Automation takes away chaos, not jobs. How to prepare your team for change

When employees hear about automation, they think about their own job first. This fear is understandable. The media write about lay-offs at large corporations, and hardly anyone explains what the change means in a company of 80 or 200 people.

The management board should neither ignore this fear nor brush it off with “there’s nothing to be afraid of”. For many people, work is not only a salary but also their standing in the team, a sense of competence and the rhythm of the day. A change that nobody has explained threatens all of these at once.

In fairness, some of these concerns are well founded. In its 2025 report on the future of jobs, the World Economic Forum forecasts a fall in the number of clerical and administrative roles. At the same time, it estimates a net increase in jobs worldwide, with the main change being in the skills required.

Resistance rarely looks like open opposition. More often it takes quiet forms that are easy to miss:

The most effective argument in these conversations is a specific description of the change for a specific person. The table below gives hypothetical examples from three departments of a mid-sized company. Replace them with the tasks that take the most time in your company.

Pay attention to the last column. It answers the question employees silently ask themselves: “So what will I be doing then?” If you cannot fill it in, you are not yet ready to talk to your team.

This is a decision for the management board, not the implementation team. Without it, every conversation with employees will be evasive, and people will sense it. In practice there are four options.

The first is growth without new hires. The company handles more orders or customers with the same team. The second is moving people to tasks that are short-staffed today, such as quality control or key account management.

The third is natural attrition: the company does not replace people who leave of their own accord or retire. The fourth is reducing headcount. That too can be an honest goal, but then you have to say so openly and do it in line with the legal rules we describe below.

The worst scenario is no decision at all and a vague “we’ll see”. Employees will fill that gap with the bleakest version, and the rumour will spread faster than any official announcement.

It is worth starting the conversations a few weeks before the tool goes live, not on the day of the training. The order matters: a manager who learns about the change at the same time as their staff will not be able to answer their questions.

The steps below work whether you are automating the invoice workflow, handling enquiries or reporting:

Employees listen carefully to every word from the management board. Some phrases that sound neutral to a CFO sound like a warning of lay-offs to an employee. The table below shows the most common ones.

This is not about nicer words for the same message. If the real goal is to cut jobs, changing your vocabulary will not help, and it will later backfire on you.

Managers have different concerns from their staff. They fear that once the tool takes over routine matters, their role will lose its importance. A customer service manager may think: if the system handles half the enquiries, why does the company need someone to allocate the work?

The answer is that the role changes but does not disappear. The manager stops allocating and checking routine matters. Instead, they deal with difficult cases, service quality, developing people and improving the process.

This change does, however, require different skills, so it is worth planning training for managers. Without a conversation about their new role, managers can slow down a rollout very effectively with arguments such as “this isn’t a good time”. Usually the issue is not the timing but uncertainty about their own position.

Talking to your team is not just good practice. In several situations, Polish law requires employers to inform or consult employees. Check these with your HR department or a lawyer before you set the timetable.

If your company has a works council and employs at least 50 people, you must inform it about measures that may significantly change the organisation of work and consult it on them. Failing to hold such consultations is a petty offence. If there are trade unions in the company, they have separate rights, which are worth checking with a lawyer.

If automation is, however, to lead to job cuts, a company with at least 20 employees is subject to the Polish act on dismissals for reasons not attributable to employees. A collective redundancy means dismissing at least 10 people within 30 days in a company with fewer than 100 employees, 10% of the workforce with 100–299 employees, or 30 people with 300 or more. It requires consultation with trade unions or employee representatives and notification of the labour office.

Employees dismissed for these reasons are entitled to severance pay, also in individual dismissals at a company with at least 20 employees. It amounts to one month’s salary for service of less than 2 years with the company, two months’ for 2 to 8 years and three months’ for longer service. The upper limit is 15 times the minimum wage. When introducing new tools, also bear in mind the three issues listed below.

In the first weeks, caution dominates. People check the tool’s results, look for errors and compare them with the old way of working. This is a healthy reaction – provided every report gets a quick response and fixes are visible within a few days.

After a few weeks, the first questions usually appear, such as “could we do the same with orders?”. That is the best sign that the change is taking hold. It is worth involving the people who ask them in the next stage.

To avoid relying on impressions, measure a few things before go-live and again after a quarter:

A common cause of failure is not the technology but a gap between words and actions. The management board talks about easing people’s workload, then a quarter later announces cuts in the same department. After an experience like that, every subsequent rollout will be met with distrust.

The second typical mistake is cutting jobs in several waves. Each wave prompts the people with the best offers on the market to leave, while those who would find it hardest to move stay. If a reduction is necessary, it is better to do it once, openly and in line with the law.

The third mistake is automating a process that nobody has sorted out first. Employees quickly see that the tool repeats the old problems and lose faith in the whole change. Before you automate anything, write down how the process should work.