This week, we have got two guests on the show: Ravin Jesuthasan, Senior Partner at Mercer and John Boudreau, Professor Emeritus of Management and Organisation at the University of Southern California, The Marshall School of Business, who are releasing a new book, their fourth together, called Work Without Jobs.

In this episode we will explore, with John and Ravin, what they are calling a new work operating system, to help people to better understand the link between qualifications, learning and jobs and move away from the current system. Throughout the episode, John and Ravin discuss:

• How they see the future of work and jobs evolving, including the core principles behind their new work operating system

• Examples of organisations like Unilever, Genentech, and DHL, who have already started to move towards this future system

• The impact on leadership of moving to a new work operating system and what that entails for existing leadership behaviours

• What this means for HR, people analytics, and society in general, and look at how you can get started with adopting this new way of working

Support for this podcast comes from iPsychtec. You can learn more by visiting https://ipsychtec.com/

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am absolutely delighted to welcome not one, but two, brilliant guests to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau, who’s eagerly awaited new book, Work Without Jobs, will be available at the end of March and is available for pre-order now.

Welcome to the show. Second time for both of you on the digital HR leaders podcast. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your work? I will come to you first John. 


John Boudreau: Thank you, David. And let me just thank you and everyone listening for the opportunity. As you said, we have a long history together and it is an absolute pleasure to be back on again and with my good friend and colleague Ravin Jesuthasan as well.

A brief introduction for me. I have been in this world of human capital and human resources and strategy, for about 40 years now. I was a Professor at Cornell, for the first 22 of those, and then moved to the University of Southern California and was a Professor there for about 15 years, and also a research scientist in the Centre for Effective Organisations. 
I am now semi-retired, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the US. I am still affiliated with the University through the Centre for Effective Organisations, doing work there, like I have before, on the future of work, people strategy, etc.

Again, thanks for having me. 


David Green: Great to have you on the show, John. And Ravin, if you would like to introduce yourself?


Ravin Jesuthasan: Sure. It is lovely to be with you again, David. It feels like a lifetime ago when we recorded our first podcast and the world was a very different place. So always so much fun to do this with John. So my background, maybe not quite as long as John’s, I have been in consulting for about 30 years. Most of my work has been around human capital work and automation.

I have the privilege right now, of taking care of Mercer's transformation business globally. And in that capacity have helped work with a number of very large organisations in helping them re-envision work, implement the sorts of things that we are going to spend some time talking about. My involvement with the future of work goes back to when John and I first started collaborating, which was back in 2007, and then four books later, here we sit. I also have had the great privilege of having done a lot of work with The World Economic Forum. I sit on their steering committee and work on employment. I have done a number of research studies on the future of work and more recently, I have started collaborating with Caltech, where we are starting up a future of work course.

So, great to be here, David. 


David Green: Well it is great to have you both on the show, it’s two for the price of one almost. I get asked fairly often, who do I go to to learn? And the two of you are two of the names that always come up, so great to have you on.

We are going to talk principally about your new book, Work Without Jobs. How to Reboot your Organisation's Work Operating System. It is due to be published, as I said, at the end of March. But for those listening, whose interest is piqued, it is available for pre-order now.

So, let's start with a bit of an introduction to the book. Why did you write it? What is new and how does this build on your previous work? As you said, Ravin, this is your fourth book together so Ravin, I will come to you first this time. 


Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah. So this book, David, really builds on our last two books. Lead The Work. Navigating A World Beyond Employment, and, Reinventing Jobs. A Four Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work.

So the first of those books, Lead The Work, really started to explore how work was moving beyond the organisation boundary and beyond the traditional confines of employment. We wrote extensively about different ways in which work could be accomplished through non-employment means, particularly the use of gig work. And the second book looked at how automation and humans can best be combined and presented Leaders, both books did really, with decision-making frameworks to enable them to make informed choices about work and its evolution.

This book, like those previous books, has several dozen examples and case studies of those frameworks in action.

I think at the heart of both of those books and certainly at the heart of this one, is the principle and the big idea of work deconstruction as a critical and foundational element for increasing the agility of organisations to respond to for example, like the pandemic that we are in the middle of, as well as opportunities presented by forces like digitalisation.

