It’s Time to Retire the Idea of Jobs

30MM people have lost their jobs and 25% of the people still employed expect the proverbial axe; but jobs as they exist in popular imagination and in normal companies won’t help us get back to work.

Why? Traditional, unchanging jobs do not bring out the best in people, but new dynamic ways of staffing might. For example, last summer Unilever decomposed roles into smaller projects and filled them through an intelligent marketplace; it got 60,000+ additional hours of work from people while they were learning. Staff gave the experience a 95% satisfaction rating. I’m left hoping that if these practices were more widely deployed it might help us all get back to work.

But first we need retire the idea of jobs.

I. Jobs Do Not Bring the Best in People

Jobs as we knew them in January weren’t working so well as it seemed.

Jobs are “Stiff” & Stiff Jobs are Toast

According to Bain researchers, roughy 15% of people in any given organization are “difference-makers.” Some call them A-Players. Whatever you call them, its characteristic of “the 15%” to reinvent their roles or change jobs on the regular. To do work at all is to in some way transform it. I count high performers and intrapreneurs among this group, ideally found at critical cross-functional efforts in any organization.

But 85% of any given workforce are those trusted B-Players, people who are paid steadily in exchange for “just doing their job” competently. With the statistically rare exception of technology companies and startups — who behave in more agile ways by nature — its implicit that the these roles will change rarely. I call them “stiff jobs.” You can see that these roles are expected not to change in language, role descriptions, pay structures, and performance models:

• Language. We talk about “having” a job as if jobs are objects. Or roles as if they are identities.
• Role descriptions. With rare exception, role descriptions detail unchanging activities, not the results someone will be responsible to deliver or the domain of unknowns they might tackle.
• Pay models. Pay for the everyman (read: neither executives nor equity holders) is typically tied to static roles, not to contributions.
• Performance evaluations. Performance is often assessed versus the unchanging standards of a role. (← This line of inquiry is problematic for reasons I’ll discuss in another post.)

There are (at least) three problems with this way of operating: the first is that these sort of stiff jobs are toast. As any mildly paranoid reader of the news knows, roles that don’t change were first on the “please automate me” list even before COVID. For example, in 2017 the good folk at McKinsey thought nearly half of work was already automatable.

The second problem with this way of working it doesn’t give leaders that agility to move talent around based on evolving business needs. It is a decidedly lumbering structure befitting of an era where power didn’t come largely in the form of speed. (Recommended Read → Chris Yeh’s Blitzscaling.)

Last, and less often discussed, I’m persuaded that stiff jobs paralyze exceptional talent en masse and quite literally prevent the sort of insight-driven, problem-solving, curious behavior that’s endemic to our species, critical to future employment, and needed more than ever. I think this is why companies have so struggled to improve engagement numbers, especially from the their B-Players.

Stiff Jobs Paralyze Exceptional Talent En Masse

Stiff jobs structurally prevent the behavior for which the 15% of A-Players are valued, rewarded, and retained. They discourage learning, inspire pandering, and create dependency as if by design.

• Learning: stiff jobs convey the idea that learning isn’t part of the job. When it’s understood that roles don’t change, it’s implicit that people should not expect to learn much either. Unwittingly this design reinforces the worst of office malaise, inviting people to believe that there is no reason to learn new things, no freedom to make choices and improve processes, and no point in thinking about the larger purpose of work. But the instincts to learn, choose, and contribute invariably drives the best of human achievements. (Reference: Self-Determination Theory & Drive)
• Pandering: happier bosses don’t make better businesses. In a world where pay is tied to positions, not to contributions, it’s reasonable to take charge of your own financial fate by making your boss happier, not making a business better. I’m all for happier bosses, but this posture is not likely to be a winning employee engagement or leadership development strategy. To boot, in this model, people are paid to avoid losing their jobs. This is an avoidance goal, not an approach goal. Some studies in psychology suggest that pursuing avoidance goals reduces a sense of competence. TLDR: If people are being paid not to lose, it’s less likely they’ll drive wins.
• Dependency: talent is dependent on delegation and leaders are reduced to updaters and triangulators. When people do not have the power to adapt their activities to business needs, priorities, and strategies in real time, leaders are reduced to updaters and triangulators. No longer visionaries, they are professional go-betweens, updating systems and people just to make sure the roles that exist are still relevant enough to merit inclusion on the org chart.

I believe this contributed to the mediocre productivity and dismal engagement characteristic of the world as we knew it in January. During that historically high labor market, employers were focused on finding the best and engaging the trusted-rest. As such, said B-Players and employers alike had the option to “love the one you’re with.”

