Are we designing work for flexibility?

If we want the benefits of a flexible workforce, we must question how work could be packaged differently.

We need flexible, agile, and fast ways to react to new technology and fast-changing market expectations.

We need ways to capture, process, and use the vast available streams—we need ‘big data’.

We need to be digital and make the best use of Robotics Process Automation, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence.

We need speed in our decision-making and excellence in our execution.

We need a flexible and agile workforce.

We need to be more strategic and less transactional in our thinking.

We are told we need all these things, and we need them now.

But who is responsible for making all this happen? We find the question of ‘who’ is rarely asked, but the answer is most likely the often maligned ‘middle manager’. The ‘middle manager’ is portrayed as the ‘permafrost’ standing between the insightful and connected senior executive driving reform and a workforce hungry for change and innovation.

We don’t think this stereotypical view is an accurate, insightful, fair, evidence-based, or helpful view of middle managers' contribution to organisational performance.

It is middle managers who are set the task of achieving increased efficiency and productivity while maintaining a happy and productive workforce. The tensions caused by the need for agility, flexibility, speed, technology, data, efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity in our workforce all fall to middle management. The negative consequences of implementing change at pace also fall to middle managers. Pervasive uncertainty, unhappy workplaces, and retaining experience are left to middle managers to find a path. Yet, our language to describe this important cohort of leaders is consistently negative.

For organisations to adapt to a fast-changing environment, fully implementing flexible work will be critical. Our experience is that despite all the great flexible working policies, procedures, and workforce strategies that many organisations already have in place, successful implementation comes from investing in and supporting middle managers.

Why are middle managers so important? Because they are the leaders most directly responsible for how work is designed. And to access the benefits of a flexible workforce that can meet the organisational need for greater agility and speed, the way work is done must be redesigned.

Our experience is that how middle managers think about work is critical, and it can be both an enabler and a barrier to flexible work. So, we offer four propositions that question how we think about work design.

Four propositions...

The following propositions are offered as a stimulus to redesign work for flexibility.

Proposition 1: The drivers of change are demanding agility, so we need to think more closely about how work is done. We need to leave behind our production model of standardised work.

Work is not homogenous and it never has been. We have forced the practice of work into our preconceived models of organisation that are firmly ground in industrial-age production. Some work is ‘scripted’, other work is ambiguous. In practice, for those doing the work, all work has elements of both. The challenge to getting greater flexibility in the workforce to increase overall organisational agility has less to do with the people and much more to do with how we think about work.

Proposition 2: We put a substantial amount of effort into controlling work and far less effort into letting work flourish to meet the demand.

The practice of work evolves at the boundary between producer and consumer. This is where we should look for innovation and signs for greater flexibility. Learning from the boundaries of work is central to seeing where work can and cannot be done more flexibly.

Proposition 3. In thinking about work design, and despite our daily experience, we persist in thinking about work as tasks (linear and even) and not as relationships (flexible and changing).

We have a view of work as fixed tasks linking to form a chain. We believe that to disconnect any link breaks the chain, for instance by considering flexible work, and so work becomes defined by the chain. An agile organisation cannot be constructed of such fixed chains of work. Our experience of work is that our organisations are spun from a web of social relationships that are constantly being spun and re-spun. People at work form the important function of buffering uncertainty in the performance of the work they do. Leadership, attitudes and opinions, team behaviours are all based on relationships that allow people to manage the uncertainty that is inherent in work. Introducing flexible work comes with the understanding that we are not only redesigning work but also reshaping workplace relationships. Indeed, if we focused on the relationships (leadership, attitudes, opinions and behaviours) that support flexible work practices it is likely that work would be redesigned to fit. After all, that is what happens now.

Proposition 4. Flexible work is at the core of organisational agility. We understand the opportunities for flexibility through the prompts and tests we put in place to challenge our fixed view of work patterns.

Our sense of permanence about the way work is done comes from the patterns of activity (the chains) that comprise work. Our challenge is to keep open the possibilities for flexibility. We need prompts that show where there is misalignment or inefficiency in getting the job done. These prompts move the conversation from chains of production to a more collaborative discussion focused on improvement through flexibility. There are points where the way work is done can be re-assessed. This might be after a person a leaves a job, or could be in response to formal changes in the scope or function of the work, or it could be in response to failure. These are deliberate decision points where the possibility of flexible work should be considered as an alternative to current practice.

The design of work is a constantly evolving activity. It is bound to the context of the organisation but most importantly, it is bound, at the interface between the producer and consumer of the work, to the immediacy of changing conditions.

For all sorts of good reasons, we develop fixed and standardised views of how work is done. However, if we want the benefits of a flexible workforce, we must question how work could be packaged differently. Reflecting on the propositions offered here might help to think about redesigning work for flexibility.

About the Authors 

Sally Dorsett is passionate about improving access to flexible work. She has been responsible for leading and implementing workplace change to improve flexible working practices throughout her career. 

David Schmidtchen is fascinated by people, work and organisation. He is interested in the growing diversity of employment types and how organisations will respond. 

Photo credit:

Photo by JD Hancock - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/83346641@N00