Imagining Work Without Jobs

hello and welcome to our webinar imagining work without jobs i'm elizabeth heichler editorial director at mit sloan management review and i'll be your moderator organizations are under ever more pressure to achieve a high degree of agility in order to thrive amid increasing rapid change and disruption and they need to better adapt to a wider array of working arrangements especially the explosion and remote work and workplace technologies our webinar today will examine how leaders can meet these challenges by embracing a new work operating system that begins by dismantling the idea of the conventional job and job holder ravine jitsutasan and john boudreau are with us today to help us understand this new paradigm for talent and the new landscape of work which they explore in depth in their new book work without jobs ravin is global leader for transformation services at mercer he is a member of the world economic forum steering committee on work and employment and a regular presenter at its annual meeting in davos john boudreau is professor emeritus of management and organization and a senior research scientist with a center for effective organizations at the marshall school of business at the university of southern california welcome robin and john thank you very much elizabeth it's a pleasure to be here thanks everyone for joining us this morning as well all right so off we go robin let me start us off wonderful um thank you elizabeth and uh thank you all for joining us today we thought we might just start with a little bit of uh historical context for kind of how we got to where we are today and and why the conditions are right for a new work operating system so if you sort of look back to how most of us work today you know it's come out it came out of the second industrial revolution when disparate activities were organized into jobs jobs and the job families those job families became the basis for functions and the job became the basis for a career and it perpetuated that one-to-one relationship between jobs and job holders but also the relationship between a degree and a job holder as being the defining feature of what qualified a person to sort of take on a body of work and in that time you you saw technology certainly start to accelerate in that second industrial revolution but it was really around supporting people and jobs and we saw that kind of the current state of the deal if you will being born that one size fits most approach to engaging talent you engage with the organization on your terms you fast forward to the third industrial revolution and that carefully constructed value chain and that work structure starts to kind of fray at the edges a little bit right because we are now we've now democratized democratized information we saw the rise of the world wide web and companies started to be able to look outside of their walls and see the cost capabilities risks options of getting work done elsewhere you know whether by another company whether by outsourcing or what was then this new thing called independent contractors um you fast forward from there to kind of where we are today with the fourth industrial revolution and overlaid against the democratization of information is the democratization of work um our growing ability to decouple work from its traditional confines of space time and structure um we saw we see the proliferation of ai you know becoming really prolific right and as most of us know we've had artificial intelligence around since the late 50s but what it's lacked is the infrastructure to truly make it a potent and powerful work option and work enabler it lacked the infrastructure in the form of cloud-based computing it lacked the data which is now increasingly being provided by the rapid proliferation of low-cost sensors the rapidly growing speed and falling cost of graphic processing units and then certainly 5g acting as an even greater accelerant and so we start to see you know work being rapidly deployed to various options but as we move forward you know what john and i believe is as we move forward um this this notion of a job um which certainly has been supplemented by things you know that we call gigs whether internal or external what we need is is is a work operating system that really allows organizations to deal with not just the rapid proliferation of digitalization which increases the speed um and the change intensity of work but also as elizabeth talked about many of the changes that we're experiencing we talked about these black swan events like the rarest of beasts and by all accounts we've had four of them um in over the last 20 years you think of 911 think of the financial crisis you think of what we had with the pandemic and what's unfolding currently in ukraine so so not quite as rare if you will and we really believe is we've looked at the body of work around agile and we've seen organizations implement agile it it certainly is a key part of that answer but it's not fully sufficient and this broad notion of deconstruction that we'll spend some time talking about is really a very pivotal element to moving from that one-to-one relationship to the many to many between many different types of work whether assignments tasks gigs etc to the unique bundle of skills that is john versus robin to the many different ways in which we can upskill whether it's technical skills leadership skills other soft skills etc so hopefully a little bit of context for where we've come from and where we'd like to go now we we do have a poll question to get a sense to get your input and to get a sense of kind of where your organization is so i think the poll question will probably come up now and you'll you'll see these options available um so essentially is your work um still you know being done primarily with the second industrial revolution model you know in jobs as on most of our organizations have you kind of started to move beyond and looking at options elsewhere do you have uh have you moved to more of a deconstructed approach with the fourth industrial revolution or are you starting to sort of lead into the new work operating system as we call it so the poll results are uh uh the highest result was for the fourth industrial revolution work as activities 38 second industrial revolution 30 third industrial revolution 20 percent future of work 12 percent wow thank you mackenzie um that's actually really quite impressive i think when john and i have had done similar polls um in the past it's uh we've been far more skewed towards workers jobs being you know the