Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Building Culture with a Distributed Work Model

These days the post-pandemic return-to-office question seems to have resolved. Most organizations have embraced a hybrid model, mandating that non-frontline employees work onsite between one and three days per week. However, this structure doesn’t necessarily equate to a positive work culture that employees are reluctant to leave. 

According to our Dayforce  Annual Pulse of Talent research, nearly 70% of employees are either looking for a new job or would leave their current organizations if the right opportunity came along. Thirty-eight percent said they had issues achieving their performance goals in the last year, with the main reason being too large of a workload. Only eight percent said their employer is giving them everything they need to be productive. 

It's clear that despite having more flexibility than ever before, employees are not as satisfied as they could be. And this does not bode well for a business climate that will continue to be plagued by labor and skills shortages.  

Understanding how to build a strong culture in a distributed work environment, a task that few attempted before the pandemic, has now become an organizational imperative. The following five strategies infused with the right employee experience technology may prove useful as you navigate this new terrain.  

Conduct ongoing employee needs assessments. 

The move to permanent distributed work requires a culture shift in all organizations, but instead of viewing this as an insurmountable task, leaders should look at it as a valuable opportunity to understand the unique requirements of all your employees and address concerns impacting specific groups.  

For example, caregivers may report that office commutes are a hardship, while employees who are underrepresented minorities may experience greater bias and more microaggressions in an in-person office environment. Leaders should know about these issues before they result in quiet or actual quitting.  

Employee pulse taking doesn’t have to be a ton of work. You can use an employee experience platform to automate the work of surveying your employees on a regular cadence and determine what they need and want as well as general workplace sentiment.  

You can also leverage an employee experience platform to create a real-time, two-way path to more in-depth dialogue and feedback with senior leaders and HR representatives. Once upon a time, the flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization might have been more of a trickle, and c-suite communication may have lacked transparency, vision, and purpose. When an organization is empowered by employee experience technology, this no longer has to be the case. 

For the rest of this piece, check out the Dayforce blog.

The Future of Workspace in the Age of Adaptability

Most global cities are taking a long time to recover their pre-pandemic vibrancy, and that’s in large part to ongoing low utilization of corporate office space. As shared in ManpowerGroup’s Age of Adaptability research, organizations are experiencing a culture revolution in which the traditional office environment takes a back seat to more dynamic, flexible places of work.

Leaders accustomed to rigid, in-person workplaces and schedules may wish for the world to return to the way it was (hence the return-to-office or RTO wars), but workforce futurists believe that ongoing societal disruptions and employee pushback are likely to change the model permanently.

Let’s examine what’s happening and why, and how the question of the future of workspace is likely to be answered in the end.

The State of Office Space in 2025

Pervasive corporate office vacancies speak for themselves. And according to CBRE’s Office Occupier Sentiment survey, more than half of executives anticipate further reductions of their office footprints to trim unoccupied space, with most executing this upon lease expirations that will occur within the next few years. Similarly, Altus Group found that the cumulative volume of 2023 office transactions was 43% below 2020 levels, and 57% below the 10-year average over the same period. 

In a conversation I had with Brad Serot, vice chairman at commercial real estate consultancy CBRE, I learned that many organizations are still committed to an office-centric approach. But a majority of CBRE’s survey respondents are seeking flexibility in lease agreements, including more latitude to expand or contract their total space, and shared building services and amenities.

The research picked up on a trend toward “flight to quality,” in which organizations are relocating to newer and more desirable buildings – of which there’s a limited supply. The highest-performing options today combine walkability as well as housing and high-end experiential retail.

Serot said that rather than just telling their workforces how things will be, smart leaders work alongside employees to design spaces that provide the appropriate structure and technology support based on geographic, industry, and company-specific norms as well as employee choice.   

This model works best when each corporate-sponsored physical office has a designated purpose – such as hosting in-person meetings, offering individual employee hoteling space, or placing team members on the same schedule in a neighborhood-type environment.

International Workplace Group CEO & Founder Mark Dixon himself described modern office space planning as a “hub and spoke model, with smaller central offices, more regional hubs, and growing numbers of local satellite offices.” He said that the concept of the 15-minute city – the idea that any place a person would need to go would be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of one’s home – saves time, is good for individuals’ health, and fosters community.

The Rise of Third Places 

I’ve been working in coffee shops since 2005. Once upon a time, I was the only person with a laptop in the store. Now, the preference to work at coffee places is so pervasive that some have had to implement “no laptop” policies to keep their establishments from being turned into mini-offices. 