This book in particular, really delves into deconstruction and presents it as a fundamental element of the new work operating system, that we talk about, that we think is absolutely essential to navigating this emerging world of work that we are in. 


David Green: John, have you got anything to add to that? Perhaps the experience of writing the book during the pandemic, we are still in the pandemic now, but during the pandemic are some of the ideas that you have written about, are you seeing them happening quicker, perhaps due to the experience of the last two years? 


John Boudreau: Thanks, David, I think Ravin put it very well in terms of history. I think the only history I would add as it turns out, as I look at my previous work back into the 1990s, many of your viewers have kindly purchased the book Peter Ramstad and I wrote, Beyond HR, which was the beginning of the emergence into the trade book world.

What Pete and I found, writing that book about the strategic impact of people in organisations was, again your viewers will probably remember the example of the sweeper at Disney, and the example of trying to figure out how that sweeper might be strategically valuable.

And I realised when I go back, that we had to take that job apart because there is sweeping and then there is guest interaction or guest entertainment, and they are both a part of the job and they both pay off in very different ways. 
So it turns out that inside a job there are these atomised elements that really give you the clues to solve a puzzle, even something as simple as, what is the strategic value of this job? You have to take it apart. So then as Ravin said, what if we source talent in ways that are not just regular full-time employment? Well, you don't end up with a contractor taking over a job very often or a gig worker or a volunteer, but you do end up with them taking parts of it. And so the puzzle is really, well wait, I still have these regular full-time people and I want to keep them because I need them, but they are doing a very different set of tasks. Then there is automation et cetera. And I think, the pandemic accelerated everything of course, and what we saw was, just take one, maybe two easy examples, when you move people from onsite to remote, they had more opportunity to craft their work. In fact it was a requirement to craft their work at the elemental level, they may still have the same job description, but what they are doing is very different. 
Actually that is true even for onsite folks. Think about shifting a production line for making auto parts to face masks, et cetera. That would be one of the very easy examples and in that case, you still have employees working on that production line and they are having to take their jobs apart and re-craft them, so that they can shift to making this new thing. 
And of course there are example, after example, after example.

And I think David, one of the fun things about writing this book, as obviously no one had fun with the pandemic, but one of the interesting things writing this book was the pandemic illuminated so many of the things that we feel are fundamental, thinking about this idea of atomising and then reconstructing and reinventing. As in so many ways, David, it has just shone a huge light on things that were always there, but that really hadn't needed to be addressed, perhaps with such an imperative. 
Also, the interesting thing is we are not going to snap back to the way it was before. So another very interesting element of writing this book during this period is that I think, the book becomes more accessible, more timely, because these issues are front and centre now. And when you see them, for me anyway when I teach this with executives or others, once I reveal in a way or describe to them this idea of deconstruction and reinvention, you almost see it everywhere then. It is like making you aware of your tongue or something like that, suddenly it is oh yeah, that was there all the time. Hidden beneath the surface perhaps, not addressed perhaps before, but now available to help solve some of the riddles that have come up with all the disruptions that we have seen. 


David Green: That is really helpful and I think we might return to some of those themes, throughout our discussion.

Ravin, one of the big ideas in the book is this new work operating system. What does it mean and what does the phrase “work without jobs” mean?

Ravin Jesuthasan: David, maybe I will just start with the principles that underpin this new work operating system and I will get into some of the elements as we go through this conversation.

The four principles that we have found to be essential to this new work operating system, number one is, starting with the work. It sounds trivial, it sounds almost trite, but it is really about starting with the work, what are the current and future tasks and not just the existing bundle, ie the existing jobs. So transcending that legacy of jobs is really the first basic principle.

The second, as we talked about that John and I explored in our previous book, achieving the optimal combinations of humans and automation. Having that really in-depth understanding of, where does a specific type of automation substitute certain types of human endeavour? Where does it augment the work of the human, allowing them to be almost super productive by letting them focus on the best of who they are? And where does it transform or create new work? The third principle is, instead of limiting ourselves to then organising a job around the remaining tasks, considering the full array of human work engagement. Is employment the best way of getting work done. In that instance, should it be someone in a job? Should it be a freelancer or should it be a gig worker? Should the work be organised, maybe done by employees, but employees flowing to projects and assignments or a variety of other internal arrangements? David, certainly many of your guests have talked about this notion and the rapid rise of internal marketplaces, we explore that in some detail because as you apply automation, the marketplace often is the best way to create and build on that more agile way of getting work done so that you can continuously keep automating and creating new work for talent.

