Karen Kirton   0:03
Welcome, Peter. 

Peter Morrissey   0:05
Yeah.
Hi Karen, how are you today? 

Karen Kirton   0:17
Great, thanks. And I’m really excited to have you here, mainly because I know as a business owner myself and you’re speaking to others, manual processes can be really frustrating. But I think sometimes people also underestimate the real
cost of that. And you’ve been helping businesses to automate workforce management for more than 15 years. So what’s the secret? What do you think the business owners are missing in this piece? 

Peter Morrissey   0:51
First of all, thank you for having me on the show, of course. And one of the things that I love that we’ve been able to do is not only are we doing this for our customers, we are internally building automation to make things more efficient.
It is about efficiency and it is about, I have a pet thing that I have chased for a long time and that is to help the humans get off the keyboards. We spend a lot of time, too much time on keyboards, especially doing mundane things, repetitive things. People in admin are just punching keyboards that, and a lot of this, the AI technology that’s coming along,
is really allowing us to automate a lot of those processes. And so one of the things I think that is probably missing is, from a business perspective, is just stopping and pausing for a minute, because that’s one of the things that we don’t do a lot of.
We don’t pause. We just go, go, go, go. We get up the next day and we go again and we get up the next day and go again. And you’ve really got to pause for a minute and sit down with your people and understand where they’re just spending a lot of repetitive time. And as soon as you start to uncover this and you solve one of those things, then the employees really start to embrace what’s going on because you’ve just given them back some
we call it clicks and seconds in here, you’ve given them back some clicks and seconds, you’ve given them back time. So one of the things that I think is definitely missing is taking the time out to pause and actually look at what you’re doing and look at the impact that it’s having on your internal people. 

Karen Kirton   2:45
Yeah, and I think it is hard to do, right, especially if the business is growing and the more that it grows and the further you get from the service or the product that you’re making, the more that you may not understand how people are actually doing their day-to-day work. But are there signs where you’ve seen that
people can understand, okay, you really do need to pause because those manual processes are holding you back. Is there anything that we can look for in a business? 

Peter Morrissey   3:15
Definitely. And I’m going to ask you a question when I finish this because definitely, this is right in your space as well. It’s like, it’s like you can, I just answered a comment online on a CUB message yesterday where a person was talking about burnout. They were just feeling flat. And I think everybody feels this too often these days, and part of the reason is that we don’t stop and pause. So this happens to your employees as well. You know, they’re just not getting a minute because it’s just crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, lunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, you know. So I think it’s so important to Sit down and sit back on the first point, sit down and spend some time with people so that you can really, and they need to be open. You need, you know, that’s part of your culture. You’ve got to have good culture in your business. We’re really lucky here. We’ve got employees who have been with us for 15, 14, 13 years. And so, you know, so we have very open discussions. Like there’s no point in hiding anything. 

Peter Morrissey   4:17
We’re all on the same journey of trying to make things more efficient for our customers and for ourselves. How do you see the burnout that’s happening with people because of, you know, these computers were supposed to make life easy? I don’t think that’s happened. How do you see with the people that you deal with?
the burnout that’s happening with people who are just constantly working. 

Karen Kirton   4:42
Yeah, it’s a great question. Thanks for taking over as the host. 

Peter Morrissey   4:47
Ah, like it, yeah, it fits in, right? 

Karen Kirton   4:50
No, I agree with you. And I think that, you know, I saw someone speak recently about this in terms of AI implementation as well, because a lot of businesses have said, okay, well, AI is going to make our lives easier. But the problem is that the AI doesn’t stop. And so then the employees feel like
they need to be always on. So not only are we working at home and the office, we’ve lost those boundaries that used to naturally exist, but we’ve also got a co-worker who’s the AI sitting in the background doing things. And I appreciate that Australia’s put in the right to disconnect laws, but that
doesn’t stop people from still feeling like I’m not going to do a good job unless I stay on top of it. Because when I get to work in the morning and I’ve got all this code that I’ve got to now look at that the robot’s been doing overnight, I don’t have time to do it. So I actually, I agree with you in many ways. I think.
Yes, we’ve gotten all this technology and it’s meant to make life easier, but it’s the boundary setting that I think people forget and that comes back to culture because what you need to do, in my opinion, as a business leader, is they demonstrate the right behaviours for your employees. So if you’re on…
and sending emails every weekend. And if you’re available at night, guess what? All of your employees feel they need to do that as well. So I think it comes from the top of that culture and saying, we have boundaries here, no matter what else happens, because I think it’s very, very easy to get caught up in the, I’ve just got to, I’ve just got to, I’ve just got to. 

