Особенности автоматизации труда в России на примере банковского сектора

Relevance of the study
The modern society is now entering a new stage of development, which has received different names, such as “information society”, “the second machine age”, “digital era”, “fourth industrial revolution” (“industry 4.0”), etc. However, while this stage of development possesses different names, its results have certain names that almost everyone in the World have heard about – Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, predictive analytics.
Today digital technologies are starting to play a bigger role in different aspects of human life (Vatoropin et al., 2017), such as services, and also, they influence companies in various sectors. For example, there has been a trend to replace people with machines and robots in the industrial sector starting from the middle of the last century. This trend also could be called “automation”. However, automation technologies include much more than just robots.
The term automation was introduced quite some time ago and was associated with different technologies through the years. Nowadays, automation is closely connected with digital technologies and, therefore, with digitalization and partially with digital transformation. And sometimes, the terms can be mixed up with each other (Moore, 2015) because currently, there is no universal definition for any of them.
As for automation, Groover, in his work “Fundamentals of Modern Manufacturing: Materials, Processes, and Systems” (2014) defines automation as “the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance.”
People’s replacement with machines isn’t a new story for humanity. John Maynard Keynes predicted technological unemployment in 1933 – “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor”. However, automation is in some ways unique, especially in the speed of its effects worldwide. Digital technologies are bound to cause the disappearance of some jobs, or at least the most simple and routine types. It would also result in the transformation of multiple existing jobs and the emergence of new types of occupations (Manuti, de Palma, 2018).
Automation is a phenomenon that is in the near future will affect almost every company in the world. It is transforming the way businesses organize their operations and how they capitalize on technology. It helps companies develop new personalized and customizable services and products and reduce overall costs and improve the efficiency of different processes (Butler, Ho, 2019). Although there are plenty of benefits from technology, companies must not rely only on technology as it may lead to “Automation bias” (Triki, Weisner, 2014; Goddard, Roudsari, Wyatt,
6
2011). So, organizations should pay close attention to training employees in the direction of human-machine interchange to avoid such biases.
Training employees is particularly important in the Digital era. PwC report (2018) shows that less-educated employees will be more prone to automation, and it is crucial to pay much more attention to retraining.
But even if companies will properly train employees to work with different automation elements, they still have to organize a comfortable workplace for them and pay attention to their productivity as they will still remain one of the most valuable assets for companies. At the same time, digital technologies will help save time by completing routine tasks.
It is important to consider different factors influencing digital transformation (main form of automation nowadays), such as economic and political state of country or current level of technological development. Countries’ readiness for the digital economy is currently measured by the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index. The Index consists of 4 main “pillars” – technology, people, governance, impact. According to the index, Russia is placed 48th right between Uruguay and Romania. This result is far from positive, taking into account that in 2017 Russia was ranked 41st.
While the overall ranking of digital readiness is not great, some sectors in Russia still show positive dynamics. Digital Banking Maturity report by Deloitte (2020) shows that the Russian banking sector is well-above average value of the index in most categories studied.
Banking sector was considerably affected by automation, especially in the last year due to COVID-19. It resulted in certain changes – further improvement of some traditional products, innovations and technology development (Deloitte, 2021). Banks also had to optimize their resource usage – more than a half of banks in the world decided to reduce opening hours or close branches in some cases.
To conclude, the main motivation to research this topic is that automation greatly affects businesses nowadays and in particular banking sector. Automation usually led to plenty of different benefits for organizations but also to changes. Such as substation of human labor. In this case, it is significantly to investigate how the most developed sector in terms of automation is handling it from an HRM perspective.
Research gap
After reviewing the current literature on automation topic, it becomes clear that researchers (Evseeva 2019; Micheler, Goh, Lohse, 2016) mostly pay attention to technology implementation rather than people affected by it. In the academic studies the authors usually pay much less attention to the problem of how companies should handle automation from HRM perspective and
the problems that will come with it as well as reviewing current role of HR in automation. Such as
7

in Evseeva (2019) paper, which focuses only on the advantages and disadvantages of different technologies used for digitalization of HRM. Lyaskovskaya and Kozlov’s research paper “Human Resource Management in Digital Economy” (2018) once again consider only technology side rather than employee perspective. On the other hand, there are some researchers (Galper, 2020) that provide information on the process of digital transformation and how to handle it, yet it does not provide any specifics regarding automation and HRM perspective. Another example is Methodical Guidelines on Digital Transformation (2019) from Russian government – while there is almost no information about automation yet, it acknowledges role of Digital transformation in Human capital development (training and development programs, employee satisfaction and engagement, employer rating).
Especially automation phenomenon has to be research more deeply in the current reality of COVID-19 which arguably speeded up automation and digital technologies adoption (Deloitte, 2020).
Russian banking sector is also rarely mentioned as a study object in relation not only to automation but also to Digital Transformation. Even though, banking sector was named one of the digital transformation leaders by Analytical Center of the Russian Government in the of 2020 in Russia. And according to the Deloitte report (2020) Russian banking sector is well-above average in comparison with foreign banking sector’s level of Digital Transformation.
Research questions and aims of the study
The subject of the study is the process of automation implementation in the banking sector, the object of the study is automation.
The research goal of the thesis is aimed at finding answers on how companies should handle automation from HRM perspective.
It will also answer such questions as:
• What are the factors affecting automation development in Russian banking sector?
• What practices Russian banks use to deal with employees who have been affected by
automation?
Also, the study is aimed at analyzing the current landscape in Russia, such as trends in
automation in the last years and the influence of COVID-19 to achieve main research goal properly. The pandemic already forced not only people to change lifestyle, but companies and even governments as well. Millions lost their jobs and will probably be replaced by robots as they are more productive and become cheaper every year. Some of these now jobless people are representatives of older generations for which it is harder to learn new skills. This implies that tens of thousands of those who lost their work due to the pandemic could be jobless for many years.
8

(Semuels, 2020). To not let something like this happen in the future, companies need to change themselves and pay much more attention to training and retraining programs.
Complex study that discusses every topic mentioned above has not been found during the literature review process. Therefore, the relevance of this study is due to its modernity, analysis of the situation in Russia and integral approach.