And then the fourth dimension is, once you have considered the full array of work engagement, allowing talent to flow to work versus being limited in traditional fixed jobs and thus increasing the agility with which we get work done and with which talent connects to work. John and I have had the question about work without jobs, now we are not saying in the near term that jobs are going to go away but I think in William Gibson's infamous quote “The future's here, it's just unevenly distributed.” 
What we are seeing are many, many organisations applying the elements of this new work operating system to move to ever more agile ways of working. Some have, maybe cynically, said that this title is clickbait and actually far from it. What the title really points to is the growing inability of the current work operating system with its indexing and legacy of jobs and that core foundation of, jobs being the elemental unit of work. And that by extension, that one-to-one relationship between a degree, a job, and a job holder is fundamentally incapable of keeping up with this emerging world of work.

I think, what the book does is that it illustrates, with these four principles of the new work operating system, what that actually looks like and how that is actually being realised by numerous organisations, to the various cases that we have in the book. 


David Green: And I guess from listening to you there, Ravin and John, and obviously speaking to you before about these ideas. I think the words you use, more agile, it is certainly much more flexible. You can see it actually being much better for employees because it gives them a bit more choice, a bit more opportunity to craft the work that they are doing, and it is better for organisations as well, because rather than trying to fit square pegs into round holes you can adapt those shapes to fit the gaps that you have got within your organisation. A follow up question, either of you might want to take this, is this being driven by technology or is technology helping to enable it? 


John Boudreau: I think in so many ways I am going to say both, David, I remember our conversation with the editor. Probably one of the motivations for readers of the book and some of our colleagues who read the draft for example, I will mention by name Diane Gherson, the former Head of HR at IBM, just because she was so helpful at the time that we were writing the book. It was one of those things where she and I were having regular chats anyway with a number of people, as many of us did as the pandemic made us all remote. And Diane among many others, said basically something like, we are pursuing agility, and obviously IBM are doing a great job with it. And even as I think back to pursuing agility and look at this book, I realised that jobs were sometimes getting in the way and that it was this almost implicit assumption that we needed to end up with jobs, or we needed to start and keep these jobs and then be agile. 
So agile was both a motivator and also becoming agile is a facilitator of this sort of thing. And I think it is the same way you take automation and we start perhaps with, I think it is often sold by how many FTEs will you be re-deploying? How many human FTE’s can you re-deploy because you used this automation or AI. Leaders confronted with now they have to implement it, realised that those FTEs are not whole people. We are not deploying whole people as I still need those people, they are just going to do something very different.

So automation is a motivator. I think leaders don't realise what to ask for. They don't realise that what they need is someone to say, let me free you from the job system and then you will see that you have options that you didn’t have before.

So that is the motivator, even if they don't know what the words are for what they need and then once they see it, it is also a facilitator because automation then enables a reconstruction and deconstruction. 


David Green: Great. Thanks, John.

Now the book, as you highlighted, there is a lot of good case studies in it. I think that really brings things to life for people and inspire practitioners working in organisations. So we are going to talk about some of those now. So Ravin, if I come to you, can you share some examples of organisations who are doing this, who are using this work operating system? And what indications of a future system are you seeing and are excited by?

Ravin Jesuthasan: Well let me do this, David, as for each of the elements of this work operating system we have got a series of cases. So let me walk through those and you will get a sense of the cases and how they aligned to this work operating system. 
So the first element, is this notion of work as deconstructed elements or tasks, and the example that we have was Genentech. Genentech is a subsidiary of Roche, and they actually used this notion of deconstruction and the period we were in, right in the middle of the pandemic, as a way to create a much more equitable and inclusive approach to flexible working. That went well beyond the traditional headlines of what a job title looked like and what a job description look like to lead with this belief that there are opportunities for flexibility in all jobs, we just need to find the right ones based on a detailed understanding of the work itself.

So work is deconstructed elements, was the first element. And Genentech being a great example of using that starting point to move towards greater flexibility. 
The second element is, this notion of work automation as optimising task level combinations of human and automated work.

