UK employees waste over 40 working days a year each on routine tasks that could be automated by robots, according to research.

Over half of office workers (53 per cent) said such processes made their job “more challenging”, 39 per cent said they “wasted their time”, and a third (32 per cent) were “let down” by them.

The research, commissioned by digital processing vendor ABBYY among 1,000 office workers, also found that a quarter of them wanted to quit their job during the pandemic due to “frustrating processes” - even in a tight jobs market.

The study showed that while UK workers spend an average of almost 1.5 hours (1 hour 23 minutes) a day on routine tasks that could be automated, senior decision-makers - from senior managers to chief executives - wasted almost two hours (111 minutes) on such tasks.

This amounts to 54 wasted working days a year for the most expensive and time-poor staff.

Manual, paper-based and overly complex processes like banking customer onboarding, insurance claims or retail returns were among those processes that could benefit from more automation, said office workers.

Almost two-thirds (62 per cent) of employees want their business to “simplify its processes”.

Paradoxically, the research did find that two-thirds of UK businesses (62 per cent) have started using technology in “new ways during the pandemic”.

But fewer than half (44 per cent) take advantage of software bots to benefit from intelligent automation.

Of those who do work alongside bots, 89 per cent said they bring benefits, especially for those routine tasks that are the main cause of wasted time.

The most beneficial uses of bots, said workers, were sorting data and documents (39 per cent), reminding or prompting staff to do tasks (37 per cent) and digitising paperwork (36 per cent).

Employees using bots believe they now work more efficiently (37 per cent), collaborate better (36 per cent) and have the “burden of administration reduced” (27 per cent).

Neil Murphy, global vice president at ABBYY, said: “We know that problems with business processes can cause huge bottlenecks and barriers for employees. Leaders need to enable their employees’ time to be better spent fixing these roadblocks, rather than 'hacking' their way around them.”

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