The Future of Work

In recent years, the thinking on the future of work has focused on the need to reconfigure jobs—not to reimagine or replace them entirely. The reasoning goes like this: As alternative approaches to work have emerged such as artificial intelligence, automation, and off-balance-sheet talent, we need to disaggregate the job into component tasks, determine which tasks can be performed more optimally by smart machines or alternative talent outside of the organization’s walls, and then reassemble the remaining tasks with new ones to create a newly reconfigured job. Employees are then reskilled, upskilled, or out skilled to once again meet the needs of the newly reconfigured job, with automation substituting for, augmenting, or transforming the human worker’s role.

But this approach is a top-down, engineering-like approach still rooted in a mechanistic mindset that doesn’t give workers much choice or agency. Too often, the focus is on chasing efficiency and cost reduction instead of opening up new opportunities to unlock growth and value. And the world is simply changing too fast to go through this process again and again each time a new technology emerges, markets shift, or new opportunities emerge.

If anything has shown the need for greater agility, it has been the pandemic. Forced to become more agile, organizations fluidly moved people to where the work was; created agile, cross-functional SWAT teams to tackle complex problems; and experimented with new work models. For many of us, the pandemic enabled work to become more emergent than engineered.

How do we go about organizing work beyond the constraints of the traditional job in a way that creates a kind of dynamic stability that unleashes the potential of both organizations and people at scale and speed?

To move beyond the industrialization of work and jobs, organizations are generally moving in two directions. In one, organizations seek to atomize the work and the worker, deconstructing both into their component parts (tasks or projects, skills and capabilities), and then using new advances in technology to rapidly match the “pieces” of work and worker based on evolving needs and interests. The other direction seeks to organize work by creating very broad commitments to problems to be solved, outcomes to be achieved, or new sources of value to be created, essentially providing guardrails for workers in terms of the broad “what” of work but giving them the freedom and autonomy to choose the “how” (figure 1).

Fractionalizing work into component tasks can lend itself to farming out work to gig or other off-balance-sheet workers, thereby undermining the stability, purpose, opportunities for growth, and stable income achieved through employment that most workers desire. For this reason, we aren’t going to discuss gig economy options here, preferring to look at how organizations can create stable homes for workers as employees, and as part of their commitment to stakeholder capitalism, while still empowering them with the autonomy, agency, and choice that many enjoy as gig workers.

In reality, these are two ends of a fluid spectrum of options, with many alternatives in between. Organizations will want to use different options for different workforces or businesses. Indeed, there’s still a place for traditional jobs in most organizations, but that should be perceived as one of many options for organizations.

Source: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/new-work-models.html