Imagine 200 years ago if the artisans of the time could read about the new way their work and lives were about to be re-arranged. They might be in shock! You will no longer be responsible for the whole job or even the quality of your work - just one small element. There will be a system of control overlay on you to monitor your every move and the minutes in your day. Speed of work will be king. You will start, stop, and break when you are told and punished if you don't comply. You will have to leave the village and go to a big work-house with many strangers. If you get sick or injured you are on your own. Welcome to the 20th century. Enjoy!
That system worked for society and allowed the most incredible transformation in world history. We now don't starve, we don't die in wars, we don't die at birth, women were included in the economic system, etc. That was the entree - now its time for the main meal.
There is a new deal coming - a new future of work - and actually it's here now if you care to look around. Should we be worried, will it be bad? Not necessarily but the new world of work will be as strange to today's humans as the shift to "taylorism" was to those of 200 years ago.
The concept of organisation, the concept of a job and the concept of work are all being reinvented. Value creation will be about having access to resources and assets, rather than owning them (the biggest taxi company has no cars, the biggest holiday company has no rooms, the biggest news sources have no journalists, etc).
The orientation towards humans in the new deal will be to include, respect, give autonomy, allowing them to bring their talent as an when it is needed. But it will be a very fluid world and the principle unit of organisation will not be "the job" but "the deliverable" and people will be selected based on proven capability as evaluated by everyone and made transparent to all. What we can and can't deliver will be known.
In tomorrow’s world, we will not have jobs anymore. Jobs will gradually decompose into “pieces of work” that can be performed almost anywhere for a limited period of time. We will no longer have employees, as they too will be “decomposed” into separate capabilities. These capabilities and the available work will be matched by a “matching engine” (you could call this the “uberisation” of work - Linkedin or Livehire on steroids). As a result, a worker will be engaged for a part of their capability for a limited period of time for a very specific piece of work, irrespective of the location. You can also call this the “packetisation” of me and my capabilities and will be marketed as such.
People won't look for jobs anymore - economic ecosystems will pro-actively look for talents.
We will no longer have people joining companies as employees, so, we will no longer need an EVP, we may no longer need offices, no longer offer careers, we work with individual market pricing, rather than with salary bands. We no longer have a company-wide consistent performance management system or a talent system.
The organisations that we know so well today will no longer be needed in the future and together with this, almost all our HR practices will have to change.
Salem Ismael, Michael Malone and Yuri van Geest in "Exponential Organisations" identified some of the elements for the organisation of the future :
• Staff on demand. Already now we witness an explosive growth of the “off payroll employee”.
• Community and crowd; as the borders of companies are becoming fluid.
• Algorithms. Experience will no longer reside in humans.
• Engagement is purpose driven and behavioral economics will become mainstream in HR.
• Experimentation the future organisation is not about managing risk, it is about constantly taking risk. The thinking behind this is to fail fast.
• Autonomy: Self-organising, decentralised authority, multi-disciplinary collaboration, agile.
• Social Technologies create horizontal and totally pervasive communication.
Information accelerates everything, with disruption being the new norm, small will beat big, assets won’t be owned but rented, trust will beat control and versatility will replace rigidity. In this world, everything is measurable and anything is knowable.
The future organisation will be an ever evolving, malleable “asset light” company with a small core of on-payroll employees, surrounded by multiple layers of physical and virtual communities; where ideas, innovation, products, manufacturing and financing are sourced through the crowd; where everything is “datafied” and managed through algorithms and dashboards, collaboration happening through social technologies in a culture of autonomy and permanent experimentation.
There will be room for a small band of leaders at the centre (note I didn't say at the top). Anything that looks remotely like command and control will be ejected at light speed. The leaders will be bright-enough but will be self aware, high-learners, adaptable, resilient, empathic, systems-thinkers with a high aptitude for facilitating and coaching and an intuitive capacity to influence others - this will be known. In a sense humans will be "hacked" by algorithms to know what they are good at and what drives them and if they "fit".
Even the work of Boards will change as block-chains makes their every decision transparent and their governance arrangements open to scrutiny as well as more democratic. In fact you may not need Boards - that can be left to the ecosystem members to manage in a democratic, decentralised and accountable fashion. It this way the leaders will become accountable to the community and not the other way around. The world of work will be de-central, not central.
