Will Automation Take My Job? A Gentle Conversation With Your Staff
What happens in your office when you say the word automation? If the answer is a sudden silence, a few nervous glances and a WhatsApp group you are not in lighting up immediately, you are not alone. Workplace automation in Kenya is often announced like a weather forecast and received like a retrenchment letter.
Take Omondi, who runs a logistics company in Mombasa. He announced at the Monday meeting that the company would be automating dispatch scheduling. He meant it as good news. By lunchtime, three people had updated their CVs, and the dispatch clerk, Halima, was barely speaking to him.
Omondi had made a classic mistake. He talked about the system. His staff heard a story about their jobs.
Why People Worry
It is worth taking the fear seriously, because it is reasonable. People have mortgages, school fees and relatives who call on the 30th. Jobs in Kenya are hard to come by, and nobody wants to train the machine that replaces them.
Staff usually worry about some combination of these:
Losing their job entirely
Losing the part of the job they are good at and proud of
Looking slow or foolish while learning something new
Being blamed when the new system makes a mistake
Not being consulted about how their own work should change
Notice that only one of those is about losing the job. The rest are about dignity, competence and respect. You can address all of them.
Be Honest About What Is Changing
The worst thing you can do is be vague. Vague announcements create space for rumours, and rumours in a Kenyan office travel faster than a boda boda in an empty lane. Tell people specifically which tasks are being automated, why, and what you expect to happen to their role.
If you are genuinely not planning any job cuts, say so clearly. If there will be changes to roles, say that too, and explain the support you will offer. People can handle hard news far better than uncertainty.
Talking About Workplace Automation With Your Team
Here is a simple structure for the conversation, ideally one on one or in small groups rather than a big announcement:
Start with the problem: the task is slow, error-prone or keeps people late
Explain what the automation will do, and what it will not do
Describe what the person's role will look like afterwards
Ask what they think, and actually listen
Agree on training and a realistic timeline
That fourth step matters most. The people doing a task every day know its quirks better than any consultant. Halima, it turned out, knew about a dozen exceptions in the dispatch process that nobody had written down. Without her, the new system would have scheduled lorries to customers who only accept deliveries on Tuesdays.
Involve Them in Building It
The best way to turn a worried employee into a champion is to give them a role in the project. Ask them to test it. Ask them to spot errors. Put their name on the improvement. When the new system works, it should feel like their win, not something done to them.
It also helps to point out what they will gain. Fewer late nights at month-end. Less mind-numbing retyping. More time for the parts of the job that need judgement, relationships and local knowledge, which are exactly the parts no software does well.
Follow Through
Promises made in a meeting count for nothing if they are forgotten three months later. Provide the training you promised. Check in after launch. Fix the annoying bugs quickly. And when someone's role grows because of the extra time automation freed up, recognise it publicly.
Omondi eventually sat down with Halima over chai and a plate of mahamri and had a proper conversation. She now runs the dispatch system and trains new staff on it. She is, by her own admission, slightly smug about it.
One practical tip before your next announcement: write down, for each affected person, one sentence about how their job gets better. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not ready for the meeting. If you need help planning the change, our team has been through this with many Kenyan businesses.