Redesigning Work with Lynda Gratton

and I wanted to talk about a topic which I think is really Central to our thoughts about the future and that's the question of work how will we be working when will we be working where will we be working [Music] hi I'm Linda Gratton and I'm very excited to talk with you today about some of the huge Trends the shaping the way that we work and we'll continue to do so in the decades ahead and that's the question of work how will we be working when will we be working where will we be working so let me just take you through some ideas about what I think we can expect to see over the coming couple of years and more importantly what you might do to make sure that the transition that we're all facing works for everybody in your organization well let me start by stepping back for a moment and I want to remind us all that actually even before the pandemic which of course is still taking a lot of our attention there was still some hugely important trends that were in place that were shaping the way that we worked and the nature of our work and I've just described three here which I think are really crucial the first is demographics you know the truth is that we're both living longer and we're having fewer kids and that means that as individuals we can expect to be living healthily into our 80s possibly even our 90s but as a population in every country of the world with a few exceptions we are an aging population and you look to Japan and say well you know the average age of Japan is 45 but we're not the same as Japan well it turns out we are and the next aging population will be China so we have to come to terms with living longer and that means working longer but also living in a society where there's going to be more older people my book The Hundred Year life which you might have had a chance to look at was really about that but just as we're living longer we're also living at a time of intense technological change and all of us are going to impact have the impact of both robotics in terms of the sort of physicality of our work but also artificial intelligence which is going to be working with us closely in terms of some of the more cognitive aspects of our work but there's a third Trend that I've been watching for years which is what's happening in our communities and in our families and whereas I might have been brought up in a traditional family of a dad who worked and a mum who was a carer that's very unusual these days right across the developed world most women work and that means that most families have two people who are working not just one so those Trends were always in place long before the pandemic happened and what they have done I think is really pushed two aspects of human capital the first is this idea that people are moving from a three-stage life of full-time education full-time work full-time retirement to something you might call a multi-stage life where people do multiple activities right their way through their life they might start their own business they make take time off to travel the world they might want to work part-time and the thing about the multi-stage life is there are more stages and you do them much more in an individual way so this requires from the individual from us humans a great deal more self-determination and agency and from organizations a great deal more flexibility around when and where you want people to work the second aspect of those trends that I spoke of earlier demographic technical Trends and social trends is that we're thinking differently about what's important to us now tangible assets are savings the money perhaps we have in our home our property our pension have always and will always be important nobody wants to retire at the age of 55 and have very little money for the rest of their lives but actually what we're realizing when we live uh long lives uh at times of technological disruption as we are doing is that there's another type of asset that becomes really important and those are those intangible Assets in other words assets that are really important to you but which money can't buy and I've described three here the first is around productivity I think that we should all be working into our 60s and our 70s because otherwise we're going to have a very poor finalist Decades of our life but the truth is you can't really do that unless you've developed your productivity asset what do I mean by that well I mean you know learning new skills right the way through your life building new networks that allow you to learn new things so being a lifetime learner is going to be really important but it's not just about productivity it's also about vitality how do we stay energized and excited about life well in part that's to do with our health you know we all know how to stay healthy we have to walk 10 000 steps a day we have to eat healthy food lots of vegetables and we have to sleep eight hours a day that's pretty much understood now but what we also know is that Vitality is also about our friendships it turns out that loneliness is a huge problem when it comes to mental health issues and so if you want to stay vital it isn't just about staying healthy it's also about staying connected to other people and the third type of intangible asset I would call a transformational asset it's the capacity for you to change you know thinking back to that multi-stage life one of the aspects of that multi-stage life is that you are able to change you could change from one stage to another stage how do you do that well as I mentioned earlier that's partly about your own personal agency you know the knowledge that you have of yourself and the knowledge that you have as uh as a human about what you would like to do but it turns out it's also about the networks that you've got you know finding people who are different from you who are role models of what you could be rather than what you are so