You might be horrified by this if you are an employee! However what if the Company ran an ecosystem that was toxic and seemed not to care for those in it - well the best employees, the ones delivering the value and creativity, will simply not be here in the morning. The leaders would be thrown out. Just as Companies will pick and choose - so too will people. There will be no barriers to exit for talent as everything will be visible to everyone all the time. The EVP will be knowable to all like Glass-door on steroids. Companies will rise and fall on their reputations and their capacity to satisfy the human ecosystem through which they will deliver value or they will lose it very quickly.
What about HR? A pattern of new capabilities emerges, replacing the ones of today.
Employee Brand becomes Employee Experience
Change management will become Agile Leadership
Employee Engagement transitions into Community Engagement
Sourcing and Talent Attraction will turn into Talent Relationship Building
Learning & Development becomes Community Development & Boundary-less Careers.
HR of the future is a spider in a web of multi-stakeholders where on and off-payroll workers are serviced with equal importance, where they consult on corporate careers as well as on a company independent career, where they play an active role in “crowd and community management”, and this is a world where most decisions will be based on readily available data (and no longer on opinions). They will play the role of an all-encompassing talent broker, connecting leaders with top talent.
The idea of a career will be an anachronism - talent will be included agnostic of age, gender, race, disability. Capability will be king.
Human Resources will see a massive shift away from the current “de-humanized” HR process landscape, where employees are managed as assets. Lessons out of marketing in customer centrality will make inroads into HR and that we will increasingly start designing an HR context that is built around segmentation and totally individualised “experiences”. With this in mind, we expect to see that consumerisation will transform HR from the outside in; personas, journeys, touch-points, channel management and design thinking will become a standard part of the HR vocabulary.
Adult people are again treated as individual human, “re-humanising HR”, because failure to engage the community of stakeholders is systemic and mission failure.
50-60% of the work in HR today is related to administration and operations and risk. Service centre technology will become pervasive, will become increasingly standardised and especially in high volume environments progressively be replaced by chat-bots with AI and deep machine learning capability. And there is no competitive advantage having a shared services environment in-house. Cloud based technology platforms will become the norm. HR will give control back to the natural owners of their own data - the humans involved in the economic ecosystem. Three years ago there were about 70 HR-tech companies - today there are hundreds.
Pure strategic CoE activities in talent and reward will no longer be sitting “in-house”. Companies will discover more and more that sourcing this capability externally has advantages: more flexibility, scalability, easier access to latest insights. Learning and leadership development staying in-house; possibly a program manager will, but the rest can be (crowd) sourced externally.
Customer and Employee experience will merge - marketing and HR will merge - as the worker of the future will be one element of the marketing mix. Talent Acquisition will “just” be another form of customer acquisition. Data driven and technology enabled workforce attraction and engagement will likely be a winner. Reward will also sit there and become another marketing tool (just like price is one for product). This change will also drive the re-humanisation of HR practices. Community and crowd management also belongs there since they “own” engagement.
All these activities will be performed by the crowd and not necessarily sourced from an HR department.
What all this means for HR jobs is simple. There will be a lot fewer. HR as we know it will no longer exist but will be replaced by people with capabilities like Organisational Engineer, Virtual Culture Architect, Global Talent Scout, Convener, Facilitator, Agency Monitor, Coach, Talent and Technology Integrator, Social Policy & Community Activist.
The new HR leaders will still have a seat at the table but they will only have that seat because of their amazing talent to organise, influence, engage, lead, sense, notice things and contextualise.
The ones that will still be in leadership group will be amazing communicators, collaborators, activators, have amazing people skills and influence, be systems thinkers, will use social and psychological science, and will be highly human and customer-centric.
Just like everyone else they will not have room to be comfortable because they are constantly learning, re-inventing, and living longer.
On balance the new world of work is likely to be of net benefit to both society and the humans in that society unlike the last mega-shift in the workplace, which benefited society but in many ways was at the cost of the workers. This change will not be smaller or less strange than the world of work given to us by the last industrial revolution but it is likely to be better. HR of today will be a memory - like farriers, and lamplighters.
Acknowledgement to Ruud Rikhof and his website Kennedy-Fitch for the inspiration behind this article. .
Comments