Future of Work:

The Playbook.

Dedication: The thinkers and the listeners. La La, with whiteboard markers in the thinking kitchen and rioja at the ready, with patience and grace, you have endured, witnessed, cajoled, critiqued, encouraged and indulged me. I am beyond grateful. X

playbook /ˈpleɪbʊk/

noun NORTH AMERICAN noun: playbook; plural noun: playbooks

a. a book containing a sports team's strategies and plays, especially in American football.

b. a set of rules or suggestions that are considered to be suitable for a particular activity, industry, or job:Typically, outsiders are brought in to execute a specific playbook, i.e. to solve a particular problem in a particular way.

Contents:

1. Playbook – a definition

2. Foreword

3. Contents

4. Future of Work, semantic trap?

5. Future of Work, mass hysteria or

opportunity?

THE PLAYING FIELD

6. Trends, tech, process, procurement

7. Commercial benefits.

a. Workforce reduction

b. Reduced labour cost

c. Performance improvement

i. Digital transformation

ii. Workforce optimisation

THE PLAYS

8. Where to begin?

Play One: Understand equipment you might need Play Two: Interpret the playing conditions Play Three: Plan to win, have a strategy Play Four: Model your game plan(s) Play Five: Measure the value of winning Play Six: Select the right team Play Seven: Set some objectives Play Eight: From thinking to doing!

a. Values and culture b. Process c. Procurement d. Talent architecture e. Strategic partnering f. Innovation

9. Starting the journey / Next steps

10. About the author.

The aim of this playbook is to galvanise business leaders

from thinking about the potential impact of the future of work,

into actions that create commercial benefit for their business.

Future of Work – a semantic trap?

Future of Work is an overused misnomer, the phrase alludes to

outcomes that are mid to long term, but the reality is that some of the

commercial benefits are already accessible.

The future of work has become the nomenclature of choice, but the

emphasis on the word future, encourages inertia, as business falls

into the assumptive trap of thinking it cannot positively impact

business outcomes in the here and now.

The topics addressed in this playbook, need a label to conceptually

group them together, hence we stick with the phrase “Future of

Work”.

Do not waste time focussing on the fine semantics of an accurate definition, for what is in effect a

cluster of correlated concepts and workforce strategies, instead focus on how to obtain desirable

business outcomes.

Consistently focus on when change is expected to deliver commercial benefit.

Adopt a mindset of “how and now”.

Mass hysteria or opportunity?

A range of global consulting brands are presently commentating on the “future of work”. Their

consulting commentaries are supported by academic studies, which in turn, provide insights and

methodologies to quantify impacts upon the workforce. This is combined with evidence derived from

early adopters in the relevant emergent technologies like AI, machine learning, robotics, IoT,

crowdsourcing and gig platforms.

The workforce impact is frequently overstated by the

consultancies, often in alarmist tones, no doubt in pursuit of an

impactful headline that drives decisions to buy expensive

consulting time. In many instances, their interpretation of quoted

academic materials is alarmingly biased and negligently omits key

research assumptions. The need for business to act is definitely

there, but develop a circumspect view across the consulting

commentaries and the academic studies that support them. Then proceed to develop a vision of your

future workforce and formulate an enterprise specific approach that ensures optimum yield for your

business.

The separate factors that will define your future workforce and consequently your

commercial effectiveness are:

The combination of these separate trends and leveraging the relevant technologies across

business processes and procurement models, can create an aggregated impact on workforce

based outcomes. These are the key ingredients that business will need to decode and act

upon, in order to extract commercial benefit.

People based trends Technology based impacts Talent Procurement

Demographic change Automation Crowdsourcing / Gig

Skills shortages Robotics RPO / MSP

Worker preferences Artificial intelligence/Machine Learning

Globalisation Crowdsourcing and gig economy Business Processes

Mobility Talent platforms Workforce planning

Culture and values Digital transformation Project resource management

LMS / MOOC’s

What are the commercial opportunities that our business should be pursuing from the

future of work?

