How Reskilling Prepares People for Automation

Fear of technology is crippling Filipinos from fully appreciating the convenience of automation. To address this fear of the inevitable change, a new trend in fast-paced industries has emerged--reskilling.

Reskilling is an initiative in which employees learn new skills to improve their capabilities and enhance their current professional track. For Filipino companies, this could be the difference between building more efficient and innovative operations and being left behind with the times.

At the business roundtable event held at Seda Ayala Center in Cebu last July 18, Salarium CEO Judah Hirsch opened this discussion to innovators and business leaders in Cebu. According to Hirsch, the fear of automation can easily be solved by reskilling employees.

“Reskilling works to everyone’s advantage. For the company, it means enhancing the current and trusted workforce you have by taking away automatable tasks and letting them focus on their true expertise and on newly developed skills,” shared Hirsch. “For the employees, not only do they get to learn more skills, they will become even more competent and competitive as professionals.”

Such is the case for human resources, an area that Hirsch’s Salarium aims to address. Consider the monthly needs of every company: administrative tasks, attendance monitoring, coordinating with employee needs, filing paperwork, and interviewing potential recruits. These are the most commonly known duties of HR professionals. Except for the last one, a misstep can immediately equate to drawbacks from other departments.

Imagine payroll being even a day late and those who are enduring petsa de peligro will immediately rally outside the department bunk. In the Philippines, these tasks are still done manually by many companies, hence the lingering possibility of delays in processing.

In reality, HR is more crucial in two tasks: hiring potentials and maintaining the power house that is already within the company. These take more than simple paperwork. They put HR as the front-liners of the company, embodying its values, and assessing whether candidates are a hit or miss.

With Salarium, a payroll processing software that keeps tracks of all the company’s manpower movements, HR need to spend less than half the time it used to for any administrative need.

This was the case for Donna Campogan, the finance officer for engineering and construction support firm TecSurge.

As with any disruptive tech company, TecSurge’s team in the Philippines aims for efficient operations with a lean team. Donna shares that when they started using Salarium to process all manpower related documents and tracking systems, the software literally unburdened them.

“We used to do all these HR-related processes for two days, complete with filed overtime. Now, we’ve cut that to half a day,” she reveals.

Donna also notes that the beauty of Salarium is that she no longer has to modify anything. Once their needed reports, documents, and tracking requirements are programmed into Salarium, they only need to select which function they had to make reports or submissions for.

Salarium was even more beneficial to the employees. In Cebu, Salarium’s payroll disbursement method is a convenient electronic wallet that makes transactions, shopping, and online banking easier for employees.

“They pay everything through SALPay, especially since fund transfers and online shopping are now so easy and even more convenient,” adds Donna.

She also emphasizes how helpful Salarium is to both the finance team and the employees when it comes to loans. A number of their employees need help with loans and cash advances, which could be conveniently catered to using Salarium.

Even with all the unburdened tasks from her role, Donna asserts that she has never once felt like her role was diminished. “I don’t think automation services like Salarium take away jobs—they take away the unnecessary stress of it!” she emphasizes, citing how efficient and more accurate their operations have become. “The team is lean, but now it feels like the work we are doing is more meaningful because we get to examine our department and see where else we can improve.”

At the end of the day, employees may benefit more to feel relief than fear when faced with a disruptive piece of technology like Salarium. Employers can help their manpower feel more confident in not working for but with technology, because they are ready and reskilled to do more in their professional roles.