The example there was DHL and its use of various types of robotics in its distribution facilities, to optimise that human automation combination based on the specific nature of the work. And creating the conditions to perpetually reinvent how automation played out in their facilities. 
The third element is this notion of work arrangements, including a boundaryless and democratised work ecosystem.

The example that we had there was work we have done with a very large insurance company that, like many, was struggling to get the right amount of digital talent in the right place at the right time. 
So you would find these pockets of wealth and pockets of poverty. All the great talent would go to customer analytics and not so many in underwriting and claims. And so they actually blew up all of their digital roles and put them into this virtual cloud-based organisation and used the marketplace as the fundamental mechanism for continuously matching skills to work and thus shifting from that traditional notion of where the job was the currency of work, to increasingly where skills and capabilities were the currency of work. The fourth element is the notion that John just alluded to, of workers as the whole person with an array of deconstructed capabilities and skills. So moving beyond the traditional headlines of what an individual in a job might bring. And the case study here, it is actually the capstone case for the book, is the outstanding work that Greg Till, the CHRO at Providence Health, has done with his colleagues. The work they have done to deconstruct the work of nurses, right in the middle of this pandemic, to enable the talent to keep optimising their skills and flowing to the top of their license while continuously re-deploying other tasks to other roles, where there may be more plentiful supply, where there may be greater access to talent.

So it was a great example. And in fact, Providence is just an outstanding example not just of this one element, David, but of all of the different elements, including automation, including just deconstruction at its most fundamental level. 
The fifth element of this new work operating system, is the need to perpetually reinvent tasks, project combinations, and work arrangements beyond traditional employment.

We illustrated this with a number of cases, but probably the one that jumps out is throughout this book, John and I have a running case study to illustrate all of the elements within the construct of a single organisation. 
It is the distribution operations of a very large global retailer and for this particular element, it laid out specifically the discipline required to create a game plan that ensures the perpetual reinvention of work in the enterprise. So specifically the process changes, activities, and workflows. The cultural implications. What does collaboration look like? What are behavioural norms? What are the talent implications in terms of skills and capabilities required to enable this perpetual reinvention of work? What's the structure and the organisation of work? And then, what are the technology implications? Not just the direct automation, but the enabling technology and the information systems required to sustain the work operating system.

The sixth element, and I promise I am getting to the end, there is only seven. It is management and work coordination, as collaborative hubs of teams and projects aligned around a central purpose and a mission, then integrated through human and AI platforms and systems. This is where we again, had a number of examples, but tying back to your previous guest Placid Jover, from Unilever. We illustrated the work that we have done with Unilever, to develop that framework for the future of work and the many great innovations that organisation has developed on the heels of that particular framework. Particularly the great progress they have made around building the discipline to perpetually reinvent work and increase the agility with which talent is connected to work, all while grounded in their broader purpose as an enterprise and their mission towards the consumers and all their various stakeholders. 
And then the last dimension is really where we go beyond the organisation, looking at the social values and policies that enable and rely on fluid work arrangements and the holistic worker capability required to achieve sustainability, voice, equity, and inclusion. So thinking beyond the enterprise to the social implications of this new work operating system. 
And there was some great connections, I will go back to my introduction, David, and the work that The World Economic Forum, is doing around both its charter for ethical and responsible platform work as well as its new, recently launched, effort around new standards for work. So, various case studies at different levels of altitude, to illustrate these seven elements of the work operating system. 


David Green: And it is interesting that the impacts you talked about there weren't just within the organisation or for employees or workers, it is society as well and that's a big impact. People that work in organisations now, they want their organisations to have a positive benefit on society so that talks very well to what is in the book. 


When we come back in just a moment, John and Ravin will share their thoughts on who benefits the most from a new work operating system and how to implement such a system.

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Welcome back to this episode of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, with Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau. Now let's get back to the conversation. John, before I turn to you to talk about how to implement such a system, either of you can answer this. A lot of the people that listen to this program, work in HR and I could definitely see this, as your previous books are, appealing to them. But who else are you targeting with this book? Who else do you think will read this?