-

2,000,000,000

4,000,000,000

6,000,000,000

8,000,000,000

10,000,000,000

12,000,000,000

-

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

Yr1 Yr2 Yr3 Yr4 Yr5

INCOMEHEADCOUNT

Workforce Blend, Cost, Profit

Workforce (Perm + Freelance) Perm headcount Freelance headcount Workforce Cost (Perm and Freelance) Profit Revenue

There are three broad categories of commercial opportunity that should feature in any discovery

phase for future of work based initiatives:

a. Workforce reduction and raised productivity.

Effectively reduction of workforce headcount due to technological improvement, solely based on

the current tasks performed, (future skills requirements are not covered in this playbook, as

it is a topic that is specific to each individual business). Principally, this impact is derived

from a clustered group of impacts that can be derived from process automation, artificial

intelligence, robotics and machine learning. This needs to be balanced with a focus on increased

productivity and enhanced customer outcomes at the same time, it should be about much more

than just reduced headcount. For example, a key consideration is how technological improvement

can enhance the quality of task execution by human labour and the impact on customer retention

and customer acquisition.

b. Reduced labour cost.

This is cost reduction by changing the mix of worker types, where they are based and how the

talent is procured. A commonly quoted statistic is that by the year 2020, 47% of the US workforce

will be contingent workforce, allowing for percentage differences by country, we can assume that

an upward trend in contingent workforce numbers will be a global theme. Local differences will be

accounted for by labour cost and regulatory differences.

Getting the engagement and commercial model correct for such a significantly sized contingent

portion of your workforce, will be a major contributor to business success. However, the

parameters for contingent workforce engagement are changing at speed:

Increased availability of platforms that provide access to talent globally.

Rise of the digital nomad.

Business being more accepting of remote/flexible working models.

Crowdsourcing and gig platforms

Task based talent procurement

Innovation platforms

Talent marketplaces

Claims for cost saving via crowdsourcing/gig are estimated at between 30-50%! That is a strong

claim, even if your business were able to realise half of that savings prediction, it surely merits

investigation?

All of these are creating

new avenues for

businesses to

successfully engage

contingent workforces.

Talent procurement via crowdsourcing / gig platforms and paying per task, can also enable

performance improvement. Speed and accuracy of task delivery by engaging highly specialist

contingent workers on particular tasks, also enables your permanent workforce, to focus on tasks

that create the highest business value.

Talent Marketplaces

The next layer of cost benefit, can be accessed by having a contingent talent marketplace.

Enterprises can provide a platform through which their contingent workforce can engage and be

encouraged to participate in their enterprise specific “talent economy”. The desired outcome is

that the contingent worker repeatedly selects their work above competitor opportunities, because

the talent marketplace gives the contingent worker a mechanism to engage directly with the hiring

client (or a client branded outsourced team). PWC launched their version of a talent marketplace,

called the “Talent Exchange”, in February 2016, with a remit to increase flexible delivery capacity

across their client portfolio. It positions PWC extremely well for future workforce optimisation.

McKinsey have recently stated that a talent platform can increase performance by 9% and reduce

cost by 7%, calculate that impact if (as Deloitte and Oxford Economics commentate) 47% of your

workforce is contingent!

c. Performance improvement

This is the increase in volume, quality or speed of customer outcomes via process improvement,

artificial intelligence, automation and variant forms of digital transformation.

Digital transformation is inevitable

Hopefully digital transformation will be occurring because your organisation views it as

imperative to survive and prosper. The alternative is that it will happen to you, as a result of digital

disruption outside of your business. New market entrants have the advantage of being able to

adopt standard digital operating models, without the time and cost burden of having to manage

extensive change programmes to transition from an old model to a new way of working. Operating

models like on demand, crowdsourcing, peer to peer, sharing platforms, will all have snippets of

new thinking that can be applied to your current business operating model.

Do not solely interpret digital transformation as technology led changes to how a business works.

Digital transformation can be applied to a business that reinvents itself, either in its processes or in the

products and services that it delivers to its customers. The impact of digital transformation on your

products, services, workforce and customers, needs consideration and inclusion in your future of work

toolkit.

Digital Transformation

Workforce Optimisation

Talent

Economy

Workforce optimisation

Workforce optimisation is the commercially optimal mix of permanent and contingent workforce

at any one time and it comes with a set of complex challenges:

Balancing commercial focus with consideration of risk, regulatory compliance and available

skilled talent.

