MANAGING ORGANIZATIONS

Work in the Future Will Fall intoThese 4 Categoriesby John Boudreau

MARCH 17, 2016

FROM THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Organizations are more boundary-less, agile,

global, and transparent — and will be even more

so in the future. Work and workers (yes,

humans) will always be essential to

organizations, but organizations themselves will

be more diverse, and work will be organized,

structured, and done in new ways, increasingly

through arrangements outside of regular full-

time employment. How can leaders navigate

this new digital work ecosystem? How should

your organization plan for the changes ahead?

Important clues are emerging from a unique

consortium of human resource executives and

other leaders. They have gathered through

CHREATE (the Global Consortium to Reimagine

HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the

Enterprise) to map how organizations must

evolve to meet future challenges, to identify

pivotal initiatives to accelerate that evolution,

and to design the actions needed to make the

future a reality.

To help frame where the world of work is going, CHREATE leaders identified five fundamental

forces driving change:

Social and organizational reconfiguration. Organizations will be increasingly transparent tostakeholders and more flexible, shifting toward more power-balanced forms and more project-based relationships. Talent will engage on aligned purpose, not just economics. Beyondtraditional hierarchies and contracts, networks and social and external collaborations willmake leadership more horizontal, shared, and collective.All-inclusive global talent market. Women and nonwhite ethnicities become talent majorities,and greater longevity increases multigenerational workforces. Social policies supportboundary-less work beyond traditional full-time employment. Work and worker segmentationenables increasingly differentiated policies, practices, work designs, pay, and benefits, andworkers choose organizations based on the opinions of socially connected peers and opinionleaders.A truly connected world. Work is increasingly virtual and occurs anywhere and any time,through mobile personal devices with global real-time communications. Boundary-less workpartnerships and networks augment capabilities and redefine careers, learning and workplacefairness and attractiveness.Exponential technology change. Robots, autonomous vehicles, commoditized sensors,artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things reshape the work ecosystem so that flexible,distributed, and transient workforces adapt to rapid business reinvention. Organizations andworkers balance long-term bets and flexibility under uncertainty by engaging automation toadapt to frequent changes and rapid skills obsolescence.Human-automation collaboration. Analytics, algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligenceincreasingly abolish work previously performed by humans but also create new work at theinterface of humans and automation. Organizations and workers conceive and design theirwork to optimize rather than resist this interface.

These trends will not affect all organizations equally, so it’s important for leaders to understand

where their organization is right now, where it’s going, and how their approaches to strategy,

organization, and talent will have to change to keep up. The CHREATE teams developed a

topography based on the degree of the democratization of work (the impact of the first three

trends above on an organization) and the degree of technological empowerment (the impact of

the latter three trends), shown in the figure below.

Find this and other HBR graphics in our VISUAL LIBRARY

Each of the four quadrants describes a different kind of organization, with different approaches

to strategy, talent, and work:

Current state. Work resembles today, with similar technological connections and workarrangements, relying heavily on regular full-time employment. This quadrant might includework where employees are colocated and the operations and workers are easily accessiblethrough physical connections. This could be work that requires a specific time and place (likehospice care) or work that occurs where it is prohibitively expensive or illegal to connectworkers to the cloud, such as technical work in secure facilities, clean rooms, oil rigs, retaillocations, etc. It could also occur when such work arrangements are required by political,regulatory, or social norms. This quadrant is  optimal where work is stable and traditionalrewards and performance systems are adequate.Today, turbo-charged. Technology evolves, but management and workplace arrangementsevolve more slowly. Traditional work relationships are supported by faster, better, and cheapertechnology and systems such as personal devices and cloud-based human resourceinformation. This quadrant might include call centers operated with traditional employees butin remote locations or working from home, like JetBlue’s. IBM’s “Watson” AI collaborates with

INSIGHT CENTER

The Global Digital EconomySPONSORED BY ACCENTURE

Strategies for growth in a connected world.

employed oncology physicians to assist with research. Many of today’s HR technologyproducts focus here by automating traditional employment systems and work relationshipsthrough devices and cloud-based learning, smartphone apps, remote performanceobservation, etc.Work reimagined. Here, new employment models evolve to include platforms, projects, gigs,freelancers, contests, contracts, tours of duty, and part-timers, but largely supported slower-evolving technology. We see this scenario today in freelance platforms such as UpWork,Tongal, and Gigwalk. It also includes innovations within employment systems, such asincluding freelancers, contractors, and part-timers in organizations’ employment planningsystems, augmenting traditional recruitment systems to constantly track and communicatewith passive job seekers using existing social tools, or staging innovation contests using today’ssocial media platforms.Uber empowered. An accelerated cycle of technology advancement and more democratic workarrangements fuel one another. New work and technology models include on-demand artificialintelligence, extreme personalization, and secure and accessible cloud-based workrepositories. These repositories will reside outside any single employer and provide asearchable location where work and workers can be identified and matched using a commonlexicon. They will contain worker capabilities and qualifications, organization workrequirements, constantly updated work histories, knowledge and learning sources, and rewardsystems. IBM’s Open Talent Marketplace allows managers to deconstruct work into short-cycleevents, publicize those events to an internal and external population of players who use theplatform to bid for and form communities to complete the work, and track their work historyand capabilities, supported by common work language that constantly evolves through apartnership between Watson-like artificial intelligence and human judgment.

All four quadrants will be a part of the work ecosystem for at least the next 10 years, with

organizations moving from one to another depending on the strength and timing of the five

forces and their effect on the organization.

One way to use the map is to apply it to your entire organization, asking questions such as, “Is

there a better quadrant to be in?” or, “Should we aspire to the upper right hand quadrant?”

However, your organization more likely has a

topography that includes many different

pockets of work, each of them optimally fitting

different quadrants. Your manufacturing work

might optimally reflect the “current state.” Your

distribution work might optimally reflect

“today, turbo-charged.” Your professional staff and software development work might optimally

reflect “work reimagined.” And your highly creative and inventive work might optimally be “uber

empowered.” Deconstructing your organization may be the surest way to reveal the patterns.

How can you use this map to navigate the evolving work ecosystem? Plot your current position

on the map, then plot your likely position in one to three years. Then ask, “Where can we create

the greatest value (or mitigate the greatest risk) by evolving from today to the future?”

Taking a page from the book Beyond HR, you can use the map to inform these questions at all

levels of your strategy and work:

What will define strategic success and stakeholder value?What strategic positioning must we define, execute, and protect?What vital processes and transformations must we execute?What vital resources must we acquire, leverage, nurture, and protect?What are the pivotal organization structures, networks, relationships, jobs, and talent poolswhere improvement or change will make the biggest impact?How must our approaches to work, culture, engagement, and human resource managementevolve?

The pace of work evolution is increasing, and its implications can be daunting. Start building

your navigation system and asking the hard questions now to navigate the changing topography.

John Boudreau is professor and research director at USC’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective

Organizations, and is the author of the book Lead the Work, with Ravin Jesuthasan and David Creelman, and Global

Trends in Human Resource Management, with Edward E. Lawler III.

Related Topics: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT | TECHNOLOGY

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John Raudabaugh a year ago

Critical is the rethinking of federal labor law and regulations.

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