the dominant model but it's really heartening i think it sort of maybe points to some very progressive thought and practice with this particular audience indeed i will be extremely interested in your questions and comments if um 38 of you actually are running work as activities rather than jobs how you've reorganized your hr systems which traditionally have been based on jobs how you pay for work as activities all those kinds of questions again as robin said it's very heartening to see as many of you as 38 saying fourth and another 12 saying you're already in the new work operating system so that would say what 50 of this audience is in the bottom two categories um so again very interesting to hear more about that as we get into the discussion or uh even after the webinar thank you mackenzie will move on now uh it looks like they've returned slide control to me so ramen yes so since we're talking about the new work operating system and this will be um certainly not news to 12 percent of you but we wanted to lay out the principles of the new work operating system just to give you a sense of what the dimensions are and and how they sort of uh lay out so the first principle is as we've uh john and i've talked about now from for many years with our even our previous books starting with the work the current and or the future tasks not the existing jobs not how we structure work today as being a critical prerequisite so starting with those deconstructed elements the second key element is before we do anything else ensuring we have a clear sense of the optimal combinations of humans and automation something we wrote extensively about in our last book reinventing jobs which we revisit here but understanding where does automation play a role in substituting human endeavor where does it augment the the skills of the human making them super productive where does it transform work either creating new work options or fundamentally changing the calculus of work um and then once we've done that the third principle is to think about the full array of which of options we have to connect talent to work you know is employment the best option if it's employment should it be a job or should it be a more agile construct something we'll explore a little later um should it be a gig whether internal or external should we be tapping alliances so what are the unique and competitive advantages of each of those options that enable you to increase the agility with which work is done and increasing both increasing the resilience and flexibility as well of work and then lastly ensuring that we are creating this model of perpetually looking to reinvent work and ever reducing the friction with which talent is connected to work so continuously looking for options to allow talent to flow to work as well as defaulting to that legacy of fixed traditional jobs so we now have our second poll so since we've talked about the the four principles um so which of the four principles of the new world operating system you know would most enhance your strategic objectives is it to reframe and get your leaders to you know think about the work as opposed to the existing jobs or perhaps it's you know getting to the optimal combinations of humans and automation you know is maybe the biggest uh the biggest prize for you alternatively is to get your leaders to think about work and how talent is connected to work through you know a greater plurality of means for one better phrase or perhaps you know you've accomplished some of that and it's really about getting a notion of perpetual reinvention into your leaders mindset and getting them to continuously stress this and challenge how we continuously increase the agility of the enterprise and allow talent to flow to work so we'll give you a few minutes give you a few seconds to take a pass at responding to that and then we'll uh we'll talk about the results okay so here are our poll results so um of the four principles um let's see 20 start with the work and not the existing jobs 29 percent optimally combine not replace humans in automation 18 said use many work engagements beyond traditional employment and then the majority 33 percent like allow talent to flow to work not limited to fixed jobs that's that's thank you elizabeth um that's that's great it's it's really interesting because i think it sort of validates john probably what we would have we would have expected um in large part because that you know the two the two issues certainly that we see in the work we do with companies is how do we start to shift leaders mindset out of thinking of automation and humans as being kind of a binary narrative where you're leading with the work and so that remains a big opportunity particularly given the rampant and rapid digitalization the last couple of years and then this notion of getting to an ever more agile construct of continuously allowing thinking beyond the job and letting us respond in in and i guess for many of you you've probably been doing a lot of these things over the course of the pandemic as you've had to readjust workflows and shift resources from one part of the organization to another yeah but i think you know the fact that and they're very close obviously you know 33 compared to 29 at the top so i think one of the things that strikes me with 33 choosing d is often that that's the easier place to begin if you have a job-based system is to say well we are going to keep the jobs and we're going to allow them the metaphor i like is to melt a bit and so people can flow around the job they have but they're allowed to move in a floating like way to something else very often certainly automation often involves perhaps we stay with jobs but we have to re-create them because automation has changed at the task level so much of what people do and again i think that's not surprising to me that's number two automation i think is almost a forcing function uh where you know it's very tangible leaders are very committed to it and yet uh the effect on work is is very very uh a seldom understood so you you really do end up almost your organization almost forced to think about number two because automation is there and then begin to realize what would be the effects on work again very heartening to see how what a large percentage of you are also doing number three which in my experience is also very tough because those non-traditional work engagements beyond employment are often handled by another function like procurement or something like that so it often requires a significant organization collaboration between two