Episode 21: Reinventing Jobs: The Future of Work and its Impact on HR (Interview with John Boudreau, Professor and Research Director at USC)

John Boudreau joins me on this week's podcast to explore some of the themes and the concepts from his recent book, Reinventing Jobs. John is the Research Director for USC's Center for Effective Organizations and Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business.

His large-scale studies and focused field research address the future of the global Human Resources profession, HR measurement and analytics, decision-based HR, executive mobility, HR information systems and organisational staffing and development. John has published more than 50 books and articles and his research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Business Week.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, John and I discuss:

• The reorganisation of work and the far-reaching implications for HR

• Examples of companies and leaders who are successfully embracing the future of work

• John's four step framework for reinventing jobs and optimising work from his book Reinventing Jobs, co-authored with Ravin Jesuthasan

• and as with all our guests, we look into the crystal ball and ponder what the future role of HR will be in 2025

This episode is a must listen for business leaders seeking more from HR as well as any HR leaders and professionals who want to add more value to their organisation, to their workforce, and to their own careers.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by OrgVue to learn more, visit orgvue.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Dr John Boudreau, Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California, and one of the foremost voices in our space to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Welcome to the show, John.

John Boudreau: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

David Green: It's a pleasure to have you here as well and in a special venue today (Chewton Glen, venue for the 2019 Global Executive Retreat, hosted by Insight222 and TI People). Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to you and your background?

John Boudreau: Well, of course, I've been at this about 35 years. It's been my privilege and pleasure to work with some of the smartest and best thinkers and leaders in HR. As many of you know, I began my career at Cornell University in the US.

And was there for about 22 years in the school of industrial labour relations, more recently for the last 15 or so at the University of Southern California in the Marshall School of Business and working with my good colleague, Ed Lawler and others at the Center for Effective Organizations as a Research Director.

So that as people know, started my career thinking about evidence and the payoff from HR investments. And that has led through a somewhat circuitous path to a little more focus on the future of work and the nature of what work will be like going forward.

David Green: So John, you've built an enviable reputation for the research that you've done on the bridge between human capital, talent and a sustainable competitive advantage.

You’ve worked closely with numerous CHROs and HR leaders during those 35 years that you mentioned. And obviously there's been a lot of change.

What do you think makes for a great CHRO in today's digital world?

John Boudreau: Well, there's a couple of things. Again, a lot of what I'll say, I will credit my colleagues such as Ian Ziskin and Ed Lawler and others.

I think what we're seeing is that a great CHRO, probably one of the biggest changes is the great CHROs will be thinking beyond the boundary of their function. And I think in the past, certainly early in the eighties, seventies and eighties, great CHROs were defined by running the function well by getting the function to be more recognised and getting the function to be more of a business relevant, a business relevant factor.

I think now we're seeing a future in which that boundary is going to become very grey and HR will look more like a combination of things like marketing, operations, storytelling, anthropology, that sort of thing. So the notion of a boundary less function that is more open to bringing in other disciplines.

My colleague, Ian Ziskin, has coined the idea of the HR leader as an orchestra conductor, where they don't need to be the expert on everything, but they do need to be able to get the best out of a widening set of constituents

David Green: And a more outward looking role than perhaps previously where HR maybe has been guilty historically of looking too inwardly at the function itself and not enough at the business, and probably the external world as well.

John Boudreau: I think that's right. I think that has actually been evolving. I'm reminded of again, my colleague Pete Ramstead, who wrote a book with me in the early two thousands and part of that book was called beyond HR. And the reason for that was to suggest the idea that the discipline might need to work a bit more like finance or marketing where you start looking outside and then move inward rather than the other way. I do think there has been a good deal of progress there. I think that's well recognised. I think the constituents for HR leaders, even regulators and employees expect that HR will be looking beyond its function. That said, I'm sure there are... Our research would suggest there are a number of organisations where the role is defined as managing the function well. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but only one way to add value.

David Green: Well, you're here because you’re our guest speaker and running a Think Tank for us tomorrow at the Insight222 Global Executive Retreat.

You're running a workshop on the reorganisation of work and the implications for HR. I thought it would be quite good for you to share what you will be covering with our listeners because I know this is a topic that's top of mind for them as well. Some of the material that we'll be covering during that day, it's a whole day, so we can only get a snapshot of it here.

First, I understand it was HR leaders themselves who you co-created some of the research with. It would be good to understand a little bit more about that before we maybe dip into the five forces of change.

