Work design
How can we build a workforce strategy for an unknown future?
Leaders need a new work operating system that better supports the high degree of organizational agility required to thrive amid increasingly rapid change and disruption. The emergence of new business models has created opportunities for many sectors to change how they operate — automating jobs and creating new opportunities for the entire talent ecosystem. As work roles are reconfigured to embrace AI and robotics, organizations must rethink the critical skills they need and build talent platforms that provide maximum agility.
Organizations seeking to transform work face a number of challenges:
- Reinventing work to ensure it is meaningful and sustainable — taking into account increasing digitization and AI
- Enabling faster decision-making, agility, innovation and growth to help deliver workforce strategy goals
- Navigating the new world of work by integrating employees, gig workers, machine learning and other emerging trends
To break out of the rigidity of existing organizational structures, leaders must reassess and craft new operating systems. These should support work transformations that better enable agility, fluidity and sustainability. This involves:
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Starting with the work (current and future tasks), not with existing jobs
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Combining people and automation
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Considering the full array of work arrangements (such as full-time employment, gig and freelance working, alliances, joint projects and other alternatives)
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Allowing talent to “flow to work” rather than being dedicated to fixed, permanent jobs
#1 people priority in business? Defining future workforce needs and/or restructuring.