First they took the factory jobs; next, robots are expected to replace mortgage brokers, paralegals, and accountants. It has always been assumed, however, that jobs requiring human interaction would remain safe.

Not so, according to one Canadian company, which has automated many management and administrative processes to such an extent that it does not have a human resources department.

Klick, a digital agency of 700 people, achieved this with an internal operating system that tracks things like billable hours, workflow and employee attendance, as well as managing recruitment and training.

It is one of a growing number of companies automating management. Others include B12, a web developer that uses a software program to coordinate its team of human designers, client managers, copywriters and robots, and business services company Konsus, which has automated workflow systems that assign work to its pool of freelancers.

Genome, as Klick’s platform is called, grew out of a system developed to replace internal email. Instead of exchanging endless emails about a piece of work, staff use a central hub to discuss a particular task.

Jay Goldman, who heads up the team that sells Genome to other organisations, says: “If you step back and look at that universe of tasks, you can see where work is flowing smoothly and getting held up; you can see when certain departments, or even individuals, are causing bottlenecks and slowing that work down.”

Goldman says Genome leaves employees nowhere to hide. “Your best performers love this because there is full accountability. People who are not your highest performers don’t love systems like this, because they are used to finding those shadows to hide in, and not contributing the full amount.”

Klick’s Jay Goldman believes the company’s Genome system can streamline ‘overly complicated’ HR processes.

It is a very public system. Almost all the information, apart from salaries, is visible to everyone. Goldman says this alleviates the sense that employees are being spied on. “You might say: ‘I feel like it’s a bit Big Brother, because when I swipe my card in other people can locate the floor I am on. However, you can find our CEO as well.”

The lack of an HR department is, however, a sticking point for some. A number of reviews on Glassdoor – a website that allows people to vent workplace frustrations anonymously – say it leads to bad behaviour. One reads: “Toxic management with the famous ‘no HR at Klick’ situation making it worse.”

Goldman says: “You’re always going to have some people who aren’t happy about their experience working here.” He says staff tend to stick with the company, although Klick does not disclose overall staff turnover, saying only that voluntary leavers represent around 3% of total headcount.

He concedes there is a danger that a company run on data will prioritise things that can be measured, such as billable hours, over things that cannot. “There are lots of things that are very difficult to measure,” he says, “although I think we are getting better at figuring out ways to find that through data. It’s often the connection [between] disparate data points [that] leads to the ability to look at something.”

He cites an ongoing experiment at Klick looking at data – such as lower productivity, leaving early, and not taking on long-term commitments – that, when combined, suggest that an employee is considering leaving. “If we’re able to predict this, we can help managers focus on the problem. It may even be before a person is consciously thinking of leaving.”

This experiment could become one of Klick’s first forays into machine learning, which requires a significant volume of data. As Genome has been in use for over 15 years, Goldman says it has enough data to also predict profitability of projects and success of teams.

Goldman is critical of HR as it is practised in most organisations, saying it is “overly complicated” and ineffective. The classic example is the annual performance review, which, he says, “is despised by basically everyone who has ever had to do one or receive one”.

Klick has not, however, done away with all HR functions. It has a learning team and a culture team; people who have a problem with their manager are invited to talk to those teams, or members of senior management.

“And if you don’t have a problem with your manager, you should talk to your manager, obviously. We’ve trained our managers to make sure they know how to handle all those sorts of situations.”

So how do people respond to being managed by a robot? Goldman insists that Genome itself isn’t managing anything. “We haven’t taken any of the decision-making powers away from our people and given them to the computer. The computer is just there to help.”



“It doesn’t replace the conversation, or change the fact that it is most ideal for that manager to be sitting across from their report and having that conversation together.”

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This article was corrected on 9 April 2018. The original said that Klick “no longer has” an HR department. The agency had never had a formal HR unit.