What if your most talented people are spending their energy on tasks they hate?
Picture this: Your relationship-focused team members drowning in repetitive tasks. Copy and paste. Fill in another template. Send another form email.
These aren’t just tedious tasks—they’re energy vampires. And while these administrative tasks are important to their work and your organization, they’re the exact opposite of what your best people signed up to do.
This was the challenge facing a nonprofit organization, and in this article, I’m going to show some of the surprising benefits of automation and how we helped one of their teams not only save 100+ hours a year, but also keep their best, most relationally driven teammates from having to do work they hated.
The Hidden Cost of Tedious Tasks
Adventures is a religious-based nonprofit located near Atlanta, Georgia, with $10+ million in revenue per year and over 70 team members.
Most of those team members are relationally and community driven, definitely not administrative or business minded.
The problem was that their most relationally driven people were forced to do hours of admin tasks for each project.
These were people who were passionate about connecting and mentoring. Instead, they found themselves fighting with Google Drive permissions, hunting down templates, and managing document workflows.
What’s interesting though is those administrative tasks didn’t actually take that much time. Maybe a twenty minutes a week, if they really focused.
But the real problem was in team energy and morale.
“My team consists primarily of relationship oriented personalities,” Kaitlin, the team project manager told me, “with tasks being something that can easily bog them down.”
Sounds like the perfect job for automation, because at Automaton Army, we’re all about getting rid of as much tedium as possible through automation so you can focus on what’s most important to you.
How We Saved 100+ Hours with One Automation
So here’s what we did: we automated nearly all of the administrative work. All the copy/pasting, data entry, template copying. And we did it with just one automation.
We created a 22-step Zapier automation that did the following:
- Automatically created every template file (8+ Google Docs, Sheets, and Google Drive folders) whenever a new participant signed up
- Customized those documents with participant and team data (no more copy/paste or mindless data entry)
- Sent custom emails and reminders to the right people when those documents were created
- Gave each team member the right permissions
- Tracked the entire process through the team Basecamp dashboard and ActiveCampaign kanban board
In short, we saved 100+ hours of the most tedious, mind-numbing, and yet mission-critical work, making it happen instantly with little-to no-input from the team members least inclined toward administrative work.
By the end, all of the documents and reports they needed just appeared magically in their inboxes.
Amazing right?!
5 Surprising Benefits of Automation for Teams
The results were immediate, and I think it speaks to the benefits of automation, especially for non-administrative-inclined teams. Here were the results:
1. Happier Teams
“The mission coordinators were THRILLED,” Kaitlin told me. “Every one of them was excited when their first automation went through.”
When people get to focus on their strengths—whether that’s building relationships, creating strategies, or solving complex problems—they’re more engaged and fulfilled in their work.
2. More Capacity for Your Best Teams
Automation is even more important as your team gets busier.
“We’re entering into busy season with more and more teams signing up — so from a future standpoint, mission coordinators have a lot more capacity to carry more teams with the automation than they did before. ”
As demand for your services grow, you can always hire more people, but then you’ll have a learning curve and growing pains as team members acclimate, not to mention increased cost.
Automation allows your best teams to do more, so while you may still need to hire more people, the increased productivity will filter through your entire team.
3. Consistency for Mission-Critical but Boring Tasks
One of the biggest problems with tedious tasks is that they get pushed off, ignored, or even forgotten because no one wants to do them. That’s even more problematic if they’re central tasks to the success of the team.
As Kaitlin said, “It was common for them to be delayed due to myself or another manager needing to explain and reteach certain things that were difficult for others to grasp.”
Getting rid of these tedious administrative tasks freed the team up to be more creative and thoughtful, focusing on what they do best.
4. Better Support for New or Technically Disinclined Team Members
The transformation was particularly helpful for newer team members.
“One mission coordinator is newer to the team and not as skilled or confident in technology or navigating the Google Drive we use,” Kaitlin said. “He has struggled with to-do lists and spending more time copy/pasting, sending the right document, making sure the right document is in the right place etc. Now he has less to worry about and more time spending on the phone with relationship building which is his strong suit.”
5. More Room for Creativity
“Since the automation, the mission coordinators have been able to have more time to connect with people and enjoy conversation on the phone more. One in particular has had more time to think up better ideas of how to disciple groups going to American Indian reservations better.”
The biggest win isn’t just about saving time—it’s about saving mental energy. When your relationship-focused team members don’t have to switch contexts to handle tedious admin work, they stay in their strengths and can do better work.
Is Your Team Ready for Automation?
I think everyone needs to be using automation in their work, but automation might especially be useful for your organization if:
- Your best people are spending time on repetitive tasks they hate
- Important but boring administrative work consistently gets delayed
- Team members struggle with technical processes
- You’re growing but worried about overwhelming your team
- You want to focus more on strategic work but can’t escape the administrative burden
One of the most important questions I ask new clients is this:
What do you not want to automate?
For Adventures in Missions, they didn’t want to automate relationship. They wanted their team to have the space to spend more time having important conversations, getting to know their participants, and building community and relationship, and less time looking up data in a spreadsheet or copy/pasting documents.
These are all perfect situations for automation, which can do the repetitive, boring-but-important work so that humans can do what they do best, connecting.
And if you want to do more of the most important work and less of the boring, tedious work, let me know either by sending me a note or signing up for a consultation. We’d love to help you automate your tedium!
So how about you? What do you and your team not want to automate? Leave a comment and let me know!