Even as automation picks up steam in the finance world, it’s not happening quickly enough for many bank employees.

Thirty-two percent of U.S. financial institution employees surveyed in a recent study said business processes make them want to leave their jobs, and 44% said these processes waste their time. The fresh data, gathered by digital intelligence company Abbyy, also found “productivity and efficiency in day-to-day tasks” have become major challenges since the onset of the pandemic.

The silver lining? This same employee dissatisfaction has also accelerated the adoption of automated tools by financial institutions.

Nearly 75% of employees surveyed said the financial organizations they work for have been integrating new technologies as a result of the pandemic, according to Abbyy, which pulled together the results from a survey of more than 4,000 office workers worldwide.

“If there’s technology out there that helps eliminate the steps they would normally take to process information or to help that customer, [companies] want to automate that,” Bruce Orcutt, vice president of product marketing at Abbyy, told Bank Innovation.

Even before the pandemic, there was a disconnect between how business owners thought tasks were executed by employees, and how employees actually completed tasks, Orcutt said. With COVID, the disconnect compounded, and employees grew “really frustrated trying to solve these problems for their customers” amid the lack of technological support from business leaders, Orcutt added.

“If remote work exposes challenges to processes necessary for making calculations … that would exacerbate frustration and could explain their response in the survey, honestly admitting they are considering leaving their job,” said Abbyy Senior Marketing Manager Cheryl Chiodi.

According to the survey, approximately 62% of workers in the financial services industry deploy digital assistants for some daily tasks. Of those workers, more than half said the digital assistants have lessened time spent on mundane tasks like sorting, classifying and analyzing data, digitizing paperwork, and digital data entry. Employees without digital assistants believe they could save 22 hours per month by using them to perform routine tasks.

Financial services workers have also turned to intelligent document processing, which converts unstructured documents into usable, structured data, with 68% reporting they’ve used such technology since the start of the pandemic.

Some of the biggest banks in the country are wrestling with using automation technology to drive employee engagement and satisfaction. Wells Fargo, for one, is experimenting with workstation automation to allow its treasury employees to automate their own tasks.

The $145 billion Regions Bank, too, has ramped up automation efforts in its call centers in order to mitigate turnover. Amala Duggirala, Regions’ enterprise chief operations and technology officer, said the automation has had a positive impact on employee morale. She said providing the necessary tools to keep employees motivated and engaged is important — “especially in this pandemic, where we’re all working remote and [risk] losing that emotional connection with the employee base, and not understanding their sentiment.”