In sociology, the third place refers to social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. Third places require either direct or indirect social interaction with other people and are also defined by the fact that no one is forcing you to be there. Besides coffee shops, popular third places for remote and hybrid workers include libraries, clubhouses, and conference centers. Coworking spaces like WeWork and Regus are good examples of businesses built on the premise of the third place. 

Some employees find third places desirable because they boost motivation and productivity, may have fewer distractions, and may also encourage them to get out of the house and look presentable. And given their popularity, leaders need to weigh whether it’s better for remote and hybrid employees to work in an independent third place or in the aforementioned regional hubs or local satellite offices.

Certainly, thorny issues like skill-building, confidentiality, privacy, and data security are easier to solve when an employee is working under a company-sponsored roof. Company-sponsored workspaces that are close to home may also boost connection and relationship building because one can see coworkers in person while working at the same location.

For the rest of the piece, check out the ManpowerGroup full blog series.

The Changing Nature of the Employer/Employee Social Contract

Over the last decade, employee expectations in the workplace have changed in a variety of interesting ways. Technological advances, a steady march toward globalization, unionization, and societal disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have fundamentally shifted the nature of the relationship between organization and worker. And while this relationship might not be as straightforward and “quid pro quo” as it was in the past, the evolution opens opportunities for both employer and employee growth, as well as a positive transformation of culture and the employee experience.  

Let’s take a closer look at some of the intricacies of this changing relationship and how employers may need to rethink their workforce strategies to succeed amid these new realities.  

Employees are commodities no more

As Mercer’s Kai Anderson, Ilya Bonic, and Kate Bravery wrote in their recent book Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age, employees have traditionally been seen as assets working under a transactional loyalty contract in which pay, benefits, and security were exchanged for time and output as dictated by the company.  

“The pandemic quickened the pace toward what we call the thrive contract – an employment model anchored in purpose, equity, and impact,” the authors said. “Employees demanded a healthier experience in exchange for a commitment to the organization’s renewal.” 

As part of the thrive contract, instead of viewing employees as commodities, employers care for employees in a holistic manner – supporting the whole person and both their personal and professional objectives. And this requires a shift in the very definition of what constitutes full-time employment and what is expected from full-time employees (FTEs). 

The meaning and relevance of full-time employment is changing 

A full-time job is generally one that requires employees to work a minimum of 30 hours a week, but in many countries, there is no legal definition of full-time employment, and specific arrangements are left to the employer and company policy.  

So, while the number of hours is standard, the timeframe in which an FTE works those hours has become far more flexible. Rather than being defined as work from Monday-Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, work scheduling arrangements for FTEs now run the gamut and include four-day work weeks, rotating in office and remote workdays, and shift swapping.  

Some FTEs use the increasing flexibility as an opportunity to devote more time to personal pursuits, while others take on other roles like gig work. Either way, employee work-life balance has become a central concern of organizations who once did not bother themselves with what went on outside company walls. For instance, employers who have implemented in-office mandates are now often expected to make those mandates easier for employees by providing childcare and transportation assistance.  

Furthermore, in the old contract between employers and FTEs, a “job” was well defined. FTEs already possessed most of the skills necessary to perform that job and were compensated accordingly. Today, employers are redesigning jobs in real time to make room for smart technology partners, and employee upskilling and reskilling efforts must keep pace.  

For the rest of the article, head on over to the Dayforce blog.

Kelly Monahan on Why the Future of Leadership is Emotionally Intelligent

Over the last decade, I've had the privilege to work with the brilliant Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan while they were at Deloitte, and then again with Kelly as a future of work subject matter expert for Upwork, where she leads the Upwork Research Institute. When I learned they were writing a book together, I couldn't have been more excited, and Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts Are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership has certainly delivered on its title. I recently sat down with Kelly for a Q&A to share more details about the book writing process and the 21st century leadership advice we can't afford to ignore.

How did you two meet each other and how did this collaboration come about?

Kelly: Christie and I met almost a decade ago at Deloitte. She and I began to partner on research together and figured out pretty quickly we enjoyed working together. I bring more of that analytical research thinking while she brings the executive strategic viewpoint. Our paths then crossed again at Accenture where we started kicking around the idea of a book, but the timing just wasn't quite right. Finally in 2023 we were both at a point to visit this collaboration again and as they say the rest is history!

 

Briefly, what's the origin story of Essential? Why did you both feel you were the right duo to write this book?