We all know the world has changed.

→ Instead of wishing we could time travel back to a time of stiff jobs and full employment, we need to learn from what wasn’t working and be brave or wacky enough to restructure work itself. I’m aware that might sound crazy. But I’ve also recently learned that, while sufficient traditional jobs may not exist, better, more dynamic ways to staff talent are ready for broader deployment.

II. Retire Jobs! Dynamic Ways to Deploy Talent Exist

Many well known companies no longer us jobs to staff their teams — they use various kinds of dynamic internal marketplaces instead. These arrangements seem to work better than jobs for employers and employees on nearly every dimension. (Should someone have sent me a memo about this? Anyway….)

These structures optimize for agility, capital efficiency, and continuous learning for everyone — not just the 15%. How? Read on, dear reader.

“Smart” Talent Marketplaces Allocate People Better than Jobs

Companies like Zappos, Cisco, and Unilever increasingly use talent marketplaces to behave more and more like managed microeconomies than organizations as we’ve come to know them.

To date, many of the technology tools that serve these marketplaces have largely been used to develop talent for hard-to-fill positions. Nonetheless, they have the capability to fully deconstruct roles into constituent tasks, projects, and jobs and to dynamically matched to the skills, preferences, future ambitions, and competencies of their employees and gig workers.

With tools that can do that, like Fuel50 here, companies can move talent where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and with confidence that all the while people will be learning new things. On the employee end, the experience works, too: employees get some measure of choice, and learning pathways with their current employer. Case in point: in a 2 month initial roll-out last summer, Unilever gained 60,000+ additional hours of work from their teams and employees gave the experience a 95% satisfaction score. (Josh Bersin gives this a deeper treatment than I am capable of here.) I believe at least some of these tools can manage dynamic compensation, but alas my internet explorations have not as yet yielded further detail.

And so, in a delicious twist on the doomsday zeitgeist narratives I consume with such zeal, in these cases technology isn’t “taking” jobs, it’s helping people find them. Can you imagine if work and on-the-job learning opportunities found you with the same same precision and speed that ads for perfect products find you on Instagram? That might literally be possible.

No big technology budget? Don’t let it stop you.

Our two hundred person company, Invisible, uses organizational design and a dynamic compensation model to achieve similar ends. We effectively have three teams: folks who create work, people who continually master new routines, and engineers who automate those routines. Work moves from one team to the next in an ongoing process of creation, routinization, and destruction. It’s not implicit that our jobs won’t change, it’s implicit that they must. (Synthesis mine.)

Our compensation model reinforces the design with incentives. The team that that creates work gets a modest, stable salary and a share of earnings that increases predictably and aggressively, in proportion to our profits. Team members who master new routines, called agents, are paid for the work they individually deliver. Last, in addition to a modest and stable salary, engineers are generously rewarded when they destroy jobs by automating routine tasks.

These ways of working answer urgent concerns employers face in the COVID era: strategic agility, capital efficiency, workforce “utilization,” and continuous learning in one go. But it’s not just the tangible results that inspire me, it’s the deep truths they reflect.

In the examples I shared, people aren’t expected to perform work without variation, as if they were machines. To the contrary, a large proportion of the workforce can contribute profoundly because they are expected to evolve. This isn’t something just the 15% are capable of doing — this is something that people, in general, are designed to do.

III. Let’s Create Work & Put Ourselves Out of Jobs

Out of touch technocrats or people with far more working capital than the average American may not be afraid of losing work to machines, or of losing jobs in general. But for anyone dependent on work to live or feed their families the prospect of unemployment is scary. It wouldn’t be scary to lose our jobs, though, if companies were great at continuously matching people with work.

In companies like this — like ours — handing off your job doesn’t mean losing a relationship with an employer, losing an identity, or losing a livelihood. It doesn’t, in a strange way, feel like a death. To the contrary, it feels like new life. Handing off work to the machine just means it’s time to do what they do best, whether that’s creating something wholly original, learning a new skill, or taking on a new set of responsibilities. From this posture, bold vision develops in at every level of the org chart because people have the security and freedom to ask the fearless question asked by leaders throughout time: “how can I put myself out of a job?”

So what do I want you to know? Jobs are limited, but work may not be. The world isn’t complete, neither are its instructions — we humans have an enduring role in deciding what to do and what to reward. And until the world is just, until every need is met, and until we can imagine nothing more beautiful than what is, there is more work for us to do. It’s on us to find better ways to organize and reward it, now.

__________

Cheery though that end is, crisis demands action. Here’s what I would do.