Peter Morrissey   6:22
Nice, yep. 

Karen Kirton   6:31
So, I will put this back to you, because many leaders are, you know, looking at how do we explore AI and automation in our business. Where do you think people should start to get those wins while being mindful of what that might look like in terms of extra pressure or workload for their people. 

Peter Morrissey   6:52
Yeah, that’s it, and that is a good question because when you’re, we’re a growing business 15 years in, we have customers now in 40 countries around the world from Penrith in New South Wales. And one of the things that you have to be able to do is do things while you’re busy. So how do you do that? And that’s where we took the opportunity. We’re doing so many amazing things with customers, but internally, I love talking about internal because we’re really making some headway internally. And that’s where you must sit down with your staff and just find these ways that you can do little things. I don’t like the whole get an AI person to come in and they’re going to revolutionise your business.
I think that’s just, no offence to the AI guys, but I think some of that’s not quite right, the right approach. I think you need to take incremental steps. You need to find the little wins because the little wins allow the staff to go, oh, wow, that’s pretty cool. And if you can, if the staff are doing something 100 times a month, 100 times a week, 100 times a day, and you can pull some of that back and they can start to see the freedom that that gives. That it doesn’t mean that they just go and work more because you’re getting rid of these repetitive, ongoing tasks that everybody does. 

Peter Morrissey   8:14
And you’re giving the people back time to, like I say, sit back and think. The humans are for thinking. We don’t have a policy internally that we’re doing all of these, all of them we’re doing for efficiency to remove people. All the things we’ve done for customers, none of them have ever been, never had a mandate to remove people. They’ve always been
about making things more efficient for the humans. So then we can give the humans some time back. We can give people time back to, you know, to start exploring the things that you can’t explore. The cub thing that I answered yesterday was about burnout, about what do you do? How do you get out of this? What do you do? You’ve got to stop.
You’ve just gotta stop, and we don’t do enough of that, and we stop a lot in this business in many different ways, and one of the ways…
I, as a CEO, stop is I will, I have my calendar blocked out from, it’s been for years, blocked out up till midday on a Monday and blocked out from Friday afternoon at midday. No one can touch me in those times, they’re times for me. And one of the things that I like to do is I like to go on a jigsaw.
I love to jigsaw because, and most people will connect with shower time. It’s where you start thinking about your mind is in a different place when you’re in the shower to anywhere else. Because you’re just doing it. And the next thing you’ve got an idea, a suggestion, a thought, So that happens everywhere when you give yourself time to be able to do that. So all of this AI is great, but if you don’t manage that properly into your business and through your business, then you’re not going to have the culture that your business needs to continue growing. And there’s going to be more challenges for everybody going forward, but to help build that culture, you need to embrace the people in the process. 

Karen Kirton   10:08
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. You can see the painting behind me is one of the paint by numbers that I do, which is a similar thing to, you know, sitting down with a puzzle. And it’s just that mindfulness activity. And it was saying before we started recording, I’m a big believer in being bored to get ideas because you really need that time just to sort of
ponder and go, okay, like, what does this look like? And how does that connect over here? And we often forget to give our people the time to do that. So, and I think that is one of those, you know, hidden costs, I guess, of, you know, manual processes. And you’ve talked about that with the burnout, but.
Have you seen any other hidden costs and also on the other side benefits in terms of employee experience and engagement when we’re removing manual processes? 

Peter Morrissey   10:57
Yeah, the uplift from the staff is incredible. Like it just is, it just lifts them. Because when you replace something that’s been happening for a long time, a particular way, and they just don’t have to do that task anymore, like it is uplifting and you can, and so you can see that they’re feeling it. 

Peter Morrissey   11:17
You can hear that they’re feeling it. You know, if you’re not seeing and hearing, then it’s not, you know, something’s not quite right. But you can see and hear, like here, it’s just, I’m just, you know, it just lifts the people up. And when we talk about the things we do with our customers,
So what it does when we start, because we do a lot of automations with customers around contractors. We’ve got customers with 10s of thousands of contractors every month and there’s activity and there’s all sorts of things happening. And by lifting some of the manual workload, you’re giving everybody time to breathe. This life of just all day,
all day on your keyboard, you don’t get time to breathe, you don’t get time to think, and therefore you’re just going to be doing that the next day and the next day and the next day. You need to find that time. So I think the cost of not doing anything is that your culture will go down, right? 