John Boudreau: I think you are absolutely right, David. Ravin and I, are both birthed in HR and are grateful to have had marvellous careers due to supportive people like you and others, that might define themselves within HR. There is clearly, and we can talk about them a lot of indications for this, just about the tectonic change in the way the HR systems work, et cetera.

But I think in the larger sense, at least my own personal mission and why I stay with this, would be to make work better generally. And for all those people that are spending the bulk of their lifetimes in something called work, often working within an organisation, for me anyways that runs across my whole 40 years, I think about what I am really after.

And so I think there is a reader here, that would be a leader, frontline leader, top leader, et cetera, we can talk more about the differences there. We are seeing it with COVID, just in terms of frontline discussions about hybrid versus remote. Let's just take that one. And that is fundamentally, really about work crafting. It is about the elemental parts of work and would you put all the remote parts into a job and let someone do that job as remote? And then take all the onsite parts and give that to someone who is onsite? That is kind of one simple example. Frontline leaders, at least in my experience with all of my clients, frontline leaders are really at the heart of that. There is no answer. There is really no policy that will solve remote hybrid and I think every book by every thought leader I know, from Dan Pink to Lynda Gratton, is writing a book that basically says we don't know and how do we deal with, when we don't know, whether it is regrets, whether it is uncertainty, et cetera.

So, there needs to be a language and a system for those frontline folks to engage in this discussion and I think this notion of deconstruction, the work operating system we have discussed, is part of the answer to that dilemma. 
Moving up, if we envision that some work will be more of a marketplace that has immense implications for, let's say higher level leaders, that are going to see people flowing through projects that are not going to have three people reporting to them, but rather will have three people that they oversee, that they mentor, but those people are going to be moving around and they are going to see others coming through on a short-term basis. 
So, how do you communicate your sense of purpose? What is your role if you are not just a direct supervisor, and you know they are going to be with you for several years, and there is a rhythm of, we do our performance management once a year, et cetera. Get ready to do that always. You are always going to be giving feedback and people are always going to be moving through.

Again, not everywhere, but in some places. 
And then I think for top leaders again, I believe that they are interested in agility, they are interested in addressing the evolution of the labour market. That is now front and centre, that is not a HR issue anymore. And that labour market evolution, the increasing empowerment of workers, the increasing desire to have flexibility, collaboration, to pay attention to wellbeing. Again, this new work operating system is not meant to be a complete answer, but I think one needs to begin with the opportunity to deconstruct jobs, to see workers as a whole person, to see qualifications as elements of learning rather than degrees. If we can give people that freedom and give them a language for that, I think there are just optimisation and solution options that appear, as opposed to when, which I think is mostly the case, people are stuck in this legacy system of jobs because they haven't had a way to think about it another way, for example.

So as you can see, I am pretty enthusiastic and excited about this. And I think it is one element, this ability to say, wait a minute, what if I let you take the elements of the jobs or the elements of the workers, what if I let you use those and let them stand on their own? Now, what might a solution be? It may look radical, but let’s at least allow ourselves to see it. 


David Green: That is great. So leaders clearly have an important role, whether they are frontline leaders in an organisation or right up to the CEO really, to make this system work. 
What about HR? As I said, a lot of people listening to this program will be working in HR. They may be CHROs. They may be working in people analytics or in workforce planning roles.

What are the implications for people in the HR profession? If I'm in HR, what am I going to do differently to adapt to this work system? Then perhaps maybe deeper, if I am an analytics person, what do I have to be aware of?

John Boudreau: Let me just start with, first of all as Ravin said, the future is and will be unevenly distributed. So the first thing I think I would say, David, is there is going to be plenty of work in HR, within the traditional system. Lots of work is going to be embedded in jobs. Lots of the systems that are job based are going to work just fine for that kind of work. I think the message we would have is HR, and HR is probably best suited for this, is going to need to learn how to find the edges, as I would call them. Where, what is needed is this new work operating system but what is available is the old operating system. And there were plenty of clues to that. We can't find the skillsets we need. These job descriptions don't seem to fit anymore. We have automation coming. People seem to be crafting their work in ways that don't fit the job. We have an internal marketplace, like Unilever, everybody wants to do these passion motivated projects.

