Dive Brief:

• In a recent blog post, Josh Bersin, founder and Principal of Bersin by Deloitte, wrote that research during his firm's Human Capital trends 2015 project found that while more than 2/3 of the companies are dealing with “the overwhelmed employee,” a similar number said that their work environment had become “highly complex” or “complex.”  

• When asked what they were doing about this, almost one third of employers had some type of simplification program in process.

• Work simplification, in many ways, is a new theme in business, Bersin writes. After talking with many companies about this topic, he discovered that there are several issues taking place, largely driven by the proliferation of new systems and technologies now being used at work.

Dive Insight:

According to Bersin, “technically elegant” solutions such as performance management, compliance programs, and employee assessment/education often turn out to be tasks that people simply don’t have time to do—so they begrudingly do the work but don’t engage and don’t learn or gain what they should.

Bersin recommends the "design thinking" concept. I.e., focus a “solution” on the user and his or her problem, as opposed to building an “end to end process” that prevents any bad things from happening.

Bersin writes that simplicity means looking seriously at a business problem, identifying the essential change or solution people need to make work better, and implementing a solution that focuses on the people. Design thinking is a lot of common sense—HR just has to get out of the mode of building “completeness” into everything it does, according to Bersin.