functions that may not necessarily have collaborated in the past so again be very interested in your comments and questions later on as we get to this thanks very much so we can move on mckenzie and so here uh what we've done where it's a very wordy slide and we're not going to stay on this one very long but it's more of a map to where we're about to go next essentially what you see here are the chapters in the book arranged from chapter one at the top to chapter seven at the bottom and the left right is is just a quick view of the contrast that we're about to discuss each uh each each of these elements in turn so for example if you look at the top you could think about the uh the first element of the book as describing the difference between intact jobs versus deconstructed tasks or projects as we talked about work automation in the second row and etc etc and so there's no need to really try to digest this slide it's mainly there as an outline and then excuse me as a recap as we come back later on so now robin and i will each in turn take a few of these elements and provide some examples for you yeah bro so um so the first of those our first element is is we've talked about this pivot from workers intact jobs to deconstructed elements and the case study that we had there was one that was very topical i think for many of you and that's genentech and the journey that we embarked on with genentech was helping them figure out as as companies were thinking about hybrid and full-time remote versus full-time on-site in the early days of the pandemic not just responding to the constraints that you know that covert had imposed on us at that point in time in 2020 but but thinking beyond um and they were incredibly thoughtful about how might this event fundamentally change the calculus of work for our organization change our culture and the thing that cynthia burks and that leadership team at genentech did which was very progressive was to say you know if we if we just start and stick with the jobs we're going to end up with a culture of the house and have nots a culture where some folks have lots of flexibility and others are found in some cases needlessly to a work environment even though the nature of their work might lend itself to being done elsewhere um and perhaps more flexibly than it might have been done in the past so what uh their journey they went on was to take our frameworks from the book use it as the basis to deconstruct the various jobs identify which elements of work should be done you know in particular places using particular equipment at particular points in time down in specific ways which work should be done collaboratively versus independently where were there things that were being forced into synchronous collaboration that could frankly be done asynchronously um so really challenging the very notion of the tasks that made up the jobs and then use that analysis to create a much more equitable not equal but a much more equitable definition of what flexibility would look like based on the premise that every job has options for flexibility we just have to find it in the elements that make up that job so really compelling case study and one that i think was very very progressive on the part of cynthia and her leadership team the second example around this pivot in the narrative of work automation not just replacing employees in jobs but optimizing task level combinations of humans and machines and we had a couple of examples that we had um i would work we had actually in our previous book that has continued to grow the great work that the leadership team at neighbours industries has done to not just move progressively to create more human work but also to use automation to eliminate the work that was you know not to be too trivial or tried about it the dial dirty and dangerous the things that were casting people to lose fingers and toes looking for opportunities to introduce automation where we could exponentially close the gap on variances and productivity of different rigs at the same time looking for opportunities to create more human work away from the rigs add centralized control facilities different ways that we're doing maintenance etc the same thing with dhl which is a is a great example of just testing different types of automation and being led by the work as opposed to leading with a particular piece of tech and trying to essentially you know solve a problem and potentially exacerbating that problem by by not fully addressing the particular specifics of the work and the last example on this page is as you would think about that transition from work being done by employees limited to a full-time jobs within the company to ever more agile constructs where it's internal gigs it's external talent plugging in we had an interesting example of an insurance company that blew up its um its data science capability took all the jobs out of the various functions and geographies and created a virtual cloud-based construct that enabled both internal talent as well as external talent to seamlessly flow the projects and assignments as managers were told the capability to design projects and then an internal marketplace connecting the right talent with the right skills to the right body of work in a much more seamless work arrangement thanks robin and so so moving on to the second four of the of the principles um as you as you begin to develop the first three you know you start to deconstruct tasks you start to see combinations of humans and automation i'm always struck by how the neighbors examples which you can find all over the web say a fully automated drilling rig and it is there are no people on there but right behind that is a picture of someone behind a control panel in a control center safe environment actually running the rig running maintenance on the rig etc so that idea of combination kind of and and then this this notion of getting away from just a stable employment contract that limits you to uh to your job and that leads kind of naturally then to the difference between uh saying well you have an employment contract and and you're in this box called a job and you report to this person called your leader and there's a black line that runs from your box to their box to this idea of work is perpetually reinvented and that includes not only internal as robin talked about so you might have and again i'll be very interested and i hope some of your type in questions and comments perhaps you have an internal talent marketplace for example where leaders are allowed to post projects not jobs and and your