 

Kelly: I am using the Elmo fire GIF to describe the way most leaders feel today. Yes, leading teams and businesses have always been challenging. But what's different today is that there is disruption at nearly every level of society today. Whether it's working across distributed teams, dealing with the fast and furious AI developments, government changes and a generally burned out workforce coming out of a pandemic, there is a lot to manage. And, most leaders haven't been trained in the psychology of human behavior at work. We've taught a lot of leaders how to manage a P&L in a relatively stable environment, but haven't done a lot to help them navigate the needs of people in uncertain environments. So, we wanted to provide a research based look at helping leaders navigate the human side of business today. We feel we are the right duo because of generational differences. Christie is a seasoned executive representing the existing leadership paradigm that Baby Boomers have established. I represent the Millennial generation that has often challenged a lot of what Baby Boomers have normalized in business settings. Our hope in writing this together was to bridge the generational gap that we often experience in the workplace and bring both sides of the lived experience of work today.

 

An emotionally intelligent leader in the age of AI may at first seem counterintuitive. Why do you feel human-powered leadership is more important now than it has ever been?

 

Kelly: I think AI is challenging us to ask the fundamental question of what does it mean to be human today. When a lot of the cognitive work can know be done by AI, what should humans be doing. For so long we've used technology to do the same type of things faster and cheaper, but now it's time to upend what we know of work and ask newfound questions like how can organizations better meet the needs of their people? How can leaders suspend their self-interest so that more people thrive in our organizations? How do we optimize rather than maximize resources at the expense of people and planet? We are at a critical juncture in our shared human work experience and I think AI can cause us to ask even more human questions than we've done before.

 

Both of you have very deep research benches. Why do you think it's important for "future of work" people to have quantitative support for their forecasts?

 

Kelly: The reality is if you want to get a seat at the table you need to bring data. For too long the people movement have been overlooked by business executives and board rooms because they've failed to see the link between performance and meeting human needs. This is why we wrote Essential. We wanted them to have the data and science behind elevating humanity at work. At the end of day, yes it's the right thing to do, but as we laid out in the book, it is also the right business thing to do. Businesses that treat their people well outperform in the long-run those who don't.

 

If readers could remember one thing from Essential, what's the lesson you'd want to impart?

 

Kelly: Stay curious! The world is rapidly changing around us and we have to keep an open mind to rethink many of the norms of business today. Relationships, routines and resource allocation can all be done better if we change our frame about people at work. Most people today want to work; they just feel overlooked and forgotten in their work systems. Be the leader that sees their people and remains curious!

 

Thanks to Kelly (and Christie) and please check out Essential at your first opportunity!

Building the Next Generation of Skills Inside Your Company

It’s common for employees to want to build skills at work, but an effective learning infrastructure isn’t as common. As organizations grow, they tend to lose track of their people’s skills. Leaders don’t know the competencies employees have acquired at work, what they can do next, and the skills they can develop to grow their contributions to the organization. 

Employers often don’t dig too deeply either, preferring instead to seek fresh talent externally when a need presents itself. But even if the current job market could support it, it’s difficult to maintain the hiring pace needed to source emerging skills from the outside. This reality leads to persistent understaffing and longer role vacancies.  

It’s imperative to build a skills-based organization that can flex to evolving business and employee needs. But where to start? 

The following five strategies may prove helpful as you seek to solve today’s labor shortage conundrum with your own reliable and already proven workforce. 

Understand the size and composition of your workforce 

Using analytics programs, employers should determine the current internal and external trends in workforce supply and demand. Examine the gap between the skills possessed by your workforce today and the skills your business requires to be successful now and in the future.  

It might be beneficial to use a skills segmentation matrix that includes the variables of scarcity (how common or uncommon the skill is in the market), criticality (how essential or non-essential the skill is for work to be successfully completed), and volume (how much volume of this skill the business requires).  

Seek feedback on your matrix from a diverse group of stakeholders across the organization, and during your investigation, determine the in-house superstars in in-demand areas. You can then enlist the help of these employees in crafting appropriate strategies and training to boost the organization’s overall level of skill competency. 

For the rest of the article, head over to the Dayforce blog.

The Future of Compensation in the Age of Adaptability

In ManpowerGroup’s 2024 Age of Adaptability report, we discussed how workers are expecting greater customization in all aspects of the employee experience – which, of course, includes compensation and benefits.

Since the business world became more structured more than a century ago, fixed and consistent compensation among groups of employees has been the standard, but increasing hyper-personalization is a thread that runs through all our considerations about the future of total rewards.

