Establish interpersonal business relationships to facilitate work activities
Little of this can be handed to software today.
This work is the relationship itself. An agent can prepare for it and write up what happened afterwards, which is real time saved, but the encounter needs a person present and answerable.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Relationships, negotiation and public-facing presence |
| Jobs that do it | 16 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | None |
| O*NET activity | Establishing and Maintaining Interpersonal Relationships (4.A.4.a.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 16 occupations that perform it.
- Attend receptions, dinners, and conferences to meet people, exchange views and information, and develop working relationships.
- Identify and develop contacts for promotional campaigns and industry programs that meet identified buyer targets, such as dealers, distributors, or consumers.
- Visit franchised dealers to stimulate interest in establishment or expansion of leasing programs.
- Establish and maintain effective working relationships with clients, government officials, and media representatives and use these relationships to develop new business opportunities.
- Establish and maintain effective working relationships with clients, government officials, and media representatives and use these relationships to develop new fundraising opportunities.
- Establish and maintain relationships with individual or business customers or provide assistance with problems these customers may encounter.
- Develop and maintain relationships with banking, insurance, and external accounting personnel to facilitate financial activities.
- Develop partnerships with businesses, communities, and other organizations to help meet identified educational needs and to provide school-to-work programs.
- Develop client relationships and communicate with clients to explain proposals, present research findings, establish specifications, or discuss project status.
- Establish and maintain relationships with other agencies and organizations in community to meet community needs and to ensure that services are not duplicated.
- Develop and maintain liaisons with municipalities, county departments, and similar entities to facilitate plan development, response effort coordination, and exchanges of personnel and equipment.
- Attend or make presentations at community events to promote funeral home services or build community relationships.
- Develop relationships with state or federal environmental regulatory agencies to learn about and analyze the potential impacts of proposed environmental policy regulations.
- Develop and maintain partnerships with federal, state, or local law enforcement agencies or members of the retail loss prevention community.
- Develop relationships and communicate with customers, site managers, developers, land owners, authorities, utility representatives, or residents.
- Contact local forest owners and gain permission to take inventory of the type, amount, and location of all standing timber on the property.
- Assemble and communicate with a strong, diverse coalition of organizations or public figures, securing their cooperation, support, and action, to further campaign goals.
- Facilitate consumer relations or the relationship between parts of the company, such as the managers and employees, or different branch offices.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing. An assistant can prepare you for the encounter and write up what happened afterwards, which is real time saved, but the encounter itself is the work and it needs you in it.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
Who does this work
16 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising and Promotions Managers
- Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
- Emergency Management Directors
- Financial Managers
- Foresters
- Fundraising Managers
- Funeral Home Managers
- Legislators
- Loss Prevention Managers
- Natural Sciences Managers
- Public Relations Managers
- Regulatory Affairs Managers
- Sales Managers
- Social and Community Service Managers
- Treasurers and Controllers
- Wind Energy Operations Managers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Develop professional relationships or networks”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.