Peter Morrissey   12:18
Wearing employees out is not good for them or for the business. So you don’t need them worn out, you need them good. We’ve got a lot of school mums in our business and they’re already worn out enough from just living life. Managing husbands and children and and all of this stuff, they’ve got enough going on. So the last thing you want is that that same pressure and that same type of workload happens at the office as well. That’s no good. So everything you can do to take away some of that is just, it just, you can see it in the people, it just lifts them up. You can see the impact. If you’re doing this right, you can see the impact.
with the people. 

Karen Kirton   12:57
Yeah, and I was just thinking as you were saying that I’m having these flashbacks to businesses that have come across with your spreadsheets when you said 40,000 contractors. But I’ve seen businesses even with 100 contractors and everything managed on a spreadsheet and all various workarounds. You know, is there a magic point where a business outgrows? 

Peter Morrissey   13:19
Well, the cost of that is that something goes wrong, right? So they’ve got to, and of course we come in when spreadsheets are there and we take over those spreadsheets with our solution. That’s what the software does. With the spreadsheet in place, the idea is that in the context of what we do, a contractor walks on to a location and a spreadsheet has to be manually checked. So somebody has to manually check that spreadsheet and make sure that everything’s okay with that contractor. The reality is it doesn’t happen. That’s the reality. So we’ve got this process, we check the spreadsheet, here’s the document that says the workflow of what happens when a contractor comes on site. The reality is it doesn’t happen because people are busy, they don’t have a chance, they forget, whatever. And then you’ve got an uninsured or an unlicensed contractor coming into your building  

because Harry at the front dock, you know, couldn’t check because he didn’t have time because there was a truck there and he couldn’t check the contract and he just said, go and fix the light, mate. And something went wrong. And now there’s an uninsured contractor on site. He’s been let through. We’ve let him through because he, you know, we didn’t check. And so he got on site. So the cost can be significant  

to not check. And so therefore, the importance of making that process, taking out the element of someone checking that is not to replace that person. It’s to free up that person. It’s never to replace, it’s to free them up. That’s probably a better way of saying it. It’s to free people up and give them some quality time back in the business.  

Peter Morrissey   14:46
So yeah, spreadsheets are good for a minute. And then as soon as you miss that one, it doesn’t matter whether you got 10, 50, 100, 10,000, as soon as you miss one, that’s when, you know, like it’s not working. You need to look at other ways to do things. 

Karen Kirton   15:00
Yeah, and I think some of the things that I’ve seen when people do try and automate processes is they don’t actually work out first if the process they have is right. You know, is that one common mistake that you see? Like, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see when people try to automate? 

Peter Morrissey   15:16
Definitely. Yeah, automate what you’re doing now is one of the biggest mistakes because just in by way of automation, you can do things better. Here’s a really fast example. Manual, we get this link, we copy it from here and we put it over here. So let’s automate, but let’s manually keep copying that link.
Why? Right? We can actually pick up that link and automatically put that link. And this is like a link to an invoice in a CRM. Simple example. And so what you’ve done for ever is you’ve copied and pasted that link into where it belongs. And you can keep doing that if you choose to, if you maintain that.  

where if you stop and ask questions and go, hang on a minute, we’ve really got to work on removing those steps out of the process so that this happens. Let’s work out how to solve that. Let’s fully automate everything and not just do part of the automation. Let’s actually look at this whole process. And it might mean that you need to add some custom fields to collect data.
But you certainly do need to explore and not just build on what you’ve done historically, because it doesn’t necessarily, just because you’ve been doing it that way doesn’t mean it’s being done the best way, that’s for sure. And I think there’s lots of opportunity to reflect on what you’ve been doing and find a better way of doing it. 

Karen Kirton   16:28
Yeah, and I think also you mentioned before about when you do look at doing this and you’re sitting down with your people and, you know, working out like how to save those clicks and seconds, like, you know, culture is so important here because if you don’t have a culture where there’s trust and openness, then I imagine the people will be very fearful of someone coming in and wanting to to look at their work. So, you know, I could imagine that there would be business owners and leaders out there that are, you know, kind of fearful of automation because they say, well, that removes that human element and how am I staff going to respond to this? So what’s your experience with that? 

Peter Morrissey   17:14
I think there’s some things that we can move down automation with and I think there’s some things that we just, we’re just not ready for automation and working out what they are in your business is crucial. You can just automate too far right now and the next thing, someone on a phone calls getting bad information right? 