let me summarize Where We Are there have always been certainly since I've been studying this topic for 30 years these big trends that have shaped our lives trends like we're living longer at a time of intense technological change and our family structures are changing both parents are now working that's set off a real change in the way that we think about our life work which looks not just at the three stages of full-time education full-time work full-time retirement but also to something which is much more multi-stage where we do different things right the way through our life and where our age itself doesn't determine what stage of life we are at and that means that we are now focused on intangible assets as much as tangible assets so all of this was in play before the pandemic we knew that people wanted to work in a different way and they wanted to focus on their intangible assets as well as their tangible assets but then the pandemic came along and from that time in March of 2021 I kept a diary about what I saw every single day in fact I still I still have I think I'm on Volume 15 now of that diary to really show what's Happening and I used uh those of you who perhaps know a little bit about organizational change might know this Theory that companies most of the time are in a state of freeze in the sense that their practices and processes are all understood and acknowledged and then something happens something big happens to the company maybe it's taken over by a competitor maybe Elon Musk buys it um perhaps a new technology happens and the whole organization goes into an extraordinary state of unfreeze where everything's up for grabs people have an opportunity to ask you know why is this happening what is this and then over time it re-freezes again but now in a way that's rather different than it was at the beginning and you perhaps know that I wrote I'm looking at it now in in May in May 2021 the definitive Harvard Business review article about the pandemic and about the hybrid and what I said then is I felt that this pandemic had changed our attitudes to how we thought about work it had given us an opportunity to re-evaluate what's important to us and what we want and that now we were going to move into that final stage where we coalesce around what what is it that we need let's just take a look at what happened in the short term and I think we're still in the short term there was an enormous Focus particularly on place the idea is that suddenly you didn't need to work in the office anymore you could work anywhere and so you moved from Place being a constraint you know you have to be in the office all the time to place being unconstrained you can work anywhere that you want and in a way that's still being played out you know we're still having big conversations about who should be in the office when should they be in the office and what do they do when they're there and I expect that to carry on I don't really see any end in sight of that conversation because we're learning a great deal as we go but of course the truth is that during the pandemic only about 50 percent of people had any choice about where they worked they were in a sense Tethered to their work if you are a delivery worker or you work in a factory or like one of my sons who work as a doctor on accident and emergency you cannot work from home these are jobs that require you to be in a place and so one of the challenges was how do you then go about really understanding that time can also be a flex you could also possibly Flex around time and by that I mean so that you can work anytime rather than having a constrained nine to five and then I think is where we are at the moment there's a lot of flexibility going on a lot of experimentation but in the long term as you remember if you've had a chance to read my book redesigning work which by the way is also available as an audio with me reading it so if you'd like to learn English through listening to my perfect English then do listen to the audio rather than reading the book redesigning work so this is what I've said I've said redesigning work is a design question and it's got four steps to it the first is you have to understand what really matters I'll speak about that in a moment you can then reimagine what work could be you need to model and test against questions like is this Fair and then you have to act and create you have to engage people in that and actually as I look around the world the companies that I advise and research each of them are going through that cycle and none of them have in any way completed it they're still working through it so what have we learned well I think one thing that we're beginning to realize is that it isn't just about what people want it's also about what the job needs and you might remember if you took a look at my article on redesigning work that I suggest that you think about three types of jobs jobs that have a great deal of focus in terms of my job you know where I have to sit here and write and think somehow have coordination tasks where you're coordinating with another person but you don't have to be synchronous you don't have to be on the same time zone as you and I are I mean I am speaking to you now uh but we're not we're coordinating but we're not synchronous this is asynchronous coordination um or you could be highly Cooperative when you really want to be together either on a zoom call or actually face to face and I think working out the sort of jobs that you have in your organization and how that works is going to be really important I think the other thing that we understood is that when it comes to work it's not just about an individual it's about their networks and those networks are really what we're looking at now as we think about the future of work you know if they might be networks where you innovate because you meet new people they might be networks where you exploit the knowledge