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Can business software empower rather than control workers?
Acclaim Autism is a US organisation that has increased employee task discretion, with an increase in insurance approvals by using AI – but worker autonomy is declining across the UK
Acclaim Autism exists to help children with autism spectrum disorder, but before doing so, the Philadelphia-based company has to get approval from US health insurers. Founder and president Jamie Turner says this typically took six months with 80% of applications initially rejected. Insurer processes vary widely: public bodies are generally easier to work with, but one commercial insurer asks for original diagnosis documents – which for some teenagers may be more than a decade old – as well as ones produced in the past two years.
By introducing process management software from Appian with support from consultancy Ignyte Group, the company now sees 95% of applications accepted by insurers, with approval typically taking less than a month. The software scans diagnosis documents using artificial intelligence (AI) to locate key pieces of information and anticipates what specific insurers will require to approve treatment based on learning from previous rejections.
Acclaim has also used the software to give its 175 staff more choice over how they complete applications. Previously, Turner says they used a Salesforce customer relationship management system which required them to do things in a set order to ensure they complied with regulations and did not start providing services before they were authorised.
“Having a user go through a linear flow seemed to make sense,” he says. “But it was just a disaster. You can’t force someone to have a diagnosis, then go through an insurance check, then go through something else, because it doesn’t always work that way.”
The company split the application process into a series of separate tasks that staff complete when they can. “It’s up to the person who is helping to shepherd this family through this process to get them into the service as early as possible as to what they do next based on what the family is telling them,” says Turner.
By breaking up a monolithic application process, Acclaim Autism increased its employees’ “task discretion”, the level of choice they have over how they carry out work. But many workers have seen these levels decrease over recent decades. The UK’s Skills and employment survey, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department of Education, Acas, and Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy, involves interviewers from the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data talking to thousands of workers face-to-face and online.
In 1992, 62% of interviewees said they had a great deal of influence over how they worked, but that fell to 44% in 2021, and by 2024, just 34% said this was the case. Its other indicators of worker autonomy, such as whether people feel they have influence over changes in their work, have also fallen.
The managers behind the computers
Alan Felstead, an emeritus professor at Cardiff University who co-directed the survey from 2022 to 2024, doesn’t believe technology is responsible for declining task discretion, although it can enable it. “Workers are not controlled by computers, but workers are managed by managers, and managers are behind those computers,” he says. “Computers do have discretion-sapping capabilities.”
The 2024 survey found that 40% of respondents say technology has the capability to monitor how they work, although only 18% say that technology sets out whether and when they undertake work.
Felstead adds that greater task discretion has strong benefits for both workers and employers. “We can see in the data that greater employee involvement drives up employee motivation, increases their well-being and raises their productivity. It’s a win-win situation, it really is,” he says, adding that there should be a national campaign to encourage participation at work.
Some business software providers try to increase task discretion by making it easier and quicker to do routine work. San Francisco-based technology provider Dropbox’s Dash service, currently available only to US users, integrates material from applications including Gmail, Microsoft Teams and Slack, and file stores including Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. It allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive AI-generated answers that include links to the source material, so a user could ask for the time of a meeting and get the answer in text, with the ability to check the schedule document that holds the information.
Andy Wilson, senior director of new product solutions for Dropbox, says Dash works particularly well for people who have to link things and people together, such as project managers co-ordinating people in different places and organisations. The idea is to save them time spent trying to find information. “The more we can do to give people the confidence and time savings from doing that, the more task discretion enables them to do their jobs easier and better,” he says.
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Notion, also based in San Francisco, aims to join up existing tools through a single workspace that includes automated agents. Mick Hodgins, the company’s general manager for Europe, has an agent that generates a report at 7am every Monday covering what he needs to do that week.
Another example is an agent that looks for changes in key operational documents of national subsidiaries of a multinational, so global documentation can be updated. “It’s a person managing within their own life a tribe of agents that are operating in the background for them, doing all the busywork,” he says. “You create space to live your best life and do your best work.”
Notion provides agents they can use and customise, and also lets users create their own, using Lego building blocks as a visual metaphor for these. Daniel Lereya, chief product and technology officer for New York and Tel Aviv-based Monday.com, also uses building blocks to describe his company’s “flexibility in practice” model, which allows users to build and alter how processes work, including the ability to make changes in its standard interface rather than having to use a special editing mode.
Monday started as a project management tool and has expanded to other areas such as customer relationship management. Lereya says its customisation abilities are often useful in organisations and even departments, where developers working on projects with delivery dates separated by months often preferring different processes to those with daily deadlines.
Customisation also works well for professionals relying on processes they have developed themselves, with one user in insurance using Monday to run a custom-built risk analysis process and turn it into a complex visualisation. Users are encouraged to use a single data lake for security and reliability, and companies can set general rules, either for governance or to promote an organisation-wide theme such as increasing quality.
Lereya sees another reason to let people do things their own way. “I think there is an emotional part to it,” he says. “When you build your own solution, you are attached to it. We see people talk about things they have built within Monday with pride.”
The provider is introducing AI-based tools that users will need to manage effectively. “This also makes the path of building what you need by yourself even more important,” he adds.
Push engagement upstream
Adam Cantwell-Corn, policy lead for technology and AI at the UK’s Trades Union Congress, thinks staff involvement should apply to technology projects as well, including early stages when problems are defined and decisions made. “Often what we see is that where there is engagement – and often there isn’t – it is way further downstream after the contracts have been signed and the IT system has been set up,” he says. “It is just like some training that is bolted on.”
He says that digital technologies are capable of both empowering and disempowering workers depending on how they are deployed. Automation tends to reduce task discretion, but when applied to time-consuming drudgery, it can increase people’s capacity to do more valuable work by increasing the available time. But automating all such work can have its own dangers, as workers may appreciate the variety in modulating between high-intensity and routine tasks.
Some apparent drudgery can hide valuable effort: using software to transcribe and summarise meetings such as those between social workers and clients may save time but lead to cognitive offloading, where staff leave the listening to the software rather than actively engaging with what their clients say. Human staff are also more likely to spot AI bias or hallucinations if they are actively engaged. And people doing the same job may disagree over how much automation suits them, with some call centre workers disliking software that suggests what they should say next and others welcoming it as a way to do their jobs in line with management expectations.
All of this shows the value of staff involvement in setting up projects, says Cantwell-Corn, including how the organisation will help to improve its skills or redeploy them. “A lot of this comes down to good practice in terms of change management generally; how people are active participants,” he says. “That active participation is not a nice-to-have, it’s an essential component of having good outcomes.”
If this does not happen as part of how a project is set up, it may effectively take place afterwards as staff come up with workarounds for badly designed processes.
Public generative AI
Felstead says that many workers are unofficially using public generative AI systems to increase their task discretion, although some organisations are addressing this by providing controlled and secured versions for staff to use.
More broadly, he believes many leaders want to give their staff more task discretion, with the Skills and employment survey showing that the proportion of organisations consulting employees over how they work has grown, but some line managers frustrate these efforts.
Felstead says a rather mundane technologically enabled process – staff surveys – could tackle this, by asking employees how much task discretion they have. Some of the questions used by the survey to assess this are in a shorter version available through an online quiz.
He says results could be used in assessing line managers’ performance, giving them reasons to let their staff have greater choice over how they work: “All the evidence suggests it is beneficial to everyone, so why aren’t we doing it?”
