Will automation and robots take over my job?

One of the concerns you may have as an employee when your work­place starts talking about auto­mating is whether you will lose your job. But don’t worry, people cannot be dispensed with.

When we talk about automation, it is in connection with work­flows that can be stan­dar­dized. In other words, work­flows are carried out in the same way every time and many times during the day.

Such work­flows can be auto­mated to the benefit of all parties. For the employees, espe­cially for the reason that repe­titive and mono­tonous tasks often equate to a less good working environment.

But what happens to your job when automation takes over?

As an extension of the automation solu­tions we have installed, we have not seen that this has led to a decrease in the number of employees. It will often happen that your work is simply moved to another work task.

Depending on your primary work task, automation can give you more time to perform exactly that task. If, for example, you wash and check surgical instru­ments in a Sterile Processing Department, you can concen­trate solely on that task instead of (also) spending time picking up and handing over the instru­ments at other workstations.

If you drive carts around between depart­ments, you may find yourself at one end or the other of the transport task. Here, for example, you can fill carts and prepare them for transport, or you can empty them again and put the items into the correct, respective rooms in the department.

And then of course there is the aspect that automation must of course be main­tained and inspected, which – natu­rally – is a task that must be handled by people. Just as the programming and quality control cannot be done by automation.

So automation removes tasks, but it doesn’t remove employees. It just moves them to other tasks.