Understanding the increased variety of types of contingent talent and what this entails for

cost and delivery of outcomes.

How technology platforms can enable remote management of permanent or contingent

talent in low cost locations.

These are all valid and need factoring in to a future of work strategy, but they assume a

perspective of looking from within the enterprise at the outside world. Understandably so, it is

based on focussing on what is best for your business. What happens if we reverse this

perspective, i.e take the viewpoint of external talent looking into the enterprise? The consideration

then becomes whether the talent that you need, wants to work with your business in a permanent

employee engagement model at all. If constructing a strategy that is traditionally biased toward

permanent workforce (normally for reasons of cost, engagement and outcome), tread with

caution. Research indicates that you should anticipate increased levels of contingent workforce

and that there is an “engagement paradox” (phrase coined by Mercer), i.e even amongst satisfied

workers, there are unprecedented levels of employed workforce that are prepared to change jobs.

Optimisation requires understanding which segments of your workforce should be permanent

vs contingent, the types of skills and assignment suited to each type. If considering non-perm

workforce, can it be leveraged talent from a partner channel? Looking at different contractual

models in the BPO market can offer up new ways to procure talent or task. The ability to rapidly

scale up in periods of growth and reduce workforce in times of low demand, is already a point of

competitive advantage across a wide range of industries.

We have briefly looked at the playing field for the future of work (digital transformation,

workforce optimisation). Then we have defined the point of the game (score points via

headcount reduction, workforce cost reduction and performance improvement). Now let’s look

at how to get in the arena and start playing!

PLAY ONE: Understand the equipment you might need

Acquire knowledge of the key components you will need to help you score points in a talent

programme for the future of work:

Automation

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

Internet of Things

Robotics

Talent Marketplaces

Innovation Platforms

Crowdsourcing / Gig Economy

LMS and MOOC’s

Start just by understanding the

definitions and differences!

Envision and quantify business impact.

Which enable efficiency?

Which enable change?

www.TalentEconomist.com/definitions

PLAY TWO: Understanding the playing conditions

Evaluate the impact of the key components from play one, on the list below. List out positive

and negative impacts:

Workforce reduction via technological unemployment

Ratio of permanent to contingent workforce

Workforce engagement – perm and contingent

Future workforce skills needed

The various contingent workforce types

Remote working models

The engagement paradox

Workplace design

Human capital reporting / talent analytics

Regulatory compliance

Evaluate external disruptive innovation.

Understand the risk to your business of not changing.

PLAY THREE: Plan to win, have a strategy.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker

You cannot ignore culture, it’s the organisational bedrock that underpins workforce engagement

and sustainable performance. Culture is always going to be a “must have” organisational asset

and represents its own set of challenges when trying to decode the future of work.

However, for the purposes of this playbook it is secondary to strategy, because strategy is more

amenable to offering a tangible start point for rational inquiry, the forecasting of commercial

outcomes and understanding how to achieve them.

Question whether the business strategy is fit for purpose:

Is it working?

When was it written? When does it get reviewed?

Is it a driver of sustainable performance?

Is the strategy a token gesture or deeply embedded?

Does it reflect what customers say they want?

Does a separate workforce strategy exist?

Is it aligned with the business strategy?

Is it working?

When was it written? When does it get reviewed?

Is the performance required to deliver the workforce strategy, sustainable with current

resources?

Is the workforce strategy a token gesture or deeply embedded?

Does it reflect what employees and external candidates say they want?

Do either the business or workforce strategy already factor in any “Future of Work” specific

impacts?

From either the business strategy or workforce strategy, are you able to model a variety

of future workforce scenarios and their associated business impacts?

If not, then work backwards from the performance objectives for the business, over the period

of time the workforce strategy is intended to cover. For example, if the performance objectives are

to achieve revenue growth of 150% in five years, then seek to mitigate against unnecessary

headcount growth whilst safeguarding revenue growth and operational performance, via the

deployment of digital transformation and future of work oriented initiatives.

Decoupling productivity from headcount, should be a constantly conscious and mindful

operating principle when designing and executing workforce strategy.

