Russia’s demographic decline, which was expected to ease by 2022, became more severe after the pandemic. Forecasts available when the original article was published suggested that the country’s population could fall by 1.7 million people between 2020 and 2024. The technology sector was already reporting a shortage of as many as one million IT specialists.
Yet people remain the most important resource for business, even in an age of digitalization and advanced technology. In the foreseeable future, people will continue to determine whether a company succeeds or fails.
Does Automation Solve the Talent Shortage—or Accelerate It?
It may appear that introducing ERP, CRM, and other automation systems will solve the staffing problem. In practice, the effect is more complicated.
Technology Is Becoming a Basic Requirement
Technology increasingly provides less of a unique competitive advantage and more of a minimum operating standard—similar to electricity or running water in a building.
Companies still need modern systems, but simply owning them is no longer enough to distinguish a business from its competitors.
Automation Can Increase Headcount
Automation often produces the opposite of the expected result: the number of employees grows.
The reason is that automation supports the primary purpose of a business—earning money for shareholders or owners by launching new products, entering new markets, and developing new areas. Growth then creates demand for additional people.
Consider coach drivers. They did not simply disappear. Over time, the role transformed into drivers of taxis, buses, trains, and aircraft—and into all of us when we drive our own cars.
The Future Arrives Unevenly
Organizations from the past, present, and future exist around us at the same time. Rapid technological development therefore increases demand for specialists and can intensify the staffing shortage rather than remove it.
Technology is still part of the solution, but its role is not merely to replace people. IT can change how work is designed, how quickly employees become productive, and how resilient teams are when people leave.
How IT Can Help
Reduce the Real Requirements for a Role
Instead of quietly lowering hiring standards, companies should systematically reduce the actual complexity of the work. This depends both on the department manager and on the quality of the company’s processes.
Begin by analyzing departmental business processes, standardizing them, and transferring them into business process management systems.
This helps eliminate “knowledge towers”—situations in which important knowledge exists only in one employee’s head—and makes work more transparent and manageable. Digitizing a process often reveals unnecessary reports and indicators. Some tasks may not need to be performed by people at all and can be delegated to robotic process automation.
Departments can also be reorganized around responsibility centers, similar to the tiered model used in technical support. Routine questions are handled at the first level, while more complex cases are escalated to specialists.
This structure reduces the need to hire highly qualified employees for every task. Service desk tools can support the flow by registering, routing, and tracking requests.
Make Work Convenient
A convenient workplace is no longer defined only by working hours and location. Technical equipment is now part of the employee experience.
Candidates may ask during interviews which information systems the company uses, what equipment they will receive, and what their future workplace will look like. The surrounding environment influences both the quality of work and a person’s emotional state.
Convenience also means mobility. Where possible, stationary computers should be replaced with laptops or tablets. When fixed workplaces are still required, they should be standardized, made universal, and organized more like coworking spaces.
The age and quality of equipment matter as well. A workplace that an employee is proud to show on social media becomes useful word-of-mouth advertising for the employer brand.
The opposite is also true. Outdated hardware and inconvenient corporate systems can undermine recruitment efforts no matter how attractive the formal offer appears.
Get People into the Role Quickly
A new employee often has to read a large number of documents, receive credentials, obtain equipment, and complete many administrative steps. This can take a significant amount of time, even in technology companies.
IT can accelerate the process in several ways:
- Prepare the physical and digital workplace before the employee officially starts: power, phone, computer equipment, accounts, and access rights.
- Create a welcome course that explains the company’s working rules as a digital FAQ in a free or inexpensive wiki system.
- After access is granted, use checklists inside corporate systems to schedule future meetings, required reports, and initial tasks.
The checklist can be presented as a quest—for example, “the first 100 days.” This helps a new employee adapt, concentrate on useful work, and become involved in the company. It also allows the manager to monitor progress automatically rather than asking for manual status updates.
Organize Zero-Learning Onboarding
Suppose the company has reduced role complexity and improved the onboarding process. The employee still needs to learn the organization’s specific systems and methods.
One way to shorten this stage is to begin preparation before the person’s official start date. While finishing the notice period at a previous employer, the future employee may be able to review public materials about the company’s systems, frameworks, methods, and recommended literature.
From the IT side, companies should reduce the number of unusual software products and heavily customized configurations. When a standard configuration is used, a specialist who already knows the product may require almost no additional training.
The ideal information system teaches people while they work, just as a well-designed computer game introduces controls and rules during gameplay. Perhaps the old Microsoft Office paperclip assistant was not such a bad idea after all; in a more intelligent form, it would fit current trends perfectly.
Develop Light Cross-Functionality
Limited cross-functionality can make a company more resilient to staffing shortages.
Specialization remains important because no one can perform every type of work equally well. At the same time, narrow specialization separates people and makes teams vulnerable.
My preferred model is simple: each employee should perform their primary function well and be able to cover part of a colleague’s function when necessary.
This improves the atmosphere inside the team and protects operations from sudden changes in team composition, even when several narrowly specialized employees leave at once.
Technology can support this model through corporate learning systems, digital individual development plans with progress tracking, internal webinars, and structured knowledge sharing.
Badges, levels, titles, and other game elements can make skill development visible and encourage people to expand their capabilities.
Practical Recommendations
Most of these measures are realistic even for a small team. Many free or inexpensive tools can significantly simplify the work.
To reduce staffing risks, companies can:
- move toward a shared off-the-shelf information system with a minimum number of custom modifications;
- digitize business processes in a BPM system;
- create a common corporate portal and communication environment, including chats, video calls, and collaborative document editing;
- deploy a searchable digital FAQ;
- automatically assign initial tasks, required reading, and meetings several weeks in advance;
- use a project approach to deliver organizational goals.
The role of HR is becoming broader and is reaching into every part of the business. IT followed a similar path earlier.
How successfully a company survives the next crisis—a crisis that may be driven by a shortage of people—will therefore depend heavily on cooperation between HR and IT.