workers are allowed to take on projects not just their job uh and then that kind of is a click away from saying well if we have an internal platform that allows us to deal and have a marketplace of projects and rather than jobs we can look outside and realize that freelance platforms are available to also uh take a la source people to take on those projects etc and so that the you know we have a number of examples we have an ongoing example of a retailer a distribution center in which as automation took on the distribution center they began to melt the work people began to flow to it and then as automation went further and as covid came on they realized they had imbalances lots of distribution center work not so much on the floor retail work in a store what they did was they melted all of those jobs and they began to allow the store people to do gigs inside the distribution center that was augmented then by others contractors and others coming in to do the same sort of thing so you can see how this idea of a system built on work is a job work as an employment contract begins to melt begins to flow and it's a natural progression we think toward a full ecosystem that's open to source uh workers from all places and allow your your employees to have options like moving to something that looks more like a contractor if they have personal well-being or other issues and then uh as as you begin to do this it sort of leads to perhaps one of my favorite principles the second one here moving from thinking of workers whose capability is about filling a particular position uh and particularly in the most traditional version of this that they have a degree or a qualification a four-year degree a two-year degree when they have that degree a switch goes off and we say now they're fully qualified we turn another switch and we say we're going to put them to work and and engage them in our organization and that's which is that they're going to join on a job this principle is about seeing the worker not just as the capabilities to fill a job or a series of jobs but as a whole person as someone with lots of capabilities that we may not even be using in the job that they hold we may not even expect to use in the in a series of jobs that they would hold but one often finds as you implement one of these talent marketplaces for example people holding one kind of uh position may then move to another kind of position one of our favorite examples came from greg till the chro of a company called providence health in in that example you can imagine providence health is a large health care organization lots of hospitals physicians etc there was a nursing shortage before coven it became acute and literally a life and death shortage during covet and what providence did and what a number of other healthcare organizations did was creatively melt the job of nurse so that we could see all the tasks within it which included top of license things as they call it intubating patients providing medication dealing with unresponsive patients but they also realized nurses were doing scheduling nurses were taking temperatures of otherwise very responsive patients checking in on otherwise responsive patients and so if they thought about sources of where that work could be done and looked at everyone as a whole person yes nurses needed to move to the top of license work but receptionists and others could have the capability to take temperatures for otherwise responsive and well patients leaving the nurses to stay on that top of license work scheduling move that to automation it gets done much quicker and much more easily than a head nurse trying to do that for half a day and then finally we're still short so where do we find top of license talent that is beyond the nurse job well it turns out you have these administrators in the hospital chief operating officer chief financial officer ceo and their job is to be an administrator a very important executive position but their capabilities often include being a former physician and that means that they have the capability if they're re-licensed to be on the floor one day a week and to do what we would have said is nursing work beyond the job of an administrator so you can see the idea of if we think about receptionists and and hospital administrators as an entire person with an entire set of capabilities that opens up options that might not otherwise be seen if we thought of them as qualified to hold a particular job etc if we move on to the third principle from the top this has immense implications for management and work coordination as we talk about in the book and let me give due credit to my colleague jonathan donner who was the head of talent and leadership development at unilever when i met him and has gone on to have several positions as jonathan and i were talking about our own experiences with leadership development etc he noted the immense difference in what how we would define leadership how we would define management uh other other chros have said now wait a minute our leaders have grown up and have been trained in a system where they're in a box and it says leader or some title like that they have 10 20 30 people in boxes that say this is your job and those boxes have lines that connect to the leader and those 30 people their job is to be available to the leader whenever the leader wants them and to be in a way owned by the leader who does performance management etc in the new system uh whether it's an internal talent marketplace like unilever where leaders can post projects outside of people's job descriptions and not job requisitions employees can take on those projects from wherever they are in the organization thousands and thousands of what they call hidden hours were uncovered now that means that this person in a box reporting to you is now going to take on a project and go work with another group so how do you decide whether or not to share i've talked to a few of the companies that have put in these marketplaces and asked them how did you get the leader to share their workers to to take time off and away from their job to do a project and i must say it's not uncommon for them to say well we just don't tell them and the leader kind of discovers that the worker has this extra time so as you begin to integrate these systems more and more into your organization leaders are now sharing workers they encounter workers maybe 10 20 30 times more often as they move through these projects very much changes the nature of leadership in a way it makes it more important the human elements like values like