Where is employment going?
If you ask Ravin Jesuthasan, a managing director and global practice leader at Towers Watson, there is a tectonic shift happening in the workplace. Rather than the typical process of assigning a piece of work to an employee, it’s about talent “floating” in and out of an organization to get work done right.
Jesuthasan would say, in fact, that the future of employment is about letting the work determine how things get done, not the other way around.
As a result, Jesuthasan’s new book, “Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment,” details how long-term employment is giving way to medium- or short-term employment, forever changing the workplace dynamic by altering the bond that once fixed an individual inside an organization.
Jesuthasan partnered with two other deep HR thinkers – John Boudreau, research director at the Center for Effective Organizations and professor of management and organization in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, and David Creelman, CEO of Creelman Research – in writing the book.
Of course, using independent contractors and contingent workers is not new. You have the so-called sharing economy, built on independent contractors as it stands. But this is different, Jesuthasan explains.
He says the twin factors of the democratization of work (i.e., new “employment” relationships that are shorter in duration and more company/individual balanced) and technology enablement have increased the number of options for getting work done, and broadened the business case for doing so beyond just cost management, as was typically the case in the past.
“Getting work done by means other than an employee was once considered a fringe event, but now leading organizations are accepting and taking advantage of the notion that talent has shown itself to be mutable,” he says.
In the view of the book’s three co-authors, work is often best done by talented individuals who are not full-time employees (think programmers, etc.). And based on the book’s worldview, more work will increasingly be done by non-employees, for very good reason: it will be a competitive edge.
“A leader’s job is to ‘lead the work’ not ‘lead the employees,’ ” Jesuthasan says. “A leader’s ability to design the organization, and the work of the organization, so that it can be placed in the hands of the best possible talent will result in a serious marketplace advantage.”
He adds that someone in every organization – aka HR – should be thinking about all the “people issues” of key talent - whom you rely on whether they are your employees, those of an alliance partner, free agents, etc.
An easy starting point for employers and HR leaders thinking along these lines would be to look for an opportunity to apply the book’s framework to a job that they are struggling with and applying one of the three dimensions from the book’s framework for success.
“For example, employers can borrow creative reward approaches from the world of contests and use them inside the organization,” he says, referring to how some entities offer huge prizes to solve a specific problem. “Or, employers can borrow the deconstruction of work concept into projects, and then consider offering project work to your own employees, as IBM does so successfully.”
For HR leaders, Jesuthasan says Lead the Work’s concept offers HR a unique opportunity to be the stewards of work (not just of employees) going forward. But that change will require new thinking – mainly the ability to break out of the way things have always been done when it comes to managing talent.
“While this will accelerate and expand the strategic role of the HR function, it will require some very different skills, especially those that revolve around understanding talent markets on the global level, accessible through today’s technology,” Jesuthasan says.