In HR.com’s 2024 report on the future of compensation and total rewards, 70% of leader respondents agreed that updating their organization’s total rewards strategies will help keep pace with changing attitudes around compensation. In addition, 85% said that it’s important to modify reward strategies for individual contributors.

In this piece, we’ll explore compensation best practices as we approach the quarter mark of the twenty-first century, such as agile compensation models, pay transparency and equity strategies, lifestyle and financial wellness offerings, and the involvement of AI in decision-making – which could paradoxically make compensation more uniform at a time when employees are demanding the opposite.

Pay Grades and Salary Bands No More

Traditionally, organizations made compensation decisions based on pre-set pay grades and salary bands, but in the post-pandemic business world, many question whether this model is fair, equitable, or well-suited to rapidly evolving conditions.

My research suggests that the most effective compensation strategies are more agile and allow organizations to recalibrate total rewards based on real-time factors inside and outside the company.  And rather than being assigned a one-size-fits-all title, salary, and benefits package upon hiring, employees can now customize the total rewards package that best matches their individual preferences based on an a la carte menu of options.

As Anita Lettink, a global future of work expert and the author of Equal Pay for Equal Work, told me, this approach works better because we can no longer view employees in homogenous groupings when offering rewards. “People don’t adhere to specific life stages anymore – for example, needing childcare in one’s 30s – so it makes sense to let employees pick and choose on a monthly basis,” she said.

In practice, a new hire may exchange lucrative stock options or company-funded retirement for a lower base salary. In tandem with this trend, more organizations are offering company equity to individual contributors rather than reserving it for senior leaders. Lettink said companies are also launching “employee sharing” initiatives in which workers receive payouts for something the organization created or revenue they helped to generate. “These programs encourage behaviors that are beneficial to company growth,” she added.

Agile compensation models don’t rely on a once-a-year performance review to determine an incremental salary bump or bonus, but rather leverage technology to auto-adjust rewards frequently in keeping with industry and market developments, larger economic factors like inflation, and peer feedback. These nimble strategies involve a broader range of metrics for assessing value including specialized employee skills, innovative contributions to company growth, and supervisor effectiveness.

Pay Transparency and True Equity Will Sweep the Globe

Pay transparency, which refers to openly disclosing the salary range for a given position, is considered a critical step in the journey toward pay equity. Although Lettink correctly noted that pay transparency is driving positive change for employees – especially at the lower levels – many organizations tend to drag their feet until they are mandated to deploy it. However, the concept is gaining momentum all over the world and we should prepare for it to be universal in the coming years.

Despite increased attention to the issue over the last decade, pay disparities based on race and gender remain stubborn problems. In response, a bevy of equal pay regulations designed to promote fairness have taken root. Organizations are ensuring compliance with these regulations by increasing their use of pay equity software to run statistical analyses of their compensation models, develop benchmarks, and derive core insights by comparing internal and external data.

Equity analysis isn’t just for leveling the playing field for women and underrepresented minorities. These tools may also illustrate pay disparities between employees at a specific location, function, or level and employees with similar characteristics inside and outside the company. Objective and ongoing reporting of pay gaps facilitates their immediate resolution and prevents these gaps from becoming systemic and leading to legal liability.

For the rest of this piece, check out the full blog series at ManpowerGroup.

HR Compliance Developments Going into 2025

According to Dayforce research, nearly half (48%) of surveyed leaders believe that increased compliance and regulatory complexity will impede their organization’s ability to achieve its business objectives. This could be due in part to the sheer number of emerging workforce compliance trends and how many different areas they impact. 

This shift requires substantially more oversight than the compliance function needed in the past. To help simplify the situation, I’ve rounded up key workforce compliance trends that should be top of mind for HR professionals through 2025.  

Non-compete agreements 

In certain nations, including Malaysia and Mexico, most post-termination non-compete agreements have generally been prohibited for some time. Then, in the spring of 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published a final rule that would effectively ban all non-compete agreements between employers and workers. The exceptions to the rule pertain to existing agreements with senior executives, sale-of-business non-competes, and causes of action that accrued before the rule’s effective date of September 4, 2024. 

Expanded leave requirements 

Globally, the parameters of paid and unpaid leave are constantly in flux. Most interesting is the increase in laws that allow employees to take paid time off (PTO) for any reason. Generous accommodations for new parents and senior caregivers are also becoming an expectation for employers of a certain size. Just this spring in Japan, Parliament passed legislation requiring companies to offer flexible working options to employees with young children to help them balance work with child rearing. 