you've already got they might be networks where you explore through synthesizing ideas but what we're realizing is that relationships and networks are very important in organizations and the new ways of working are disrupting them so when I was faced I think uh with some pretty tough questions and some insights let me just remind you of what certainly what I'm seeing in the companies that I'm working with around the world the first is we're beginning to understand what this looks like for example we're realizing that the number of meetings that we've put into our diary have gone up by 50 we're realizing that uh some people are resigning because they don't like the jobs that you're you've got but at the same time with inflation on the horizon the job market is cooling down again while learning a lot more about how you work in a hybrid way for example we're learning that Zoom might be good at selecting ideas but it's not very good at creating ideas when you're working as we're doing here in a virtual environment we're also learning a great deal about friendship and if you're interested in my work by the way do go to my website www.lindogratton.com and you'll see that I've written quite extensively about friendship and how important that is I have a column in the times so if you go there you'll also get a chance to take a look at that but we're also faced with some tough judgment calls like what experiments should we be doing and what are the risks associated with that and what what happens to our Investment Portfolio you know what's an office actually for so I think we're beginning to realize that as we think about new ways of working we have to consider how to model them and test them and I think that that's three questions that you will need to be asking yourself number one what are the experiments we should be running now to help us understand what's going on number two what are the red lines what are the principles that will guide us and number three as we look back what do we want to protect what was it about the way that we worked before that we want to protect and we begin to realize that we each organization has its signature approach its own way of doing things and let me finish by reminding you that that fourth stage of the design process is act and create and by that I mean how do you engage the whole company in Reading designing work what we've learned is that leaders are very important in terms of the narrative they give about what they believe to be important but actually there's a pivotal role for managers who seem to be the the golden thread that connects the organizational business and strategy to individual employees but also there's this astonishing power of co-creation the power of actually bringing people together as employees and co-creating with them so these are some of my thoughts about how we might go about redesigning work thank you Linda thank you so much that was obviously uh you mentioned Japanese examples they were certainly a a bullet train speed of going through redesigning work so fascinating and there's so much depth in in what you mentioned and of course each slide could be a presentation on its own uh certainly a time does not allow that to dive so deep but but I do have a couple of questions before right and you talk about managers and let me pick on that thought because uh in recent conferences you've run the managers and and the role of mid managers it just keep coming back and coming back how important it is and somehow managers are caught in the middle and together with Diane Garrison you wrote a really interesting art in the Harvard Business Review in actually April March uh this year about managers can't do it all time to rain when they roll for new world of work and and in that I'm quoting from that in recent decades sweeping range engineering digitization agile initiatives and lately the move to remote work dramatically transformed the job of managers uh managers now they have to have to think about making their teams successful rather than being served by them so what's very interesting that because managers are being empowered more and more uh sort of HR tasks being sort of pushed up on them they are involved in hiring they're involved in Performance Management they involve their Employee Engagement of course engaging coaching and leading the team but somehow they are caught in the middle so how do you suggest to approach a question of of managers to make sure they are not burnt out they are not overworked and they still find meaning in the job while of course leading the team and doing their job as managers well thank you so much for that great question and you're right of course to to link back to the article that Diana Garson and I wrote so Dan for those of you who don't know her uh had just stepped down as the chief human resource officer for IBM so she's got one of the biggest HR jobs in the world I guess and she's now teaching at Harvard Business School and she and I began to talk about the challenges that we saw and we realized that as you talk about human resource strategy there's a group called managers who are sort of sitting in the middle who have to have to deliver on that and what we realized is that they were just burnt out and as you say and we have data now that we're collecting all the time and that burnout continues so so Dan and I made a number of suggestions and we have details of that in the article but let me just remind you what those were um well one suggestion is a whole restructuring suggestion and this we looked at a company called Telstra which is a U.S Australian telecoms and they said we're going to split the job up it's too much for any individual so what we're going to do is we're going to have managers leaders of work and leaders of people and the leaders of work manage the work part of it so this is a company that's going agile so it's everything is based in Project teams that