John Boudreau: Great. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. So for the listeners, there is an acronym that I want to share with them, and it's the word create but with an extra H after the C for HR. And so that word, C, H, R, E, A, T, E will bring them if they do a search on it to a webpage and an ebook that is free, for them to download. The CHREATE project then, which I'll refer to now, was indeed a kind of upwelling, of willingness and energy from some of the best CHROs that I know, surprisingly, given that they're the best, what they were saying was that the progression line of HR trajectory is going to be outrun by the potential challenges and also the potential opportunities. So they really came to me and Ian and others and said, why are we not working on these tectonic exponential shifts? And then one of the many, they invented many things, the listeners can go find out about those. Tomorrow we'll talk primarily about one particular team, one particular initiative, which was to say, what are the strategic issues that are being ignored by our strategists?

And again, these are some of the best HR people in the world. So they're in the strategy meetings. And even they were saying there were some very important changes in the nature of work that never really reach the level of discussion in our strategy sessions. And so how can we bring those trends and ideas to the fore of our strategy and how can we connect them to implications for the business, implications for the future, etc.

David Green: And the five forces that are identified. If we could just briefly go through those for our listeners now. I think it'd be great because certainly when we were going through the materials yesterday, they really resonated with me and certainly resonated with a lot of the conversations I'm having with the people analytics leaders that are here but also those that aren't here as well.

John Boudreau: Yes. So, I'll try again create them from memory though we've covered them a lot, but again, all due credit to the group. So one of them is a social and organisational change and that sort of encompasses some ideas like the formal hierarchy may be less important, less pivotal than the social network that there has been a shift to social media as the communication rather than formal communication, that sort of thing.

Second one is a globally connected world, a global market for work really. And so that's sort of closely related. And then the third one is full inner connection in the world. So while though not every region in the world already has bandwidth, etc, but it's getting to a point where you basically will be able to connect with anyone anywhere.

And then as we move down, we have the trend of human and machine collaboration and then exponential technology change. So the first three, roughly, the group decided comprise what they called the democratisation of work. Democracy in every sense, a greater voice, greater power to the periphery of the network. Less control, but also a great deal more innovation and freedom inside the formal organisation, boundaryless, markets for work, that kind of thing. And then in the bottom one, exponential technology change. Human machine collaboration, those trends, they said reflect technological empowerment.

And using those two dimensions, democratisation and technological empowerment, we can begin to map the work of an organisation or the work of a region and begin to say what work will... Where is work today? And then where will work be in the future on those two dimensions?

David Green: And you created a very nice, and we will include this in the podcast so that people can see it as well. You created a really nice two by two, which aims to help organisations plot what they need to do with certain parts of the workforce.

John Boudreau: Yes, indeed. And that's, I suppose, so many of us were consultants in the group that you must create a two by two.

But it actually makes, I think in this case it's pretty legitimate and makes a lot of sense. So this idea of mapping, and I find it very useful to map the work. And what that means is that the lower left quadrant, so to speak, is not a bad place. It just means that this is work that will probably be traditional in terms of democratisation, meaning that it'll be employment, be relatively internal or close substitutes and that it can be managed with today's technology, which actually is pretty formidable. There may be in some organisations, 80% of the work may fall in that box. Yeah, that's good to know because there's no reason to push hard on that sort of work if it isn't in need of new technologies or something else.

As we move upward, we begin to get out of the realm of employment and we begin to say, well, work could come from anywhere to anywhere, and again. Even with today's technology, there will be work in the organisation where you say, yes, this is our issue. It's that we are bounded by employment.

But if we could just be more flexible about the nature of how we engage humans, that would solve many of our problems, might be skills, it might be filling positions, etc. And then of course, moving to the right, we move toward greater technology and your listeners will of course be probably more expert than me, but it's the idea of going from today's technology to maybe more of a virtual, more of a constant experience, more algorithmically driven nudges, algorithmically driven analysis, etc.

And again, none of the four quadrants would be bad. It's actually a matter of mapping the work. And then the implications are very different depending on where that works exists.

David Green: So what it really helps, if you're an HR leader, is it helps you prioritise where you should focus your efforts. Because as you said, if in some organisations, that bottom left hand box maybe is where 80% of the population is. Yes, of course you've got to create a great workforce experience along with everything else, but there's less amount of work to do and you can focus on the other 20%.

John Boudreau: I think that's right. Indeed. So one of the things is let's focus change efforts where they're most needed, where the energy already exists. I think when I work with organisations, what we find when we map the work is that, some of the work in those outer quadrants where change is needed, the indicators are already there and there's great energy. Leaders are essentially saying, I'm at a loss, I can't fill these positions. Maybe they've been open, 15, 20, 30 weeks. Our skill changes are happening so fast that I can't seem to get it done with re-skilling or training. We have work that is becoming dis-aggregated or deconstructed as we say, and the pieces are starting to pull apart and, and so those things often already exist and why not go there, where leaders are already searching for new solutions rather than come to a leader where the current system is working pretty well and say, Oh, we're here to bring you the future, and really they can't see the need yet.

David Green: And if we explore some of the implications for HR, it almost helps put HR on the front foot within the organisation perhaps?