PLAY FOUR: Model your game plan(s)

Model multiple scenarios for workforce strategy, based on the potential impacts re future of

work on your business. For example, with automation, the questions could be:

How will your workforce be affected by process automation?

How quickly can automation take root in your business?

Will that apply equally to all regions?

Will that apply equally to different role types?

Will that apply equally to different levels of worker?

What is the impact on desired workforce shape and end

state?

Repeat the above questions with robotics, the “Internet of Things”, artificial intelligence and

talent marketplaces.

Don’t forget you will also need to account for these challenging variables:

What are the future skills your workforce will need?

How will your future workforce want to be engaged?

*Suggestion: Use the Gartner

hype cycles to assess when

different technologies are

expected to make an impact

on business performance.

Link thinking to your business outcomes and workforce models

PLAY FIVE: Measure the value of winning

“What gets measured, gets managed” – Peter Drucker.

Embed assumptions about potential technological unemployment into how you model your future

workforce. When embedding these assumptions, factor in to your financial analysis:

whole cost to implement these technologies

when investment cost reaches a breakeven point

what the full return on investment (ROI) will be over the duration of the workforce strategy.

Who is validating these assumptions and numbers? Who is owning the responsibility of ensuring that

the investment is approved and that the work to implement will actually get done?

Consider the time, cost and quality benefits of different talent procurement models, (resourcing from

bench, direct in house, RPO, MSP, crowdsourcing / gig, innovation portals). Are you evaluating from

multiple perspectives to ensure a balanced scorecard view across the different talent procurement

models?

Do you consciously prioritise when and where you spend on talent procurement in order to align with

strategic and operational outcomes?

PLAY SIX: Select the right team.

Who needs to be in your future of work team?

Leadership from across these functions to start with:

HR Talent Acquisition Marketing

Innovation L&D Digital Transformation

Analytics Finance HRIS

Plus key external partners/providers from RPO / MSP and relevant

talent technology providers. They can help drive the changes you

need, often with other clients going on similar change journeys, they

can share useful experience.

Business transformation associated with the future of work is likely to have its fair share of

challenging times, you’ll need all the help you can get! Working with the right partners, with a

contractual mandate to perform at a transaction level, will help drive some of the changes your

business will need. Consider the value of engaging these same transactional partners with

activities that reflect your strategic aspirations as part of their contractual agreement with you.

Great sports coaches use a full squad with diverse skills.

PLAY SEVEN: Set some objectives!

Set some minimum, median and stretch objectives, be bold at this stage of normative objective

setting, it will help to widen the scope of enquiry, if/when you enter into a discovery phase for a

programme and associated planning based on the “future of work”.

The reason for setting objectives is to pursue the benefit realisation from your strategy and enable

teams to gauge their own contribution to the shared objectives at enterprise level.

It’s important that at the forefront of this activity is the set of sound commercial reasons for

pursuing these objectives.

Relate all activity to a monetary metric and a mission statement, these will create a commonly

shared language. The monetary metric will create a sense of commercial urgency for all

concerned, whilst the mission statement metric, will give a sense of greater purpose to those

participants that are not primarily motivated by commercial or monetary outcomes.

Revenue per employee per day OR Profit per employee per day

STOP

DOING

THINKING

START

PLAY EIGHT: From thinking to doing!

In this section we look at the different aspects of our game that we need to address, to positively

affect how and why we play. Get your game face on!

Values and culture: Why you play the game.

How do you shape the values and culture of the business in order to:

Embrace the future of work and digital transformation

Drive performance.

Absorb rapid change.

Accommodate new ways of working (flexible and remote).

Accommodate different types of contingent worker.

Reflect what your target workforce says it wants from working for you.

www.talenteconomist.com/valuesandculture

Process: How you play the game.

This is about redesigning processes in order to optimise generating successful outcomes. There

is no point having a really attractive and well thought out style of play, if it does not get you

winning results!

Have the processes for talent (attraction, acquisition, onboarding, resource management) been

simplified and given a consumer grade user experience?

Is there currently any process alignment between the activity of permanent recruitment, contract

recruitment and project resourcing?

Do you have the ability to collect data across all of the talent based processes?

Has your business been able to execute multi-disciplinary projects using agile methodology?