Those are examples of where HR can say, when we see this, the frustration is in part because of the legacy of the job system. I think HR needs to step forward then, and now it gets to be a big deal, and say, how are we prepared to, as Pete and I said, the fundamental purpose of HR is probably best to teach others how to think better and make better decisions about people. And so I think it is up to HR to step forward and say, here is your option. We are prepared with a system that can track tasks and projects and allow them to be reformulate, we can track the whole person as capabilities or skills and we are prepared to allow you a system that lets those stand alone. And then I think as Ravin mentioned, a system that could tap a larger ecosystem than just people with employment contracts.

That is a big deal, that affects virtually the entire talent life cycle, which is why I am not going in to specifics, David. Take any element, take sourcing, pay, development, even termination in the sense of we want to keep a relationship for when you come back, and all the elements of wellbeing and culture and purpose, et cetera. 
I think if you touch any of them and say, what if we needed to teach our leaders to work in a system that is elemental at tasks and projects and capabilities, and we didn't have jobs, what would our role be?

It is an immensely good and optimistic picture of HR and I hope that HR is the profession that is prepared to step up and provide that new way of thinking when it is needed. 


David Green: Yes and I think John, you have described previously that HR can be a hub of agile experimentation. You might not remember writing those words, but it definitely resonated with me. And that really links well to this. 


John Boudreau: It really does and Ravin, I will let you get a word in edgewise here. My colleague Pete Ramstad and I, late last year, began thinking about what do we want to say about what is happening? And I was working with a lot of clients and they were working on policies. Should it be two days or three days and what are the criteria that you check off to be remote? And everyone was concluding, this is happening faster than a policy can keep track of and to be honest, David, I got tired of telling them, please go tell your C-suite that they are asking the wrong question when they ask you for a policy. That is a little difficult. I sometimes did it just so then they can shoot me with arrows, but what we came to was the positive way to think about it is like applying agile product design or software design to work. And in both of those areas, you need to see the elements of the software, the elements of the product, to find solutions. And in the same way, you need to see the elements of the work, the elements of the worker, to find these solutions.

And yes, David, I would say my fervent hope is that HR steps up and says we are prepared to be the hub for the tools and the integration of experiments everywhere about work. 
What is working? What is not working? Where should we use scrums? Where should we use Six Sigma? Where should we use agile tools?

I would love for HR to be the place leaders go and say, okay, I realise I am in a big experiment, now help me. 


David Green: And Ravin, turning to you as a nuance to this, what is the technological requirement and also the data that could underpin such a system? 


Ravin Jesuthasan: At the heart of this pivot, just to pick up on where John left off David, is not to be trivial about it, but it really is a fundamental reframing of HRs role from being a steward of employment, to being a steward of work. 
And the lens that is brought to all of those issues that John talked about, hiring, development, deployment, et cetera, is one that is completely different.

And I think, related to that, the data and the technology required to make this new work operating system work, start to transcend many of the traditional metrics that maybe HR might have used in the past, to looking at the broadest scope of different work options. As an example, one of the simplistic metric we talk about is, do we understand the total cost of work? And somewhat simplistically, do we understand the different work options that we have and how do we get them on a level playing field as it relates to their accounting treatment? So we have got labour costs today, the cost of employees and jobs, that is owned by HR. You have got the cost of the gig workers and that is often owned by procurement. You have got strategy, maybe that engages in its relationships with the RPA or AI vendor. Many organisations have stood up their own RPA and AI capabilities often capitalised. So how do we get an annual operating cost for all of those assets, so that we can make those choices of, I am going to trade off an employee in a job today for one of these options or vice versa. Having metrics that are transversal in nature, that cut across all of these, like this measure of total cost of work, that we talk about in the book, is I think a good one.

I think also to your question about the technology, having the technology that allows you to rapidly deconstruct work and look at the various options, there is a variety of tools out there including from some of the consulting firms, including Willis Towers Watson as well as Mercer. So the opportunity to get beyond the jobs. Technologies that look at the different work options, what is the cost of different types of automation? What is the accessibility, the applicability, to different types of work? But being able to integrate very disparate data sets because that is the state of play today, right? 
The data required for this new work operating system is distributed across a number of different domains. One is, responsibility within an organisation, as I mentioned a second ago. The other is across different providers, in terms of insights into these various work options. 
So I do think we are starting to see some traction and some movement, but there is I think, a fair bit of runway on the part of many organisations to get integrated data sets and integrated technology to underpin this new work operating system. 