ethics etc because those things are going to be on display more workers are going to touch more leaders and so if those leaders have strong values strong ethics a common sense of the way they're sharing and why they're sharing talent it can be a immense exponential elevation of the humanity and and the uh sort of empowerment of the system on the other hand this acceleration can also work the other way if leaders are not prepared if they tend to hoard talent if they tend to exhibit values that are not consistent you're going to see that a lot more quickly because it's not limited to just those 30 people in a box so again fascinating issues many to be explored i hope some of you are commenting on the leadership issues here and what it means to move from a leader of 30 people in boxes to a leader that shares talent and then finally as many of you are already guessing and may even be working on there is this issue of the the society surrounding this work system and uh and certainly you can do many things in your own organization perhaps in collaboration with partners um i'll just say there there needs to be a rather significant rethink at the social policy level particularly in countries like the us where so much of the safety net is tied to having a job i went every time i hear really smart well-intentioned policy makers say we've got to create good jobs i wish they would say we've got to create good work because you limit your options so much if you assume that the good has to come with an employment contract rather than things like portable pensions portable health care etc so those are the elements of the the seven chapters that uh we talked about um here's again a recap of what robin and i have just covered i'm not going to dwell on this one but just to give you a sense of where it is in the handouts in case you want to see the chapters of the book laid out here and that brings us to our final poll question and then we'll begin to move after this fairly quickly toward a conclusion and then hopefully talking with some of the questions that you've submitted with elizabeth and her team's help so let's go to poll question three and i'll just read it here mackenzie uh which of the elements of this new work operating system then are used in your organization now we covered seven of them and in these five choices we've kind of combined them a bit so the first one is are you using elements of work and workers as deconstructed the work into its job elements the workers into capabilities some of you might call those skills number two are you using perpetually invented task and project combinations where the the work is contained in jobs but then leaders can post projects etc where jobs are perpetually reinvented as we look at the tasks within them and ask who could do that better think providence number three work arrangements that reach out into the boundaryless ecosystem to what extent are you reaching beyond your boundary to have contractors volunteers crowdsourcers gig workers any number of of talent sources do work at the task level number four how much are you working on automation as uh optimized at the human and uh at the human level and then finally to what extent are you coordinating work with your leaders in terms of teams and projects so one two three four five uh mackenzie i'll let you gather up the and report the results to us thank you for uh the first four all the work and workers as deconstructed job elements about ten percent uh perpetually reinvented task project combinations also around ten percent work arrangements include a boundary-less ecosystem about 11 percent automation as task level human automation optimization 13 percent and then 57 to work coordination as collaborative teams and projects yeah pretty i think uh really very definitive results i think that we have i would say it sounds like kind of the beginnings of experimentation in the first four uh and then this idea of teams and projects i think robin that's very um very consistent it's interesting that that would say organizations might be beginning with leadership and with getting their leaders comfortable with sharing people i also suspect that that reflects the idea that these internal talent market places whether put in by any number of vendors where a leader can post a project and someone can take it on those are extraordinarily popular it is i think today's as i like call it bright shiny object your ceos know about it your hr leaders know about it and they say can't we have one of those um and so i wonder if that's where we're seeing you know a voluntary system of projects that can be posted at which maybe someday might be integrated with the larger system yeah completely agree john and i i also think as we said a little while ago just the experience through the pandemic where people were just forced to reshuffle move people from one part of the business to another i think has started to build that muscle of you know thinking more about skills and tasks and you know collaborating across functional boundaries then perhaps we might have done you know two years prior indeed indeed very interesting thanks to all of you for that and so we're moving on mckenzie thanks a lot and so again a lot of words here but it's really uh to give you uh just something to something to finish with here so how would you get started uh i think what i've come to is it's at least until the book uh becomes a bestseller it becomes more widely read it's very unusual probably unheard of that your leaders your workers your executive team are going to come to hr or someone else and say i need that new work operating system that john and robin wrote about uh as much as we want to see that happen it's not there yet and so what you have are really the signals that that so a leader will come to you and say i can't fill my job requisitions for months and months and months they will say i thought automation was going to neatly replace these people in these jobs and i could lift them out and redeploy them it's turning out that i need to keep the people and the automation and figure out how to combine them they may say we say we're about things like belonging and diversity equity sustainability we say that's everyone's job and that seems that causes it to be no one's job what might be a system do we need to create a job of diversity or is there a way to think about that differently these are the kinds of triggers that we talk about in the book and then which means that you don't have to start by by d essentially by changing your entire system you start in the places where