Impact of Work without Jobs

Let’s face it! To understand how to reinvent human work, leaders need a new operating system for work that better supports organizational agility and more reflects the fluidity of tasks in the job.

New principles and components are needed, which we will zoom on further in this article 👇

Sweet spot of technology and tasks

While leaders may still think a lot of work can be managed well using a traditional work control system where an "employee" has a job or role, there is no excuse to ignore this future work evolution. Research in the book ‘Work without Jobs’ by Ravin Jesuthasan, CFA, FRSA shows that a new work operating system kicks in at the ‘sweet spot’ of embracing and adopting new technology in the optimization of daily tasks. 

When this occurs, leaders realize that not on technological advancement, but on optimizing work leads to achieving the full potential of work and automation. Then it requires a fundamentally different paradigm. For optimization of work, leaders need to have insight in the most important skills of employees to fulfill these new tasks with data and technology to achieve business goals.

Technology replaces human jobs

The idea is still alive among many that technology will replace people's jobs and that leaders can reduce cost by downsizing headcount due to automation. That’s not the case, it will not happen. 

But the demand for future capabilities remains pivotal, for solving the organizational, social, and strategic challenges of work automation. It requires insights of employees skills for optimizing the constantly evolving options that combine human and automated work.

Of course certain tasks will be automated, still other tasks will likely be reinvented by the combination of humans and automation, such as “making decisions and solving problems.

A new work operating system offers the solution to this dilemma by deconstructing and reinvents human work into tasks and skills.

Limitless Ecosystem of Work Arrangements

Work is increasingly done by a mix of different types of people with specific skills who can perform certain tasks well and who are not always full-time employees. In the new work operating system, work is independent of a particular arrangement or function, whereby a number of conditions must be included in work arrangements. Examples of these new work arrangements include the following:

contractors • freelancers • volunteers • gig workers • internal talent marketplaces (full-time employees working on projects and assignments across the organization and beyond their job). To be sure, a regular full-time job should also be on this list, but it shouldn't be the only option.

With an overview of these different options, you can optimize tasks for projects and involve employees as much as possible. However, in most organizations there is only a list of permanent employees. Imagine the possibilities of real time insights of all the key skills in your organization, regardless type of employee, contract or arrangement?

Identify employee’s skills and interests

In the traditional work operating system, organizations have linked employee capabilities to jobs. Most HR systems focus on whether or not the employees are qualified for an entry-level job or qualified to move to a new job within the organization based on current performance and the traditional resume with previous job titles, duties, and a list of completed courses.

This is a sub-optimization of work and employees. The traditional work system tells nothing about the employee's skills beyond their qualifications from the current job title. Few of those qualifications will be used in any job, but each of them can become relevant as the job changes or in a multidisciplinary project.

Still, optimizing work increasingly demands a nuanced approach. Certainly in times of labor shortages or rapid change, the right question is not "is an employee fully qualified for this job" but rather "which potential employees are "usually qualified", and what would it take to make them fully qualified?" Identifying the most skilled person requires a work system that can view employees as a set of skills and interests rather than as holders of a "degree" or a job.

Principles to transform into a skills-based organization

The four principles of the new work operating system are:

1. Start with current and future tasks of the job -> not the existing jobs or position.

2. Combine people and technologies -> optimize this

3. Consider the full range of available human capital required for the tasks (e.g. employment, job, freelance, alliances, projects, other alternative work arrangements) -> instead of full-time employees.

4. Let talent "flow" into work and projects -> instead of being limited to being stuck in traditional jobs.

Each of these principles provides a useful insight and contrast between the new and the traditional work operating system.

“the future is unevenly distributed” quote by William Gibson

1. Start with current and future tasks of the job

A traditional operating system starts with jobs and employees within the organization. This creates a number of major challenges that we will not explain further.

But we share 3 wrong questions leaders still ask themselves quite often:

“What jobs will be eliminated due to automation?” and “What training will keep my existing employees relevant?” and “What do I need to pay to get the needed skilled employees?”

The new work operating system starts with different questions:

• “What are the current and future work tasks (regardless of current jobs)?”
• “What are the capabilities to perform these tasks?”
• “What current and potential workers have or might develop those capabilities (regardless of their current job)?” 
• “What are the best work arrangements to engage those capabilities (including options beyond regular full-time employment)?”

2. Combine people and technologies

Depending on the characteristics of key tasks and objectives, technology can either substitute, augment, or transform human work.

The new work operating system offers better questions for employees to ask the following: 

• What are key tasks within the process?
• Is the process already optimized?
• What are the characteristics of each task (repetitive versus variable, mental versus physical, independent versus interactive)? 
• What objective or pain are we trying to solve for each task? 
• Does automation substitute for the human, augment the human, or create new work? 
• What are the available types of automation (robotic process automation, cognitive automation, or social or collaborative robotics)? 
• What is the optimal way to combine human and automated work across jobs and processes?