are reconfigured unusual action in telecoms um and so they have a whole group of managers who are just there to manage work to schedule work to see sort of what works coming up to make sure that people are trained to do these new jobs and then they have managers of people which are much more around helping each employee be the best they can and that's what I really found interesting so really more of a coaching role actually so that's one idea the second idea coming on to this idea of coach was something we saw in a couple of companies particularly Standard Charter Bank where they've trained their managers to be coaches so you know they've said coaching is a really important part of your job uh we're going to certify you to be a coach so we're going to give you coaching skills and we expect that that's what you're going to do and then the third idea which is actually an IBM idea is to use artificial intelligence now no surprise IBM has got that wonderful AI Watson who can do a lot of things for you and so you know there is really taking stuff off the manager's plate by using artificial intelligence to remind you of what the pay grades are remind you of what what people's performance ratings is it has been over the last five years and so on and really to do a lot of that admin stuff but actually certainly at IBM and a few others that's really really using the power of artificial intelligence in terms of you know scraping the data from the organization and coming back to the manager and saying we think that one of your employees is about to leave you know they're high risk and we've now got enough data to suggest that's the case so really also acting as an intelligent co-worker as it were and bringing to you problems and ideas that that it sees that the data is suggesting so you know I think there's much we can do but what was very clear from Diana and my work is we actually have to do it brilliant thank you so much for that and bringing on on those continue on those ideas certainly you mentioned a lot from your presentation the importance of the growing importance of intangible assets um and back in and that was in 2007 actually with Tami Erickson wrote a really interesting piece in Harvard Business review and what it what it means to work here and you mentioned that companies that successfully create and communicate signature experiences understand the different types of people will excel at different companies and not all workers want the same things so it's interesting that by now we we would be would like to believe that we've made some progress in the past 15 years obviously employee experience has been uh sort of a priority for organizations even prior to pandemic during and after depending now it's it's even more important so with considering the the fact the important of the intangibles how would you suggest to Ray imagine employee experience from the intelligent this point of view well that's a great question and what I would say is that what we learned looking particularly at the Hundred Year life which has been my I haven't and this is the follow-up the new Long Live um is that you know people people are different both in terms of their character and personality but also importantly in terms of their life stage you know I'm 60 68 years old now I don't have the same expectations or needs as I had when I was 30. so you know acknowledging that people are different primarily because of their life stage I think it's really important and then realizing that what they need at that moment in time you have to give people flexibility to make those choices and that's I think what I've learned since I wrote that article with Tami Ericsson all those years back is that we somehow had it in our idea in our mind that we would personalize the experience and present it to people but one what I've realized now is you don't need to do that you just need to give people choices and they will make a decision about what's best for them and that's why I think the pandemic has been really important because what the pandemic has done is it has created opportunities for people to make choices around both the place they work and indeed the time they work and so that's why I was very keen to write this book redesigning work as fast as I could because I was very conscious that if we go back to the past and simply recreate the past that would be a lost opportunity so intangible assets are built because people have autonomy they have a choice about how they work and when they work uh very interesting of course you work with several large organizations members of of HSM hotspot movement do you do you see that actually we are making progress in companies are actually consciously aware and making conscious choices to uh to to consider intangibles when it comes to employee experience well I think you know interestingly the companies that have moved marketing has taken control as it were of the employee experience so yeah I'm thinking and I wrote about it in the book actually HSBC one of the big um you know uh Global retail Banks it was the head of marketing who said you know we have a whole way of thinking about our consumers our consumer insights our programs but we're not using those methodologies within employees and she said you know we know more about our consumers than we do about our employees and so those sort of marketing Technologies which is really about looking at people's day-to-day experiences rather than just in you know one of the challenges I think we have with HR is we have very ritualistic interactions with our employees like you know it they're being reviewed or they're being trained or it's the or they're being selected whereas actually what mark marketing does when they look at at an um at a consumer they look at all of their touch points as well you know for example when a consumer has a baby then they their buying habits change the same with an employee when