John Boudreau: I think so. I think it gives, again, with all due respect and all complements to the people who developed it. It's not the only language that one might use to frame these issues. And certainly there are lots of great models out there. However, something like this or something that the organisation may have developed, I think it helps to give the organisation leaders the freedom to place work in some sort of a framework like this at the very basic level, to say, let's admit that there are places where we may not need as much change and let's find the places where change exists. So I think it can put HR on the front foot in part because it clears up, it gives a language to better articulate HRs role, and it doesn't put HR in the position of trying to do all or nothing.

We must move our entire system and our entire workforce into the future. That's a very difficult position to take to be able to say, well, we'll step back. We'll pick the low hanging fruit, we'll find the high priority areas. We'll find evangelists that already have energy for something new, and to make the change process happen more incrementally.

David Green: So I think you called this effort "leading the work". And I think it'd be great if you can provide a couple of examples to bring some of this thinking to life.

John Boudreau: Great. So yes, the book title with my colleague Ravin Jesuthasan was Lead the Work. And the reason for that was, as we were writing the book, we realised that leadership is often defined and measured very much in terms of something called an employee.

And we know what that is. They're inside the box we call the organisation, they have an employment contract and we measure their engagement and we measure their satisfaction. And we measure whether leaders are well-perceived. And as we wrote the book Lead the Work, we began to encounter examples of of work being created with a different arrangement that wasn't employment.

It might be projects, it might be contracts, it might be freelancers. And we realised that in many cases, the leader is actually leading a blended workforce that might include some contractors, some freelance project workers maybe even volunteers. And so our question for the book was, are you leading only the employees or are you leading the full array of the work, which may be done by others?

And of course, our premise was that most measurement systems, most analytic systems fall pretty far short of giving a leader a full picture of their full workforce. In fact, it's quite often quite hidden. So that was the theme of lead the work and it was a pleasure writing it because we began to uncover all of these examples that were really quite thought provoking.

And we sort of developed a framework about how far you dial things, like how much you're breaking down your boundary, how much you're changing your reward systems, and how much  you are, we call it deconstructing or dis-aggregating the work maybe down to a tiny project, for example.

So those three dimensions became the basis for describing these examples and, and offering leaders, maybe a language to talk about this. So one example is one where the boundary of the organisation is just barely pierced. But where the work itself is very dis-aggregated and we think there's a change in the rewards.

So, basically what happened is Siemens invents a hearing aid for children. Now, Siemens is a great company, engineering based. Most people know them for their products. And the hearing aid was magnificent. And so as they go to market it, they might go to their own marketing people.

Well, those people work with engineers. They work directly with technical people, and they're going to think to over characterise marketing is showing people the engineering specifications and they'll see the decibel level. Well, this hearing aid needs to be attractive to parents and children who need to ask their physician, tell me more about this.

So you don't really solve the problem by handing the parents or the children a spec sheet. So, Siemens came up with a really interesting innovation that involved sending one of their representatives to Disney because that's where the best storytellers are. So we take this job of marketing a hearing aid, we dis-aggregate it and realise there's a storytelling component, and we realise that the best talent in the world to tell a story happens not to be at Siemens. That's not a bad thing. It's just the nature of the organisation.

David Green: They're able to recognise that.

John Boudreau: Yes, and if the best storytelling talent is always going to go to Disney, and of course it would, can we find a way to tap that talent?

So they pierced their organisation boundary with a very tiny well-protected conduit in the form of this individual who was an intellectual property lawyer. He would go to Burbank. He would show the secrets of what Siemens was developing, a new MRI, a new hearing aid, etc. And Disney would bring him their people, and Disney would show him the secrets of what alliances they were forming, what storylines they had.

And the result in this case was a set of marketing tools. But one of them, for example, is a comic book. And the storyline is about a rabbit. Large ears that doesn't hear well. And all the Disney characters help that rabbit hear better with the use of this hearing aid. And of course you and I hear this and we go, oh, I'm sure I would have thought of that.

Right. But of course we wouldn't, because we're not the world's best storytellers. And so the brilliance of Siemens was they didn't bring the whole marketing process to Disney. They brought the part where Disney would be great. They dis-aggregated the work, they pierced their organisation boundary in a way they were satisfied with, lots of IP protection, only one organisation, which they already knew well, Disney and Siemens had lots of partnerships already. And I don't know about the rewards because, Darren Sparks, the gentleman who goes to Disney told me it's a proprietary secret how they organise the rewards for Disney people. But I'm of the opinion that you might even get volunteers from Disney because as much as Disney offers storytelling experience. It's rare that Disney can offer you the chance to help children hear better. And so I expect that if you put this out as a project, you'd get a pretty strong upwelling of volunteer energy at Disney because these are people that care about children and parents and their experience.

