Good automation looks like nothing. The work still gets done, the same way it always did, except one step quietly stopped needing a person. Bad automation announces itself — a new dashboard to check, a new tool to learn, a new failure mode to explain.
Five signals it is working
Nobody asks how it works anymore — they only ask when it breaks. It has not added a step for anyone downstream. It fails obviously, not silently, when it fails. The person who used to do the task manually would notice if you switched it off. And it is still there, unmodified, six months later — nobody has needed to build a workaround around it.
The tell that it is not working
If a workflow needs its own onboarding document, a champion to keep it running, or a weekly check to make sure it actually fired — it has become a second job wearing the costume of automation.
The goal was never more automation. It was fewer things a person has to remember to do.