there's energy you start with experiments and these principles can be applied in places within your organization rather than thinking you have to throw away your job-based systems much of the work is going to be in jobs for a long long time however at the edges it's our view that this new work operating system will give you and your leaders and your workers a different way of thinking about the options available to them okay and excuse me gentlemen we have a lot of good questions and barely 20 minutes to address them so i just wanted to let you know that we're ready to go to questions thank you very much elizabeth sure super yeah these are let me uh turn my camera on so i can join you hello thank you this as i expected when we chat about this earlier we do have a ton of really really good thoughtful questions i figured uh given the topic and the audience um and uh you know what the first actually uh as one of our our audience members says the old leadership is becoming useless and bring great resistance to the new work operating system how do you promote a new kind of leadership for this scenario and maybe we can broaden that to uh you know what does this mean for leadership and what are the implications for leaders robin do you want to start yeah i'll maybe start with sort of how you get leaders to sort of start to engage around change and maybe john you can pick up on the pivots in the skills we're seeing you know um the example of that retailer i think was was really quite instructive and we see this work well in organizations where john talked about kind of the pain points right that you want to start with the sort of change we're talking about here is is can be very disruptive right because you're talking about challenging so many of your legacy notions and in some cases it may threaten the integrity of the operating model so are there some pain points where you could pick a discrete area you can't find talent you've got a bottleneck in the process you've a leader has gone out and bought a new piece of technology kit and you know she's about to implement it can you use that impetus as a way for a focused disputed prototype that allows you to sort of test this enabling the all the enabling architecture we've talked about around this particular initiative in a way that um that others can follow along that they can see the benefits and the requirements of the new work operating system but it's done in a discrete kind of safe space that allows many to observe and learn and for you to sort of actually pilot and build up the muscle necessary to make this work so i think it's probably the best way to get started um and maybe getting your leaders either those directly involved or those on the periphery to all participate and at a minimum observe and collaborate through that process yeah but i think that's i think that's robin has put his finger on elizabeth i don't know that there's an easy answer to you know question like the old leadership is useless and i really appreciate the kind of candor and edginess of that you know i think leaders quickly surmise that this is is different again lots of the chief hr officers that i've talked to about the book have said you know they're just used to saying these 30 people belong to me in a way and i know how to do that kind of leadership i think covet has accelerated a bit the idea that 30 people in a place is not the way that work is going to get done so robin's right i think what we found is find a place where the leader is already bewildered you know the automation isn't working the way i thought i can't fill a job requisition these skills change so fast that i can't i can't hope to train people in the time frame that we have and i think it's come to them and say i know you didn't ask for it but let's allow us to take a framework that says what if we allow things to deconstruct would that be easier easier on you and then i think you know something like maybe find a few leaders willing to share you know something like that and create a little ecosystem maybe at a distribution center maybe at a call center where we practice this flowing and and sharing and leaders begin to get more more comfortable with fluidity maybe all three leaders become the uh become the repository and hub for everyone's employees in a certain function something like that right okay great now i had we have a couple questions about these so-called gig economies you know contingent work is obviously a you know an element here and um you know one uh one of our audience members pointed out that uh you know it's uh the system that's flexible work is great when you can charge a thousand dollars a day not so much if you're you know around a minimum wage uh and you know somebody else that you know asked give it you know given that and giving you know sort of some of the the ways in which the gig economy isn't necessarily working for everybody um how do you see it evolving from where it stands today and how might it improve for workers and for employers again i'm going to defer to my robert i think i'll let you start with you you've done a lot of thinking about this with the world economic forum yeah and we sort of um allude to this in chapter eight in the book um where we talk about a couple of things that the forum has done there is firstly a charter for good work uh good platform work and what is coming out um in in early may is a a charter around new standards for good work that several dozen organizations have already signed and will be a point of focus in davos this year but i i do think elizabeth we're seeing some real movement on this front right so my organization mercer actually we've stood up a business uh called indigo that provides uh benefits for contingent workers we're seeing more and more progressive chros this um this is going to sound a little funny but i had a chro a couple of years back who said you know our employees may choose us for the free food but you know every day we're using 3 500 gig workers on these various platforms how do i build a a relationship that is not just transactional you know so the next time this great app developer this great graphic designer has has a choice you know they choose us um but i do think you know that there are a organizations who are being more progressive and thinking about how they manage a relationship not a transaction but b a lot more activity whether it's from the world economic forum whether it's from various states that are looking at this notion john alluded to portability of benefits there are a couple of states looking at portable accounts