So as you can see, that's an interesting thought provoking example. I think the implications for HR, CHROs, HR analytics is, would your dashboard, would your planning dashboard offer that alternative? When you are faced with this dilemma of how do we market this thing and our marketers aren't good enough, do we tend to say, well, let's go hire more. Let's create more jobs called marketer, and let's try to hire people who want to work for Disney, which won't work, or could you imagine a dashboard that might say, ah, this is an exact situation where we need to borrow talent. From an Alliance partner and we'll help you dis-aggregate the work and we'll help you form, we'll help you pierce our boundary, says HR. And so, so whether it's borrowing talent from a partner, that's that example. Reaching out to a freelance platform on a project basis, similar kinds of issues, enlisting volunteers, because of a sense of purpose, etc.

These are all options in this option set. And for me, these pose the question of when and how will the HR profession present leaders with a dashboard that would allow them to see and consider options like this?

David Green: And I think it's definitely something that's going to be needed, isn't it? Because the example you've given - companies are going to have to collaborate a little bit more with each other.

John Boudreau: Yes.

David Green: Because as you said, as you deconstruct the work, you identify where you're not the best at something.

John Boudreau: So I think that's right and you make a very good point. I think the courage to realise that any given organisation can only be a destination of choice for employment for a certain... It may be a very broad group.

IBM is a massive organisation. It has lots of talent inside it, similar with Siemens. But the fact is that there will be limits. And that's why I love this example, because if you say, where are the best storytellers in the world going to be go? There is just no question that they are going to go to storytelling organisations, whether it's Disney or Pixar or, or some production studio.

They exist in the world, but the chance that your engineering organisation, even if you set up a loft in New York with bean bag chairs, etc. The chance that you'll really attract the very best with all due respect to those organisations is probably pretty low. So when you deconstruct, when you offer the option to look beyond our boundary, I think you then you find solutions that were there, but that are invisible if you're limited to jobs, employment, hiring, etc.

David Green: And as you said previously it's changing HR's thinking from focusing on employees in the organisation: How many jobs do we have open? How many people left (the organisation)? How many heads? To a far more holistic way of thinking...

John Boudreau: Yes, whole people become, I think, an array of capabilities. Today it is popular to talk about skills and a skill-based economy.

I think that's close, but there's more to capability than skills. So for me, I prefer the notion of this person that we used to just plug into a job to over characterise and what we know about them is their capability to do that job and maybe some other things, but we don't know about lots of their capabilities. And I was working with Disney, for example, and they created an internal project-based platform. And why? Well, they said it's because we want to tap into the whole person. Good example that they shared with me was we have lots of people in various functions and we sometimes have the opportunity to do a voiceover for a character or for some sort of promotion or trailer for a film or a play. Our people, of course, even I'll over characterise, even the accountants at Disney join Disney because they're excited about the mission? Well, I believe it was something like an accountant turns out to have a great voice.

Because we posted a project that was a voiceover. This accountant can say, oh, I'll raise my hand. I'd like to be considered for that. Now if you multiply that by thousands, you have an engagement level now for people that might not normally be involved in something like voiceovers or something like that.

It's not the whole production. We're not giving him a job of voiceover. We're just saying, take time off from your accounting job and come over here and offer a new talent, which we didn't even know you had until we had this project-based approach. That's a very different approach to HR to say, let's look at the whole person and all of their capabilities.

Let's have a system that allows us to see them and to tap into them on a dis-aggregated way. And then of course on the other side, you need to disaggregate the work, I'll call it tasks or projects, because the only way to match an accountant's, so to speak with a voiceover, is to get beyond, this is a whole person we need to find a job for, and instead say there's a voiceover project. And I would say that took no organisation boundary piercing. You can do that with the employees inside the organisation. 

David Green: It's just using the technology to your advantage to actually do it and having the mindset behind it.

John Boudreau: Yes. So that's very different skills for HR. But as I said, we have Disney. There's a similar initiative that I know of by folks at P and G, Proctor and Gamble.

And so if you think about it, one of the things that HR does, for example, at P and G is they vetted, they approved certain platforms for freelancers. So if you're a leader now and you bring work to them, they can safely say, well, let's say 30% of your work is suitable for a freelancer who we might contract with through a platform.

Now, if you give that to a leader, they don't know the platforms, they'll run into IP issues, they'll run into legal issues, etc. So the brilliance of HR was let's vet through all the choices and come up with two or three top choices of a freelance platform of partners where we borrow talent, so that when we dis-aggregate your work and come back to you with a solution, we're prepared to implement that solution.

And you're free to choose those options because we've already vetted them.

David Green: Let’s move from Lead the Work and looking at human workers, both within and external to the organisation. To another growing type of worker that we are getting, automation. And that blend between human and automation as well.