The first question immediately reframes the analysis to focus on the deconstructed tasks rather than on the entire role. The rest of the analysis is more optimal.

3. Consider the full range of available human capital 

Even if technology is not an issue, the future of work will contain alternative work arrangements (different from regular full-time employment in jobs). The optimum solution is, deconstruct the job and examine how each task is best accomplished. It rarely leads directly to the replacement of an entire job with an alternative work arrangement.

For example, the job of product manager includes many tasks. One of those tasks is generating ideas for new products or features, combined with other tasks such as evaluating those ideas to fit with existing strategies and market potential.

If we deconstruct the job, then the task of generating new product ideas emerges as one “assignment” that can be deconstructed from the rest of the job. That task can be undertaken by different work arrangements in the organization to a wide array of volunteers, freelance, alliances, projects and detached from an employment contract.

So, once work is deconstructed, the individual tasks present a much wider range of human work options.

4. "flowing" talent into work and projects

Optimizing work is to let the right people do the right tasks, so let talent ‘flow’ into work. Imagine that you have insights of talent and key skills required for projects in your entire organization.

This ‘flowing’ often requires that workers look beyond their strict job descriptions to apply their skills where they are most pivotal. For example when data scientists, business analysts and software developers flow to a project to develop new functionality for a customer application.

The key is constantly optimizing the reinvention of work by combining options such as:

1. Talent in fixed roles as regular full-time employees with difficult-to-acquire skills that justify offering a fixed full-time assignment

2. Talent who flows to tasks or projects, perhaps because their enabling skills are required in short-term specific period, in several different work processes (such as a freelancer or project-based data scientist who moves between projects in finance, HR, and operations as needed)

3. Talent who are in hybrid roles that are partially fixed because of work amount or skills dedicated to a job but can also flow to specific challenges as needed (such roles often emerge from internal talent marketplaces where regular jobholders take on additional project work)

Determine for this the boundary between different organization units or jobs within the organization boundary (not the organization boundary itself).

Deconstruction is key for skills management

For an organization three relevant core values are particularly vital to pivot to the new work operating system:

1. Prioritize individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

2. Prioritize customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

3. Prioritize responding to change over following a plan.

Good to mention the following, according to the authors Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau of the book ‘Work without Jobs.’

“Yet the Agile process redesign alone cannot overcome the constraints imposed by traditional ways of thinking about jobs. A major consumer goods organization implemented Agile, but despite its thoughtful approach to redesigning its processes, and even upskilling its employees, the company faced major difficulty in getting its employees to flow to work and actively engage with challenges that spanned job titles or departments”.

Much of the key value of the Agile process design is squandered because the workers are trapped in a system of jobs that offers no mechanism to flow to the goal of product improvement. Many organizations lack to deconstruct the jobs into discrete tasks that clearly support its goals, so its workers struggle with work that reaches beyond their jobs. They will be challenged to understand how projects fit with their day jobs, how to find space to contribute, and how to respond to direct supervisors who feel that projects are unrelated to the employees’ functional areas.

My conclusion and advice

Leaders who adopt the new work operating system will transform faster into a skill-based organization. This means deconstructing jobs in the most pivotal tasks related to the required skills to perform the tasks. 

Absolutely key in the new work operating system is to also have a good skills management strategy and execution to use the right skills for the right tasks by the right people. My advice is to start small with a pragmatic Proof of Concept of skills management. First, learn to use a basic set of important skills, build a skills taxonomy, get feedback of the users and evaluate with relevant stakeholders before roll-out to others departments. Don't fall in the trap to make it too big and complex from the start.

Crucial in this process is using the right skills management platform, that fits your organizational culture and strategy. First start with a limited amount of users and run a user acceptance test. The end goal is the active use of the right skills management platform by everyone in the organization as part of the regular business.

Want to know more about how to start with skills management? It will accelerate your transition into a skills-based organization.

Jan-Willem Nieuwenhuys is Managing Partner of Digital Skilled Professionals (dsp) and is a trusted advisor in the field of skills management to make organizations future-ready. Connect on LinkedIn and/or reach out here to meet.

Jan-Willem is also host of the Learning & Skills Management podcast 🔊

Work changes quickly. Learning and transforming is a challenge for organizations. In these podcasts, we have conversations with learning leaders, professionals, and solution providers who have applied successful methods to transform a business environment. 

#futureofwork #skillsmanagement #skillsstrategy #learningskills

Disclaimer: this article is written with the inspiration of the book Work without Jobs in combinations of my own experience. Copyrights and credits are with the authors Ravin Jesuthasan, CFA, FRSA John Boudreau and publisher MIT Press.