How much of your talent focussed processes are currently manual?

Does each of the talent focussed processes have a clear metric linked to business performance?

Procurement: How effectively are you buying talent?

Are the parameters of time, cost and quality, consciously used to guide decision making?

Has the decision to procure talent been segmented into build, buy or borrow?

Does the business have decision making frameworks to help them make the best commercial

decisions when procuring talent?

Are the different types of talent procurement and transactions visible on a single platform?

Time

QualityCost

Build?

Borrow?

Buy?

(Identify what is most important to business) (Execute procurement efficiently)

Talent architecture: Does your team have equipment that enables team performance?

Are the current platforms used for recruitment and resourcing fit for future purpose?

What are the biggest changes that the teams in your talent functions will need to adapt to?

Does the blend of process, people and technology, deliver a consumer grade experience for

candidate and hiring manager?

Can more of the process be automated to enable candidate facing teams to focus on high quality

relationship building activity?

Do your key talent applications have the ability to integrate with one another? Does your business

have the resources to create API’s to provide a single source of data that you can gain insight

from?

Talent Architecture Principles

Cloud based Mobile Consumer grade U/X

A.I Integrated Analytics

Strategic partnering: What partners will you need to support you?

Identifying the key gaps between current resources and future resources needed, will shine a light

on where you need to partner. Understanding the extent of partnership needed, will help identify

whether it is a straightforward transactional partner or a strategic partner that is needed.

What change(s) will your business be undergoing? Do you have clarity on the skills needed to ensure business continuity throughout? Does your existing workforce have capability and the time, to acquire the new skills needed? Do you have an operating presence in the future locations needed? Can partnering be leveraged to de-risk business change? Are strategic partners able to agree to contractual clauses that share risk? How long do you think you will need to partner for? Do partners have the appetite for agreements that are vague about the volume of demand?

Innovation: What new plays will help you to win?

What happens if your competition innovates first?

Innovation has two primary facets in a future of work programme:

how innovation is embedded in organisational culture, for alertness to product and service

enhancement opportunities.

How innovation is used as an open source talent strategy

How is innovation being leveraged to ensure the best possible customer outcomes?

Is innovation used to consciously improve workforce engagement?

Are innovators given reward and recognition?

Does your business have the capability to adapt at speed to

disruptive innovation?

What time (if any) is set aside to keep abreast of competitor

development?

“Innovation distinguishes

between a leader and a

follower”

– Steve Jobs

Next steps

Hopefully this playbook has identified for you, the main “Future of Work” topics and how they can impact upon business performance. Having a strategy and plan, will require decoding these topics and answering the questions raised in this playbook, then bringing it altogether in a suite of pragmatic and commercially beneficial responses. That’s where Talent Economist can help!

Book a Future of Work workshop via www.TalentEconomist.com/workshops

Gather relevant data on workforce (perm and contingent), for workshop data analysis preparation,

see data template at www.TalentEconomist.com/datatemplate.

Create a future workforce vision (workshop activity).

Build a future workforce cost, headcount and profit dashboard (workshop output, examples on

www.talenteconomist.com ).

Identify the different steps needed to attain your future workforce vision (workshop activity).

Calculate the different project costs and RoI from the project outcomes.

Devise a programme roadmap, determine which projects to do first and which should be delivered

by agile Vs waterfall methodology (workshop activity).

About the Author

Simon Shott is a founding director of Talent Economist.

Simon has provisioned talent solutions in over twenty countries and across multiple sectors. He

helps companies with the challenges associated with talent, the key consulting delivery themes

are “pragmatic profit” and the “future is now”.

Consulting on talent strategy, acquisition and programme delivery, with an emphasis on the

positive impact on business performance. Some of the topics covered include:

Adaptive workforce planning “Future of Work” Talent technology architecture Workforce optimisation Digital transformation Talent platforms Flexible workforce engagement Automation strategy LMS / MooC integration Contingent worker compliance Crowdsourcing strategy Innovation platforms Mobility Open source talent Robotics Candidate experience Internal VC schemes Contacts: Mail: Simon.Shott@TalentEconomist.com Twitter: @TalentEconomist LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/TalentEconomist