Obviously, you've recently published this book, Reinventing Jobs, again with Ravin. And for those that haven't read the book yet, you really should. It's a very good read and it's an easy read as well which is always nice. And for me it provides almost a much needed and long awaited update to how we think about strategic workforce planning.

I think it certainly leads the way into that. Can you walk through the four step framework, which is in the first part of the book. It's pretty fascinating and I think it follows on quite nicely from some of the stuff we've just talked about.

John Boudreau: Well, thank you. That's very kind of you.

And again, all due credit to my colleague Ravin Jesuthasan, I'm sure it's an easy read primarily because of his intellect and his perspective as someone who's working in the field. So the idea would be that we have systems that think about human workers and we could say, well, let's expand that beyond just employing a human in a job.

Let's think about human workers engaged in many different ways. That's "Lead the Work". As Ravin and I were talking about Lead the Work and what our next book might  be, we realised that automation had a great deal of similarity, that it also was a boundary breaking idea, that it also required dis-aggregating the work to see the patterns.

So we began to play with that idea, and the result was this book. So you could think of it as, as now expanding the dashboard. So we have a dashboard that was human workers in a job. Now we expand it to say, deconstruct the work into tasks, and now we can think about tasks distributed to other humans that might engage with us in different ways.

Well, it's not much of a click. It's a big deal, but conceptually you can say, well, wait a minute. I love the way you phrased it. I can think of automation as a part of my workforce. Which is kind of the point of the book, is that automation can be thought of in a way as part of your talent pool.

In the Center for Effective Organizations, one of our affiliates is named Shauna Weblon. Australian, Shauna has done a great deal of research on the... Call it the epistemology or language of how we think about talent. And she raised an interesting question, many of them, but one of them is, would you think of automation as part of your talent pool? Well, as we'll discuss tomorrow in the program, there are some very interesting examples where human beings really regard the automation they work with as a collaborator and they describe it as a collaborator and they think of it as part of the team. This full language expert that happens to be sitting in a computer like Alexa or Siri or something like that, that can answer my questions when I say, has anyone ever done this before?

That can suggest options based on what it sees. All right, so now how do we create a framework to understand that. So it's in a way four steps to understanding and coming up with solutions for automation.

So the first step is, and this is a theme I think that is going to be a big thing in HR, is to dis-aggregate the work.

You simply cannot see the patterns. If you think of automation, replacing people in jobs. What we discovered was, and this is a fairly common, understanding now, but at the time we wrote the book, we were just beginning... There was a great deal of course, of attempts to analyse how many jobs will go away.

And the researcher studying that realised that they couldn't answer the question at the job level. So they broke the jobs down into tasks. Now they could say 70% of the tasks that are part of this job are, let's say, easily automated, but 30% are not. So the real issue is that we don't end up with jobs going away, we end up with parts of jobs going away, and then you have a need for humans, but you only need them for whatever it might be. 30% or 70% of the work they did before. So dis-aggregation as courageous as it is, imagine now that you in HR are going to have to go to leaders and say, well, I know that your accounting was about how many jobs we were, how many humans we were going to give back.

And we're not going to give back any of them.

David Green: Particularly as some new tasks will be identified because of the technology that might add to the 30% in the example. 

John Boudreau: That's right. So it can range. Now we say, well, the worst case is, we need humans, but the humans only have 30% of the work to do that they did before.

And it's not quite an equation where we just, well then let's get rid of 70% of the people, because we may need 100% of the people each doing 30%. So what do we pay them? I mean, it just changes development, pay, everything, and of course you're right. It could be that we have 30% old work, but we have a new 60% of new work.

And the interesting thing is it is not unusual for that new 60% to be so much more valuable because of automation. That you actually could do better economically by just paying the same people more to do 90% of the work they did before because it's so much more valuable. So we talk about generally, the idea that once you deconstruct and see these tasks, you may indeed replace humans at the task level, you may augment them, meaning that they're pretty much doing the same thing, but we've made it more efficient, faster, etc. But sometimes you actually enhance or reinvent them, and humans are doing something that no human being could possibly do without automation. And that's when you get these really interesting win-wins where you have terrific economic value because of automation, you can afford to pay the humans more because they now have been reinvented to be doing something else. So deconstruct the work.

Then the second one is back to some early writing that I, that I did with Pete Ramstead about the nature of the payoff.

So there are curves and everything, but basically let's think about four different kinds of things. One payoff is the automation will reduce mistakes. So the value is getting rid of accidents, mistakes, etc. That's one way of automating. Another way of automating is the differences in the way people perform don't produce a lot of difference in value. So you could think about there's many different performance levels, they all produce the same value, so we may, make them more uniform. Another one is this idea of augmenting. There is an increase in performance for each value. As performance increases, value goes up.

Maybe it's like a line and we're going to move people along that line. And then at the very right, let's call it at the highest performance levels, you have these situations where the highest people are the creative ones, exponential value. And sometimes automation can take all of us ordinary humans, and it can make us into the most extraordinary version of workers.

