. This is one of the ways we see future workplaces optimizing for better visitor experiences.

Everything you need to know about workplace automation with examples from how sales, marketing, and HR use it to replace repetitive office tasks using automated tools and systems.

Say hello to your new favorite colleague: workplace automation.

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What is Workplace Automation?

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