where if you're an uber driver and you know a portion of your fare funds a flexible tax advantaged account um that allows you to fund you know your potentially your pension your potentially access to healthcare potentially you know access to reskilling and upskilling all on a tax advantage basis so i think we're starting to see some movement in a couple of different sectors okay great now we have some good questions that really sort of the devil is in the details so one of those is how can organizations achieve um real accuracy and timeliness in inventorying skills because if you're going to really do this you need the data especially if you want to fully explore ai as a tool from matching work to a person um i need good data better data very up-to-date data so i'll take that one robin and i'm not i'm not sure this is going to be a popular answer i know that my colleagues are very interested in coming up with some sort of common language for skills um first of all i'll say i think skills is not i love skills because it has broken the plane and made everybody sensitive to deconstruction so atomizing a person into skills you you know you're suddenly fi you're suddenly removed from the idea that they fit a job so i like that skills is really only one part of what we would think about as capability in psychology they would say knowledge and skills and abilities and of course once you start doing that you end up with the question of granularity should it be a ten-level skill five level skill why did they call it one thing and we call it another thing what do i put on my linkedin profile all of that is relevant but i don't think the solution elizabeth is that someone's going to come up with a lexicon and the best analogy i have is is thinking about uh platforms for shopping or movies or anything else that we all consume and nobody at amazon is coming up with a lexicon of product features every time scion puts a new product into the market at all the ai watches transactions watches the language people use to search and it sort of consolidates all of that and lo and behold you know if you type in some weird set of features it's going to say oh i know what you want it's from this vendor and then you know what to call so i think that eventually the this talent marketplace will evolve in the same way and that it will be the transactions and the language used by the people who are uh who are engaging those transactions that will be listened to and kind of perpetually updated uh i just don't see as again with with all terrific respect for my colleagues working very hard on this it i i think really that that the the better way to think of it is can we create a system that is organic enough to let people find each other for example these talent marketplaces when they begin don't really have a lexicon of well you know your project has to be this language you just post it in your own language and someone reads it in your own language and they decide if in their own language they have the capability and motivation to do it and the marketplace kind of chooses so i'm hoping we kind of move quickly to that that said elizabeth i've been talking about that idea for 10 years with microsoft and apple and google and amazon and as yet i i don't see the startup evolving that's uh that's developing that so i hope maybe out of this webinar uh we'll see cool thanks uh we also hear from another audience member that one of the major challenges to moving to this way of working is the bureaucracy and entrenched mentality of our hr systems themselves um benefits pay performance management how do we move those functions um also technically because there's that's that's a lot of inertia just you know no functionally and culturally you know indeed well i think one of the reasons for the book elizabeth and i know one of the reasons you know our editorial team at uh mit was so excited about the book initially was that it might uh begin or make a i'll say a humble contribution to a dialogue about this that it might at least lay down a gauntlet that would say what if what you need is a system where the deconstructed elements can match to each other without the intervening consolidation into something called a job or a job holder or a degree and i and i first of all i will endorse the idea that one of the fun things for me about writing about this is that it is a challenge for most of the systems um and i so yes there are challenges in the hr systems and and you know one of the great things that i get to do is work with extraordinary people that'll solve that problem and then i get to write about it and rob and i get to write about it robin being one of those solvers um but and i think the other one is perhaps the it's it's the it's the top of the iceberg on what i think is a much more fundamental uh challenge and and a much more important way for hr and others to step up is to offer workers and leaders a new way to think um and so yes the systems need to change as people know for 30 years my position on hr systems is they should be seen much more in terms of how they teach others to think about work so then that may be the starting point is that we first begin to teach organization members and others how to think this way and then we begin to develop again piece by piece experiment by experiment a place where maybe we can link pay uh play the two two potassium projects well maybe we can link some of our development taxonomy to tasks and projects and let's let it expand that way organically yeah i will just say there is an entire chapter devoted to moving beyond that legacy of of jobs to you know what is a what is an operating system that hinges on tasks and capabilities actually look like and what does it mean for every aspect of the talent life cycle i think i'd also say elizabeth there it's not as if there are models for this there you know freelance platforms have existed for many many many many decades they now span the kinds of work that almost everyone would be surprised about i challenge you to type in some kind of work or a job title into a platform like upwork or fiverr or others you will be amazed at the the kinds of people who will say i can help you with that sort of work so i think elizabeth for me that that kind of marketplace offers some insight into how this might look inside an organization or as an organization becomes a hub for that larger work ecosystem makes sense thanks now just towards the end of your of your last slide you you started touching a little bit on the topic of of diversity it's a big question so um i don't think we