So take surgery. The best surgeons in the world have certain things that they do. Some of them are frankly avoiding mistakes. The best surgeons in the world will think of ideas or they've read the literature so that they know what to do in a certain situation. With automation, AI can inform a surgeon about the best procedure. Now we've taken all those surgeons that were frankly, somewhat poor performers because they'd never think of that. And we have made them all superhuman.

David Green: Good benefit there.

John Boudreau: So for HR, this idea of, well, what is the payoff we're trying for?

Is it reducing the stakes? Is it augmenting the human performance? Or is it some sort of exponential reinvention of the work where we make everyone a superhuman with this tool? Those are discussions that we need to have. Leaders need to be facile with that idea.

Once you've done those two steps, then you can turn to more of the automation. So the next step would be to begin task by task, think about what sort of automation, robotic processes, artificial intelligence, deep learning, etc. So our feeling is that if you can get the tasks well isolated, then these questions of, well, should it be robotic?

Should it be an artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, etc? Those are difficult questions at the job level. Probably impossible. At the task level, they become a bit clearer. They're still tricky, but it also reflects the future of HR. That step must happen in conjunction with people who know technology well.

What often happens is you have operations or IT over here. They're very good at understanding the different technologies. They're very good at speculating about how they might affect the work. You've got HR, which knows the work deeply, but isn't very facile or very involved with the technologies.

And when they're separated, you get, if it's driven by technology, you'll get lots of rather naive solutions about the work, but very deep on the technology side. If it's HR, you get very deep understanding of the work and the workers, but maybe some naivete about technology. So again, we come back to that boundary-less HR function, where if you look around HR, it may look like a technology design organisation in many parts of it, you might really not see a difference there.

And then the final thing is, so you've done all this analysis at the task level. Then you reinvent the job, which is the title of the book, and that's when you come back. You put it back together optimally, and you have the courage to say, if it turns out that we need only 50% of the work being done by people, we're prepared as an HR organisation to help our leaders understand that and work with it. For example.

David Green: Perfect. A couple of points that emerge from that. Firstly, I think I'm an optimist, so I look at the future of work as an opportunity for organisations and particularly for HR. You've probably seen some of the work that Jeffrey Pfeffer published around how our workplaces are literally killing us because people are overworked.

Also Josh Bersin has talked about the overwhelmed employee. This potentially is an opportunity... We talked about, okay, let's take the example you gave. 30% is left. We maybe add other stuff to make it 90% and hopefully that means people actually have to work less hours and maybe they're doing stuff that they enjoy more and maybe we can afford to pay them more as well.

So hopefully we actually make work better. I might be being a bit naive here, but we make work better for employees. Through using technology rather than just wholesale replacement.

John Boudreau: I think that... I love the vision that you have and I think it’s quite possible. When we begin a conversation like this the phrase that's going through my mind is a kind of famous observation that the future is coming, but it will be unevenly distributed.

And so I really love that quote because it brings to mind the idea that there will be variations and that it's fine. So I think you're absolutely right. That some work is going to evolve and we're going to have the happy circumstance where the part that's automated was actually unhealthy.

So there's plenty of accidents to be prevented, dirty, dangerous work to be prevented. And it was also mundane, so it was kind of mind killing anyway. We're going to take that away and we'll have the happy situation that we have replacing it with work that is more fulfilling, automation, enabled, etc.

We have examples in the book. That definitely happens. However, that is not... As much as I love your optimism. That is not likely... That happy circumstance will not be 100% well, I don't know what the percentage is going to be. There will be situations where the answer is that we need to reduce the workforce and HR as a profession will need to be prepared to help with that.

But I think as a profession, HR needs to be more. Our leaders need to understand that they are making choices that have these effects. It's not completely at the discretion of leaders, but in many situations, leaders' choices will be the difference between wholesale layoffs or work that is even more mind numbing versus work where we preserve the workforce and where people are even more fulfilled. At the moment I don't think that leaders realise that these choices they think are about technology are actually having implications that are about the future of work and that their philosophy about work is being reflected in the choices that they make.

One of my favourite questions, I think it's a bit early in the learning curve, but one of my favourite questions is to ask, will you slow automation to allow your human workers to catch up? And at the moment almost every leader I talk to looks at me as if I'm crazy. We can't possibly slow automation, competition etc.

Well, that sounds a little bit like so many things where we feel we must unfortunately exploit or treat the workforce badly because it's competitive pressures and we hope that we can do it humanely but it's choices that the... Layoffs or something like that where the workers would rather have another choice, and I think we may see a future where organisations may say, we can compete better by being the place where we say, if you join us, we will give you the opportunity to keep up and we're going to be that careful about how we communicate, about the opportunities we give you, that choice is something that I think the HR profession has the opportunity to articulate for leaders.