Minimum pay thresholds 

In the U.S., the beginning of 2024 was marked by an increase in the minimum wage in more than 20 states, and more changes are occurring in individual states and localities as the year progresses. Canada continues to raise its minimum wage every year, while European countries continue to realize the effects of 2022’s Minimum Wage Directive, which took aim at in-work poverty. If you have employees in the U.S., you should note that in April, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a rule updating overtime pay requirements. This rule increases the minimum salary threshold for employees to be exempt from overtime pay, with the first phase having taken effect on July 1, 2023 and the second phase on January 1, 2025. 

For more compliance happenings, read the full article on Dayforce.com.

The Future of Leadership in the Age of Adaptability

In ManpowerGroup's 2024 Age of Adaptability trends report, we discussed how the pandemic forced an immediate overhaul of management as we knew it. While societal disruption, advancing technology, and sustainability reshaped work, leaders needed to steer organizational change without tangible models from which to draw. They also needed to promote upskilling and reskilling, inclusion, and satisfaction among their employees while managing a geographically dispersed and distributed workforce.

Leaders who had done things more or less the same way for two centuries were suddenly operating in the dark. It takes a special kind of person to do this effectively, and this person is what we will refer to as the 2030 Leader.

The 2030 Leader

In 2030, the majority of leaders will be members of the millennial generation, or those born between 1980-95. In the early aughts while entry-level workers, the millennials made their mark early with their insistence on a more empowered, enlightened business world. As an ethnically diverse generation raised on computers, the millennials have adapted seamlessly to the integration of smart machines into the workplace and more naturally engage with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) issues.

In general, these circumstances make millennials the ideal candidates to shepherd our organizations into the second half of the 21st century. But of course, everyone is different and some leaders will be more competent in 2030 than others.

I believe that the future of leadership will be co-created by young trailblazers with several core traits including flexibility, humility, emotional intelligence, global perspective, and technological curiosity. Let’s describe these one by one.

Flexibility: The years 2022 and 2030 were characterized by what many termed the “RTO wars.” Entrenched baby boomer leaders wanted the workplace to return to post-pandemic norms, while many employees weren’t having it. Although a majority of organizations settled on a compromise of 2-3 days in the office per week, the RTO wars still exist.

But by 2030, millennial leaders are likely to have put an end to them. Rather, they will be more inclined to accept a reality that includes a variety of employment arrangements that are to some degree customized to each employee. These leaders will be comfortable with the constant change inherent in a rapidly evolving world and are likely to staff accordingly – creating project-based, time-bound teams from a variety of internal and external sources (retired part-timers, fractional executives, subject matter experts, etc.) as business needs require.

As time goes on, leaders will become more proficient in best practices for managing distributed and remote workforces. And millennials will be the first generation of leaders to successfully model effective work/life integration, with a holistic orientation toward work, family, and leisure.

Humility: Back in the 1970s, a management researcher named Robert Greenleaf proposed the notion of servant leadership, a style in which leaders display personal accountability and put the needs, aspirations, and interests of their followers above their own. Never has the concept of servant leadership been more relevant, as ManpowerGroup Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that the challenges of this century mandate that leaders are selected on competence rather than confidence, humility rather than charisma, and integrity rather than narcissism.

In 2030, organizations will still be in the position of needing to pivot quickly if an established strategy isn’t working, which means that leaders will need to adopt an agile mindset, admit when they’re wrong, and solicit advice from a much wider range of stakeholders – including individual contributors deriving insights from AI-based tools – than they have in the past.

For the rest of this article, visit ManpowerGroup's Global Insights blog.

Talent Intelligence Platforms Use Deep Learning to Close Skills Gaps

The HR community is enthralled by the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) can provide tangible benefits in the quest to effectively source and hire in a tight labor market. But how does this work in practice? 
 
It starts by understanding a branch of AI called deep learning. Deep-learning algorithms, which are inspired by the actions of the human brain, continuously analyze data with a given logical structure. This structure encompasses multiple layers of algorithms called neural networks. 
 
Deep-learning algorithms can’t predict the future or give answers that a human would agree with 100%. Yet they are still valuable. If you’ve ever used a modern search engine and been amazed by the results or if you’ve ever watched the perfect show recommended by your streaming network of choice, you have experienced the power of deep learning. 
 