David Green: It is almost like from workforce planning to work planning. It becomes more complex, arguably, and there are more pieces to pull into the jigsaw, as it were.

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Now, let's go back to the conversation with John and Ravin, as they discuss the societal impact of a new approach to work.

I'm conscious of time but I would love to hear a little bit more about the societal element, John. So what does this new approach to work mean for society more broadly?

John Boudreau: Again, starting simply, imagine that your organisation is in the middle of a big ecosystem of work. People are going to pass in and out of your boundary and they won't always have an employment contract. 
You are going to be reinventing work at the task level and you are going to be trying to look at the whole person and all of their capabilities, as they move across and within this very fluid system. Right now, let's take the US. If you want to talk about improving work, almost every leader that talks about that, will talk about good jobs. And indeed a few people have said, boy, that title “Work Without Jobs” is fascinating because isn't it about the insecurity of workers, even who have full-time jobs, have realised that's no guarantee of something like lifetime security. And so that is the downside, is aren't we in a very exploitive difficult world where no one has an attachment, but of course the opposite of that would be a world in which society creates a safety net so that moves along with you. The Unilever example from inside an organisation was, we will keep you as an employee and now we are going to free you up to take on projects, and we will figure out how to pay you, how to track your development, etc.

I think across the world we will see different experiments with this. And as Ravin said, I like The World Economic Forums metaphor of platform-based work, that this is more like a platform marketplace and yes, today, often platform workers have less security. We might even see more exploitation. Although some of them are immensely happy with the security that comes with owning their own skillset. So portable pensions, a portable skill passport that moves through with you, these are the kinds of things. I guess in a nutshell, I wince David, every time I hear a brilliant leader who wants to improve work say, good jobs, because you immediately limit your options to the kind of thing where someone must have an employment contract and be a member of this organisation. And I think when you step back and look at the way work is evolving, there are so many instances where that is simply not going to be the arrangement.

I think it is really up to society to step back and say, let's talk about good work and not just about good jobs.

David Green: Let's pivot to some final guidance. Ravin, I will come to you. Final guidance for organisations, how should leaders get started building this new approach to work? And maybe another question is, when should they get started? 


Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah. So David, I would say three things. One is, in terms of getting started, start by adopting the work design principles that we talked about at the beginning, as a touchstone for all your efforts. The four principles were, start with the work and not the existing jobs. Combine humans and automation and not just be looking to replace humans with automation. Consider the full array of work engagements, as John just spoke to, whether that is employment, whether that is gig workers, internal gig workers, alliances, freelancers, outsources, you name it. But, what is the full breadth of options available.

And then lastly, allow talent to flow to work and not just be limited to fixed traditional jobs.

So those are the four principles.

The second would be, follow the change process that we talk about in the book. Start by identifying the high value trigger for creating a prototype that will illustrate the power and the value of the new work operating system. Some of the typical triggers that we have seen work well in the organisations we looked at are, one, the most obvious where you have got an operating challenge where you have got a constraint, like a bottle neck in processes or talent pipelines. Where you have got new technology that you have bought and now you are trying to figure out, how do we redesign work around this technology. Lastly, it might be a shift in organisational priorities. John, talked about the numerous organisations during the pandemic, who shifted from producing cars to producing ventilators. And then also ensure you have got the right metrics in place, David, to come back to something you touched on at the beginning. You have got the right metrics in place to measure success beyond the usual suspects. And then the third of this is, deploy the new work operating system along the lines of the seven principles that I touched on.

So hopefully three ways for organisations to get started. 


David Green: Yeah. Excellent, some great advice there I think, for people listening. 


John Boudreau: Let me just add David, I think for me, working with my clients and others now, and beginning to put these ideas in, and this has been true really for 40 years, I think. There is an opportunity for HR to step back and have what I would call, private offstage conversations about these things. So I think what we want to see eventually of course, is that these things emerge and leaders and workers interact with them, and that is going to happen. But I think right now, the HR community in an organisation could get together when they are at their offsite. An exercise would be, where do we have these indicators that the current system isn't working? And bring that case to the front. Somebody report on that in their business unit and just say their frustrations, and then let's turn over here and let's look at these ideas, perhaps from “Work Without Jobs.”