Peter Morrissey   17:33
Because you’ve just set up this automation, you’re really not monitoring it. You’ve not built guardrails up around not just the automation, but around the results of the automation. So when you go and automate, that’s one thing, and you go, great, I’ve automated now, a bot answers the phone every time someone calls.
If you don’t measure the results of the conversations, you’re missing out on crucial information to make that process better. We put 18 months ago, we put our first one into the business to answer the phone call. And it’s still just this morning, there was a change made to the made to the process because someone called in and asked for an employee that worked for us three years ago who doesn’t work here anymore. And we didn’t have a, you know, so we had to make an adjustment to say if someone asked for Michelle, you know, put the call through to Melanie. So it’s one thing to build an automation. It’s an entirely different thing to actually have the data that’s being created, analysed to make sure that you’re actually maximizing, you know, as much as you can, that process so that it doesn’t end up giving bad information to, if it gives bad information to somebody once, it’ll do it again and again and again, because that’s automation. 

Peter Morrissey   18:52
We’ve just automated to give bad information when this result happens. A lot of people are automating and I talk to people and it’s like, because I don’t know, the people are asking for automation, the automation guys come in and build it and then they just go away. Oh, your automation is working now. You have to look at the results of the automation. And today with technology, you can look at the results easily. You can have it automatically go into a simple Google spreadsheet, and then you can have that analyzed, you know, automatically and get some feedback each day so that you can go and look at the results and go, you don’t have to look at every single action, but you’ve got to be looking at the outputs of what you’re doing so that you can just, you can improve on it, right? If you automate
Bad, it’ll keep doing bad, and you may not even be aware, so that’s pretty dangerous to do. 

Karen Kirton   19:38
Yeah, and you’re reminding me, actually, and I’m sure we’ve all got this happening, there’s so much automation of marketing emails at the moment. And I’ve had more than one example of receiving an e-mail where I actually know the person. And I’ve reached out to them and said, hey, I’m just letting you know that this is what I’ve gotten. So there’s something going wrong in the process because it doesn’t recognise that we actually know each other. And so it seems a bit weird. And then I don’t get a response back because they’ve set up the automation in a way that it actually doesn’t take the feedback and respond. 

Peter Morrissey   20:04
Yep.
So this is where we go. We need the humans. We need people. You know, if you embrace your people in your business, and I don’t care if you’ve got 5,500 or five, if you embrace your people, I think this is a huge opportunity for businesses to give the employees who have worked in your business for so long, the opportunity to be real humans. Not just, not just, I’ve got this job and I go to the job and I come in at 8 and I go at 4 and I’ve done my thing and that’s it. No, embrace them to be a part of your business. And to do that, you really have to be open to that. And then
What happened? Like, it’s just amazing what happens when you start to do this. It’s like, you know, like doing your painting on the back wall and it’s like doing a jigsaw. Go and relax for 10 minutes and see what happens. Just move yourself away from everything that’s going on. And once I’ve been, you know, jigsawing for an hour or two, it’s like, it’s amazing what happens. It is amazing what happens.  

But that never happens when you’re sitting at your desk or when you’re, you know, if you’re just back-to-back meetings, it never happens. You’ve got to find that space to do that. 

Karen Kirton   21:23
Now, I’m sure you’ve got some really interesting stories about automation. Have you ever seen automation expose a deeper people or cultural leadership issue in a business? Obviously without naming, but… 

Peter Morrissey   21:38
For me.
I think that, I think the biggest thing we’ve uncovered when we go to automation, it’s probably more with customers, is that you’re moving from manual to automation. And the biggest thing we’ve uncovered is that the manual was just never, ever done properly, right? And it’s like, it was always believed that, oh, no, we’ve got this manual process and it works.  

And then you uncover that really, it actually wasn’t working at all, but because there was no checks and balances, whatever that process. So that’s probably the one that I see the most is that the thought that everything was working okay is it’s discovered that everything actually isn’t working okay or not as we thought. And over time, you know, creep steps in and all of a sudden there’s some changes happen somewhere, but it’s not even picked up in the manual process. So the manual process is now not even as relevant as it was when it was first created. So I think that’s one of the biggest, and that’s the power of now moving to some automation. And like I just mentioned, having that automation looked at and like checked on, look at the results of the automation, that’s where it’s so powerful. You can really make an impact and keep improving and improving and improving. So then you’re, and then you’re then because of the culture of this and because the people are going, I see this, I’m not losing my job. This is really cool. I am getting the time back that they say I’m going to get back. And so now employees are coming forward saying, how do we solve this one?  