can chew into it entirely but um but you know how does the work of advancing diversity equity and inclusion in organizations change in this new world of work because you've got contributors who are much less loose much more loosely coupled um not as much of an opportunity perhaps to support people and bring them in um you know so how can we proactively seek to ensure that opportunities are open to all in this environment i'll maybe kick off elizabeth and i'll just point to you know a number of examples right so um one of the the example i alluded to as we talked about the insurance company one of the things that that algorithm explicitly seeks out is not just um the matching of who has the capabilities to do this body of work but can if we look at the pool of people who have those capabilities is there an opportunity or a legacy bias that we need to correct by now giving access to that a project opportunity to someone who maybe is not part of that community but has adjacent skills and whose participation and was new and who's the opportunity to gain capabilities would now make him or her you know part of a more diverse community so looking at how do we address diversity needs with these with these projects but more importantly i think you know one thing john and i sort of quickly realized as we were writing this is if you think of the the times at which diversity is addressed right it's at the time of higher it's at the time of promotion it's at the time of pay raise these are incredibly episodic versus in a new work operating system where talent is flowing to work you have so many more opportunities to address some of those legacy issues to keep moving the needle on diversity equity and inclusion and i think the last thing i'll say is when we look at that system um you have an opportunity to meet more and more people on their individual terms and thus create a much more inclusive enterprise than i think the traditional ones that we might have had were the jobs and the headlines that defined what skills a person had which were incredibly violent in many instances you know were the only things that a recruiter might focus on robin puts it well in a nutshell elizabeth if the system runs correctly you end up having the opportunity for many leaders to touch many many more workers in in project oriented ways in smaller ways and so as robin said what you end up with is a much less episodic cycle a much much more frequent opportunity to mix workers together uh on and not wait until someone is eligible for a job or can be hired for a job so i think to be jonathan and donner and i wrote about this to be honest you know if it's if your leaders are not good at inclusion and diversity those biases are going to show up fast and they're going to be very very apparent and so i'm hoping that the system will self-correct much faster around better values ethics etc because the transparency that begins to happen will be immense and it'll probably shine a light on both the good and the bad hopefully by asking organizations to move even more quickly to help leaders become better at these things right okay thanks well and since we just have a couple of minutes left um maybe we'll just go with a quick lightning round question which i've just devised just obviously this is not in our contract elizabeth but no i know um this is it's a this is a a major um cultural shift for organizations that want to be in the lead on this um big change management effort um what uh you know we've talked about uh about you know leadership and and how they they need to change there's gonna have to be a lot of messaging around this what are what what are some beginning ways for our audience to think about articulating the benefits of this to workers and because they are especially as the idea of uh you know if it's destabilizing for a manager to think of not having people in jobs it's super destabilizing for people to think about being yeah so what what's the uh what what's the best messaging to to managers i mean to to managers to give to employees if maybe you can each take a shot at that nice probably yeah so um i think i'll say two things one is the deal in the past was about competitive paying benefits and a great work environment and i think what we've seen just the last two years is the epicenter of the deal now is flexibility for me to engage with you on my terms and your promise that you will keep me relevant for a changing world and and i do think that's really at the heart of what this new work operating system promises is because of the signals that are continuously being sent to the workforce about what skills and capabilities are being demanded versus if you're in a job those are incredibly those are not very clear they're obscured by all sorts of noise um so the fact that you get those signals you have uh you know for an organization if you're going to send people those signals you have to give them access to the resources to continue to develop themselves and you know i'll i'll end by saying take a look at the unilever case study in the book because the journey that they wanted to go on was about to say you know a business model is being professionally reinvented you need to be perpetually reinvented and we're going to have these future fit conversations with you to support your perpetual reinvention yeah i think robin's hit on it it is it is kind of destabilizing elizabeth but i i think um uh while covet is essentially a disaster it also has uh shine a light and and advance certain things very very quickly um and so i think the other thing is i think most workers will realize they're really not that far away in this thing they call a job from behaving in many ways in the system that we're already talking about you know no jobs change rather quickly you've got us you know they know that they need to stay agile they know that they need to be ready for different opportunities and i think robin and my hope would be that perhaps we can begin to or make a humble contribution to a conversation that would say how do we better institutionalize that so that it's not so much of a mystery but i think it's a fact even if the operating system needed to manage it is somewhat obscure today right good thanks and on that note we are out of time so thank you both so much for sharing your insights today um this has been terrific and uh thanks very much to infopro our sponsors for this event thanks again to all of you for being with us today thanks everyone thank you all thanks elizabeth

2022-05-01 11:58

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