And just in our offsite, let's say, what if we tapped other kinds of workers? What if we allowed these job elements to flow freely and we can reconstruct them? What if we thought about the people doing these jobs as an entire set of capabilities, rather than just their qualifications for the jobs? What if we thought about our degree requirements, this is what people are already doing, and we deconstructed the degree in to the learning elements? And what if we said we didn't have to take a degree, we could just hire people with the elements we need or with most of them and then train them?

I think that is this deconstruction exercise that I am finding, when I work with organisations, it is often the first step. To hypothetically almost, say let's at least imagine. And very often what you find is there is a solution in there that you can then bring forward and say, we are not going to force you to deconstruct as a first step. We are going to solve your problem as a first step. And then you will realise as a leader, oh, that was a deconstruction. Like a skilled controller in finance doesn't force a leader to learn the financial equations, but they constantly find better cash flow. They constantly find a way to increase revenue and then the leader says, how did you do that? And they are ready to be taught and learn the principles. And in this case, it is the four principles like Ravin, described. 


David Green: Start where there is a problem that needs to be solved, where the system isn't working, because you will have a more receptive audience in the business, that is prepared to work with you to do it. You then prove the value and then you can communicate that out. John, I am going to come to you for the last question and this is a question we are asking everyone on this series. How does behavioural science help improve the work? 


John Boudreau: Thank you, David, and obviously that is very near and dear to my heart. If we define behavioural sciences as the scholarly work so to speak, the work that I did as a Professor, pretty much for my whole career, the primary work of my colleagues. And I think we see elements of this already. It turns out that there is a significant amount of literature on the idea of work crafting. Now that literature is written from a world where people had jobs and it was looking at the crafting they did inside those jobs. One chapter I have written for my colleague, Benjamin Schneider, was about engagement and the literature on engagement. There is decades and decades of literature on job engagement, job satisfaction, etc. 
We, the behavioural science world, could begin to think about task or project engagement and how would that look if we could take apart the job and say, oh, these parts really motivate you, these parts really frustrate you, rather than just one measure of the whole job.

So I think if you start with the idea of work elements, and then you start perhaps with the idea of a work ecosystem that is beyond employment, there are lots of behavioural science questions that could be reframed to take past work, where we would know a lot of things about motivation and engagement,and reframe them to reflect perhaps the atomised elements. One example is, and I hope people will contact me if they want to get involved. My colleague, Ben Schneider and I, have developed an instrument based on his work on work automation engagement, or the work automation climate. The idea there is to get a sense of whether the workers are prepared and trust the organisation to do work automation in a way that they can engage with, or on the other hand, do they feel threatened? So for me, I am finding it is very helpful to look at work that has already been done, but that was understandably developed with the idea of a job and employment as the focus, and then ask ourselves, could behavioural science take that and in a sense, deconstruct it or apply it to deconstruction, to fit the new work operating system. 


David Green: And back to your point about the mission of making work better. Using behavioural science to show that moving away from the job can actually help. So really good.

It is always an absolute delight to talk to both of you, even better when you are together. Thanks again for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. I am going to come to each you now so you can let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and maybe find out more about Work Without Jobs. So Ravin, I will come to you first.

Ravin Jesuthasan: I can be followed on Twitter @ravinjesuthasan as well as LinkedIn. And then also my website ravinjesuthasan.com. 


David Green: Great, thanks Ravin. And John, you have got the final word.

John Boudreau: In terms of contact, my website is drjohnboudreau.com. That is a great way to get started. Ravin, mentioned the book website, and you can find pretty much all my contact information and bio and other things there. 
Also The Centre for Effective Organisations at the University of Southern California, is another good way to search and find my academic affiliation and the work of my colleagues there as well.

David Green: You are on LinkedIn as well aren’t you John? 


John Boudreau: Yes, LinkedIn and Twitter 


David Green: John, Ravin, absolutely fantastic. Best of luck with the book. I have already read an extract from it and I am definitely looking forward to getting a final copy of it, I know it will be a tremendous success. I look forward to speaking to you both again.