Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesThe automatic door opens beautifully and cannot hail a cab, recognise a regular, deter trouble or make an expensive hotel feel expensive.
Efficiency projects adore a narrow job description. Define the doorman as “door opener”, the receptionist as “visitor router”, Support as “ticket closer”, then automate the measurable verb and book every vanished human contribution as profit. The spreadsheet looks pristine because informal value had the decency never to appear in it.
Routine work should be automated. Making people perform repetitive tasks for the romance of employment is daft. But removal needs a fuller inventory. What exceptions did the person catch? Which anxieties did they settle? What did their presence signal? Where did information travel because they noticed a pattern rather than completed a field? An experienced support agent may close fewer tickets while preventing the next hundred. An office coordinator appears costly until everybody else spends Friday locating cables, couriers and a room nobody double-booked.
Ask what the role does when the formal process fails. Decide which value technology can replace, which needs redesigning and which deserves keeping precisely because it resists standardisation. Saving the salary while quietly degrading trust, judgement and early warning is not efficiency; it is moving cost into columns nobody reviews. A business can become perfectly streamlined and strangely unpleasant to buy from. Customers rarely send a thank-you note explaining which invisible human touch stopped them leaving.