The main challenge of deep learning is data — specifically, the massive amount required. The talent space alone needs billions of data points about people, career trajectories, skills, and experiences. 
 
But while AI’s reach was once limited by computing power and the availability of data, that’s no longer the case. Today, global neural nets can identify more than a million skills across the world’s 8 billion people. 
 
Then, using this data, AI engineers can develop deep-learning algorithms to determine the best answers to a defined class of questions. In the case of deep talent, such questions might include: Who is the best fit for this specific job requirement? What job is this individual most likely to hold next in their career? 
 
Understanding deep learning’s ability to harness a massive amount of data is only the first step, however. Next, we must explore how deep learning can help us identify skills and transform how we hire people. 
 
The Power of Skills Adjacency 
 
Skills adjacency refers to the inference that a person good at skill A often excels at skill B, and it helps us complete our picture of a human’s true potential and the transferable skills they possess. 
 
In my recent book, “Deep Talent,” my co-authors and I tell the story of Nico Iannotti, a top sales engineer in Europe. Nico wasn’t always involved with either sales or technology. He was, however, previously involved with customer service as a sommelier and waiter. As he put it, skills are interchangeable assets that individuals can leverage in a variety of industry roles and life situations. 
 
“Many of the skills I acquired prior to my corporate career have been very helpful in my role as a client-relationship manager and solution engineer,” he told us. “What is the link between pairing wines and selling software? Both are customer-facing roles, and both provide solutions to a customer’s problem. In both cases, you are building relationships, demonstrating empathy, and selling an emotional experience based on a specific budget. It’s just a change of context, not a completely different skillset.” 

For the rest of the piece, head over to the UKG Workforce Institute.

Don't Be Intimidated by Job Redesign

The need for job redesign is on most HR leaders’ radars in 2024. But in most organizations, it still seems to be more of a talking point than a reality. However, given that Dayforce’s 14^th Annual Pulse of Talent survey found that 37% of respondents said there is a different role with their current employer that better matches their skillset, the process seems ripe with opportunity.

Job redesign is the process of rearranging or replacing tasks to better align work with evolving conditions both inside and outside the organization. And it’s really nothing new. For example, the telegraphist or telegraph operator was one of the first tech-related jobs of the 19^th century. The telegraphist used the most modern equipment available at the time to send and receive Morse code via radio and telephone.

In the 1970s, the telegraph was mostly replaced by telex, a communications network to send text-based messages. So, if you were a telegraphist and you wanted to remain gainfully employed, you had to adapt and learn telex. In other words, the telegraphist job was redesigned with a lot of the same skills and responsibilities – minus the telegraph.

Job redesign may feel more complex and overwhelming today because the pace of technology is faster and has a broader impact in terms of affected occupations. In particular, the arrival of generative AI has leaders wondering exactly how to execute job redesign to incorporate the benefits of this technology.

Before we get into how to make the process more turnkey, let’s address what job redesign is NOT. For example, job redesign is not bringing in a new piece of automation and letting go of all the human employees previously involved in the job targeted by the automation. When integration of automation is done well, the technology takes over more straightforward, repetitive tasks while human employees provide the necessary strategic input, creativity, judgment, and oversight. And that’s where job redesign comes in.

Three practical steps for job redesign
In most knowledge-driven and in many frontline worker occupations, shifting business requirements and emerging technologies mean that employees need new skillsets. Therefore, the process of job redesign involves understanding the individual tasks that encompass the work being done, and then matching or training for skills necessary for those tasks.

Step one: Engage in task analysis

Target a small category of jobs to start, and then assemble a diverse group of stakeholders from across the organization. Make sure this group includes people across levels, and not just leadership, so you have representation from those who are close to the work.

Document the critical tasks currently associated with each job, and note where there are redundancies, areas where technology could be efficiently deployed, and places where you can build a job to become more flexible in structure and environment. You can also rank your tasks according to importance, how often they are performed, how long they take, and the skills required or how people learn how to do each task.

Step two: Create new job titles and descriptions

Next, based on your analysis, group related tasks into new job buckets. With smart technology now helping in new ways with some tasks, there may be room to remove or combine previous jobs. This may involve creating new “super jobs” that cross departmental lines. For example, the new job of people analytics manager might be technically housed in HR but include tasks traditionally housed in IT such as selecting appropriate technology applications, ensuring data quality, and communicating data-related insights to leaders and other constituents.

You can also use this exercise as an opportunity to standardize jobs titles and descriptions across the organization.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the Dayforce blog.