BIG
I N TERVIEW
by Tech News, and one of the top 100 HR influencers by HR Executive. His other books are "Transformative HR" (Wiley, 2012), "Lead The Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment" (Wiley 2015), "Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach to Applying Automation to Work" (HBR Press, 2018).
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How would you define ‘Work’ without ‘Jobs’ and why the future of work requires the deconstruction of jobs and the reconstruction of work? Work is traditionally understood as a “job,” and workers as “jobholders.” Jobs are structured by titles, hierarchies, and qualifications. In our book, we propose a new way of looking at work that deconstructs jobs into their component parts, deploys these parts to the optimal combinations of talent and automation and connects talent to work more seamlessly to make the most of the skills and abilities of individual workers. COVID-19 impacted work and life globally. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in April 2020, said: "We have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in just two months”. Looking back from here, the impact on the future of work is far more profound. It's more like a 20-year trend in these two years because of two forces. | may 2022
The future of work requires an ability to ensure that the organisation, its work, and its workforce are perpetually being reinvented to ensure their continued relevance even as they are perpetually being rendered obsolete Certainly, digitalisation and automation is one factor, however the bigger and more insidious force is the democratisation of work… our ability to decouple work from its traditional confines of space, time, and structure. The most obvious change we can all see is the shift to remote work during the pandemic and we typically think of the where and when of work, but what is the work? How is the work done? Things like job sharing, etc. Who's doing the work? Is it automation? Is it
the employee? Is it an agile talent pool? And lastly, the Why of work. Why should I, as an individual, connect with what you as an organisation stand for or is your mission and purpose. The future of work requires an ability to ensure that the organisation, its work, and its workforce are perpetually being reinvented to ensure their continued relevance even as they are perpetually being rendered obsolete. In our new book, we lay out a roadmap for that future of work.