Peter Morrissey   23:28
I’d like to get rid of this. And that’s when you know that this is working. 

full circle because it’s not just been driven by management saying we’ve got to be more efficient. It’s been driven by other people who are going, I’d love to fix this, right? And here’s what it is. That’s when you know, you know, that’s full circle. And now you’re really motoring because they’re involved and they want to be a part of this process because they’re getting that time back to be themselves in the business. 

Peter Morrissey   23:49
and being a much more important person in the business than what they can be, you know, an invoicing person just chucking out invoices is nowhere near as important as an invoicing person who has a lot of things done for them. And now they’ve got time to think about how to make that process even more efficient to make a better experience for the customer, which impacts your business, you know, and
impacts them, now they’re enjoying their job. This is good, yeah, so I think there’s so much potential out of getting this right. 

Karen Kirton   24:18
Yeah, absolutely. That’s where you start to build that learning and innovation culture. So if someone’s listening to this today and they’re thinking, okay, like what’s one thing that I can do in the next month? What’s your suggestion in terms of 1 process or one place that they can start in?
to start thinking about moving their business in this way. 

Peter Morrissey   24:43
I would sit down and just talk to your employees and ask them a couple of questions. What are the three things that they do every day, every week, that is constantly, they constantly keep doing those three things? What are they? Find one of those three things, tackle it, solve it, show them, show the employee
how you’ve helped them. You’re not there to replace them. You’ve helped them and you’ve taken away this little, little and then build on that. That’s exactly how we’ve done it here. We didn’t come in and just go, we’re going to, you know, create, recreate the whole business and we’re going to have computer boxes sitting on a table and everyone’s sitting at the beach. That’s not what we’re building. 

Peter Morrissey   25:20
We’re building the ability for the employees in the business to really embrace in themselves, themselves growing within this business and not just being people who come to work and do this job, you know, 9 to 5 and they’re not really part of anything else. Innovation, it’s all about giving people their time.
Humans have amazing minds. And if we can just let those minds unlock, because they’re locked up, whatever you’re doing this day-to-day stuff, your mind’s locked up. We talked about that. And if you can get your employees to start unlocking their minds, they’re going to win, you’re going to win, you know, your customers are going to win. You’re going to build a different business. 

Karen Kirton   26:00
Yeah, I love that. And I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. Unfortunately, we’re almost at time. But there’s one question that I always like to ask everybody, which is, what’s one thing that you wish that you knew earlier about running a business or leading a team? 

Peter Morrissey   26:16
Definitely, for me, it’s cash flow. It’s been a it was a battle for 9 1/2 years out of the 15 years. For those 9 1/2 years, it’s like if I had a better understanding of cash, a real understanding of cash flow like we do today, then maybe the first 9 1/2 years wouldn’t have been as hard as they were. 

Peter Morrissey   26:35
We’re not wasters of money, but I think we could have done things definitely differently. So for me, if I was starting a business today, I’d be wanting to, the first thing I’d want to be seeing at the end of Friday is what’s the cash flow? What’s the cash flow forecast? Let’s see what we’ve got. So then you start making decisions about, you know, what you’re going to do based on what’s real. One of the reasons that lots of businesses fail is because they don’t even manage any of this at the start. It’s just like, go, go, go get an invoice and then they run out of money and don’t know why. So yeah, cash flow for sure. 

Karen Kirton   27:07
Yeah, absolutely. Look, thank you so much for joining. For those listening, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? 

Peter Morrissey   27:14
You can track me down on Peter Morrissey on LinkedIn. Now, there’s two Peter Morrisys in the world. There’s more, of course. There’s lots of Peter Morrisys. But there’s a famous fashion designer in Australia called Peter Morrissey. So he’s famous, he’s a great guy. He’s worked for Myer, he’s worked for Qantas. 

Peter Morrissey   27:32
He puts me on about page 81 of Google. So, so you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna Google me, I’m not gonna come up. But if you Google Peter Morrissey time and people, then you’ll find me on LinkedIn. And if you don’t, we, yeah, if you don’t find anyone about contractors, if you find a fashion designer, that’s the other Peter Morrissey! 

Karen Kirton   27:35
And we’ll put the links to your LinkedIn and also your website and your phone number in the show notes as well. So thanks for joining today, Peter. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the conversation and the whole concept of how automation is not just technology and how it really is really an enabler of culture in a business as well.
So for those listening, if you’ve received value from this episode, I’d love it if you could leave a rating or a review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify so someone else can also find the episodes to help with their business. Episodes are released on Mondays, so click subscribe and you’ll be notified of when it’s available. If you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to Amplify HR.
or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.