So in a simple case, leaders have choices. I don't think they're aware of them. One of the real opportunities for HR today, I'm hoping they can, they can take advantage of it, is to be the profession that leaders learn to go to, to understand the full array of the implications.

David Green: And one of the implications of course which I know more and more HR leaders are getting involved in, is some of these new tasks that will be created as a result of automation, which humans will do. There's a gap in skills. Because these new tasks, there's a shortage of people with those skills.

John Boudreau: Yes.

David Green: Which probably leads back to what we were talking about before, about actually being more open to collaborating with other organisations, looking outside the organisation for people who have those skills to actually fulfil that work.

John Boudreau: Yes. I think that's very well put. This is where I see it and I think you're articulating it as a kind of continuum, multiple ways to engage humans, multiple ways to combine humans with automation. We imagine all of that existing in a dashboard. We wouldn't call it any longer an employment planning dashboard.

It would be something like work planning or something like that, and that dashboard has the data to begin to get algorithmically smarter. AI, etc, about what appear to be the optimisations that work. And also good at informing leaders and alerting them to these choices. So I think that's exactly right.

And re-skilling I love the attention to re-skilling. That said, I think that the re-skilling debate at the moment is fairly embryonic, and that skills are only a part of the capability. So I like the dis-aggregation... Skills instead of jobs. I really love that skills instead of a whole person who fits or doesn't fit a job.

That said, I think there's more to capability than skills and we'll probably end up with a different language about capability than just the skills. I admire the attention to it. I think it's a great starting point. It's a good way to focus leaders' attention. That said, if we stay with skills, I think we're going to begin hitting walls.

And, and on the same way, I don't know that we've thought enough about the dis-aggregation of the work, which I think we remain in a position where we'll, I think we'll eventually be able to develop a language of work that is at a more dis-aggregated level.

And I don't know yet that the world has begun to develop that language.

David Green: So as you said, John, I mean, a lot of this thinking is still quite embryonic in most organisations, but there are some examples in the book of organisations that are doing this well and are applying this thinking around reinventing jobs.

John Boudreau: Yes.

David Green: Would you like to share one of those examples with our listeners?

John Boudreau: Sure, let me say as a caveat, I work with a limited number of organisations. I'm sure there are many out there that are even further along. And, and that's part of the reason for working with folks like you. Because I get the privilege of working with them and hearing from them. So I think in the Lead the Work world, I've mentioned a couple of organisations. I think this idea of creating a project-based platform is something that the impetus for thinking better about engaging humans more flexibly.

Organizations like IBM has a very robust internal platform, particularly in their professional services area. I mentioned P and G, which is starting this idea of... they call it a shopping mall of different options. I mentioned Disney, etc, Accenture, others. There are also companies that come in from the outside, such as a Manpower, or Upwork that have the ability to help build these kinds of engines for individuals that they've already learned to do them outside and they can help build them inside. So that's humans being engaged in different ways, lots of tools, lots of initiatives there.

In terms of automation, I think its more industries than maybe specific organisations. So as we looked in the book, Ravin is very involved, for example, in financial services. So it's just unavoidable, really, in financial services that we have now automated financial advisors.

One of the favourite examples I like is the example of bank tellers. The reason I like it is that a very good economist, James Beeson did the analysis, and we have more bank tellers today than when the ATM was invented in the 70s, it's one of my favourite slides. Now. How can that be? And how can it be that after decades of ATMs, we have more tellers?

Well, it's a great economic story that you still need humans in a bank branch, but with automation, you need fewer per branch. That means that branches become less expensive. Something that's less expensive gets used more. And so the proportional increase in the number of branches was greater than the proportional decrease per branch in people.

So automation actually added more jobs than it would have before. I mentioned the example of superhumans. There were a number of examples in the medical industry where with automation, we create doctors, physicians, nurses that are automatically as informed as someone working at the best hospitals in the world because the automation can bring that knowledge, virtually to them.

Surgeon's automation can often do a better job than any human at, for example, opening and closing in a surgery. Once you allow automation to do that, you remove the chance that someone will be hurt, or injured with the opening and closing because that's now uniform. One of Ravin's favourite examples comes from the oil extraction industry.

Where you can actually automate most of the functions of an oil rig, particularly things like maintenance, because the internet of things allows you to put sensors everywhere and run drones around to look at things, that sort of thing. And that actually changes the job of oil rig maintenance from a human standing on the oil rig with a team doing inspections etc.

So suppose you have a really unbelievably smart maintenance person. Well they can only do one rig in the old world. In the new world, we have sensors on all of those rigs. We put those people in a control centre, like an air traffic control center, and we can move the best repair person we have to the rig that needs that best thinking instantly.