an employer has a child their their habits change but we tend not to think about those so this idea of looking at people through events I think is really important and once you do that you realize that intangible assets become extremely important to people at particular times of their life so for example as people get older we know that keeping learning learning new skills is absolutely crucial so how do you provide opportunities for people to learn new skills so they can carry on being productive or how do you give them time so they can stay healthy I I try to walk 10 000 steps a day but that takes me more than an hour well that's already quite a big part of of my day so helping people make those choices is going to be really important and probably during those walks you get these Amazing Ideas and great Reflections but generously sharing with us thank you so much for that and interesting in marketing you mentioned technology before but probably here as well technology can certainly how because marketing is is really superb when it comes to sort of a hyper segmentation really individualization working services and it's something probably nature we should be should be picking up even more so and now yes exactly potentially exactly uh what I'd like to last but not least a question about culture many I mean obviously when pandemic sort of started standing we we read in the news how companies sort of trying to bring people back in the office uh in softer or harder ways uh interestingly Cisco CEO I just watched this interview last week he said office should be a magnet not a mandate and that was a very nice and refreshing uh way of way of looking at office work but many of those who are opposite opposing uh remotes in hybrid work they say that well it's not our culture in fact we cannot really preserve our culture if if people work remotely in fact during the pandemic thousands of people were hired and onboarded remotely without even stopping stopping in any Office Buildings so how do you suggest for those who are actually opposing hybrid and remote and flexibility how would you suggest to preserve or even strengthen the corporate culture without losing corporate identity even in the remote and hybrid work environment well I think I was sort of very fortunate when I wrote redesigning work to meet somebody um who runs a company called Artemis which is entirely virtual this was long before the pandemic it was actually built as a virtual it's a management consulting practice completely virtual and what she talked to me about and I and I wrote about it in the book is this level of intentionality which is to say you have to ask yourself what is it about the culture that's really important in this organization so in in her case the culture was really about about learning about taking risks with each other and so they it very intentionally said how do we demonstrate that culture what is it that we could do so that people really feel okay I'm learning I'm I'm taking risks and so for example they did a huge amount with peer learning where people learned from each other they could learn across peers they also uh peer groups they also really thought about experimentation and what could we do to demonstrate that so I think I think being intentional is very important the second piece is about High hybrid and it's turning out that hybrid is particularly difficult because you're not building the company to be virtual and you're not building it to be fully uh back to the office it's something in between and that in between is very complicated as it turns out and so again you need to actually design work and and as you heard from The Cisco CEO if you want people in the office then it has to be a cultural experience nobody wants to come into the office and sit on Zoom all day that's not a cultural experience so what I'm seeing companies are doing now is creating events not just spaces but also events that actually demonstrate what is it to be in this organization and it's not just oh you know we're having coffee and we're eating cakes all the time although I'm the first one to say that's a great idea especially Turkish cakes um but but really more you know let's learn some something together let's let's do some voluntary work together so how do you how do you actively create your culture rather than just passively talking about and I think I think in many ways what the pandemic has done is it's made us all realize that we were getting into very bad habits around work we were just assuming that people would come into an office every day and we could tell them what to do and that was it and now that it's become more complex I think we've had to really think more seriously about the design of work and also the possibility of redesigning work need and of course if you mentioned it's the involvement of people understanding what matters for them as their intangible let's design culture together what what how do we want this company to look like so fantastic thank you so much for listening to be absolutely interested in speaking with you and of course ladies and gentlemen get a copy of redesigning work as a great guide as a great A playbook for redesigning work fantastic work and I understand that you're also working on the next uh book after redesigning work no no I'm not no I'm not working on any book at all no I understand of a business review article but you're not going to see that until April of next year which is basically asking what happened I'm looking forward to that because there's so much confusion confusion around the topic hopefully your book will certainly get some clouds in there thank you so much Linda it's been absolutely so much thank you bye [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: The HR Congress

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Id: jaZTQDPLpXc

Length: 37min 5sec (2225 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022