So they're now covering 20 to 30 rigs. That's a great example. That new job can be paid a great deal more than someone on one oil rig. So as you can see, my dream is that the HR profession becomes known as the place leaders go to articulate those kinds of options.

David Green: And probably for that former oil rig worker, a better work life balance as well?

John Boudreau: Yes. So they can live.. The control centre can be in better places to live. It's less dirty. It's less dangerous. So all of those things on the left side of the performance curve, less mistakes, less accidents, etc. Some things in the middle of the performance curve, the maintenance they do is going to be better, because our sensors will get them to the spot.

But then there is that exponential, I think of it as a really upward rising curve on the right hand side of the performance graph, where we say, well, if everyone was this good if each of our rigs could have the best maintenance person, imagine the economic value, but of course, in the old world you go, well, that's not possible, everywhere we have a distribution of talent, etc. Now maybe you can have a subset of people, and as you say, I don't remember the exact numbers Ravin calculated, but it's factors greater value. Which leaves you a great deal of room for factors greater work life balance, pay, etc, and still an economic advantage.

David Green: Well, John, it's been great. We're drawing towards the close, unfortunately now, but this is a question we ask all our guests on the show. I think it will follow on quite nicely from the conversation we've had so far, and it's what will the future role of HR be in 2025 and I know you look beyond that, so you can always go beyond 2025 if you want.

John Boudreau: Thank you.

David Green: HR itself. What do you think?

John Boudreau: I wish I could be as precise as this is how it'll look in 2025 and this is how really in 2030. I'm afraid that's well beyond me. That's for people like you that are much smarter. But I think the trends that we see, and again, I would thank my colleagues in the CHREATE group and Ian and of course my co-authors and others.

As we said, I think it's unavoidable now that the disciplines that are brought to bear in questions like this go well beyond the traditional disciplines of HR. As important as those disciplines are, there is a need to open the boundary so that an HR profession has within it... Already we're seeing data analysts, storytellers, etc. I think we're going to see more designers of technology, more professions that are good at dis-aggregation and re aggregation such as architecture, engineering, where very often the problems they're already really good at have to do with dis-aggregation and then reinvention, if you think about that. So lots of engineers running around, architects running around. So one is the future of HR is this idea of an orchestra conductor, someone who's well connected to other disciplines, and who can bring those disciplines in. One of the really fundamental things, I think as a profession that is prepared to dis-aggregate the work and dis-aggregate the individual and to develop a language at that dis-aggregated level that is not chaos, but that is something systematic that we can use to reinvent the work.

I don't know that the profession, it's not a criticism, but I think there's a great deal of potential in realising that, that not all, but much of the work will benefit from dis-aggregation and from the courage to be able to put the pieces together in a different way. We don't really have systems that plan that way.

We don't really have systems that think that way. So that's going to be, I think, a significant one. And then I think this idea, these ideas we've talked about engaging humans differently, combining automation with humans. They have organisational implications. So when automation takes over certain tasks, the power structure changes.

My colleague Rob cross and I, Rob is much better known than me. And rightly so for his work on social networks. I love that work. Those social networks are generally conceived of as human networks, very often conceived as employee networks. And Rob and I have been thinking together about the notion of what happens when first you open up the network to be people that aren't employees.

So how vital is this contractor to the social structure of the work? And then what if we put artificial intelligence as a social node? So when you have artificial intelligence providing information, offering suggestions, etc, shouldn't that be a part of your social network? Because when you drop it into a social network, doesn't it change the way everyone interacts?

You can imagine that if AI starts to make surgical decisions, how does that change the power of a surgeon? In terms of hospital values, hospital culture base compared to the old times when the surgeon was really the centre of knowledge of power, of influence, etc. Do we need the AI inventor with the surgeon when the board of a hospital talks about decisions about patient health?

So another significant element here for HR is to realise that once you start to reinvent the work, the echoes, the ripples, are going to mean vastly different organisation structures, vastly different elements of organisation design, such as power, accountability, etc.

David Green: It's fascinating.

And I love the social network stuff, and actually I was at a conference a few weeks ago in Philadelphia where Rob Cross delivered the keynote. Really really good stuff.

John Boudreau: He's wonderful.

David Green: And I think you're right. I think these are becoming more and more important. And I think now the technology is there and with some of the passive network analysis to really start to understand how organisations really work.

John Boudreau: Yes, I would agree.

David Green: John, it's been great. Last question. How can people stay in touch with you? And we'll put all your various social media stuff on the publicity.

John Boudreau: Well, I think there's lots of connection points.

One of the main ones is the website that I use in a sense for my professional speaking, etc. So that's D R as in doctor, johnboudreau.com. All one word. And then another one is the center for effective organizations, where I work with a great number of terrific colleagues. That's kind of the entry point to my university role.

And either one of those, will get you pretty quickly to LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

David Green: John. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to speak to you.

John Boudreau: Thank you. Appreciate it.