New Work and the age of knowledge- worker-centred collaboration models
“The megatrend New Work describes an epochal disruptive change that focuses on the search for meaning by knowledge workers and is transforming the working world radically”
proclaims the German Zukunftsinstitut GmbH 2018. Even the career platform Xing set up a comprehensive “New Work Experience Portal” to examine the “megatrend” New Work with correspondent videos and podcasts from widely acknowledged experts and industry leaders (May 2020). Universities are recently offering “New Work Certificates”. All these initiatives are conveying the same message: the unlocking of the individual potential must become the focus of any agile, learning organization so that talent retention and resilience against market pressure remain competitive. This message demonstrates the broadness of the New Work concept. Even though the approach seems diffuse, it is a very hot topic these days.
However, research shows that the New Work paradigm is synonymous with innovative approaches to design work. Among them are well-known best practices from the field of agile work (such as self-organization and management), but also rather disruptive, new organizational models, which recommend turning employees into entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the development of a school of thought that revolves around the knowledge worker as a central component in today’s age of digitization is entirely reasonable.
The New Work ecosystem
Today, companies, consultants and coaches can draw from a constantly growing vast of frameworks, methods and practices when starting and accompanying a business transformation.
This shows the fact that besides all the new approaches which popped up in organizational and management theory in the last decade, even the established, classic agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban have experienced many improvements.
The Scrum Guide solely got up to 24 revisions/adaptations since its creation in 2010. In addition, scaled models for agile working were brought to market and became a commercial success. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) being currently the most demanded framework across industries. Recently, in January 2020 SAFe released a comprehensive framework update (v.5.0). This version of SAFe contains a significant addition, which is summarized under the term “Business Agility”. The newly defined business agility competencies are aimed to support modern companies with the unpredictability of future business developments within increasingly turbulent market dynamics due to rapid digitalization. In simple terms, business agility requires that all areas of the corporate value chain become agile — even those who have not had any direct contact with IT before.
The goal is to shift customer-centricity from the periphery of the organization to the center of fertile activity so that change can be mastered even better through flexibility, reduced transaction costs and innovation.
The area of agile leadership and management theory is also booming. A cornerstone was the 2010 released management 3.0 approach from Jurgen Appelo. Meanwhile, the leadership field encompasses a variety of approaches from advice on how to build an “agile mindset” to concepts as sophisticated as the intention-based leader.
Be it single best-practices, frameworks, management theories or large scaled agile working models, there is a tendency towards comprehensiveness. Simply put, the various best practices and models for managing complexity in modern organizations have evolved from a focus on the project over the product to a focus on customer value.
Some emblematic examples:
1. Project and process-centricity (PMP, Kanban, Lean manufacturing) between 1970 and 1985
2. Product-centricity (Scrum, Lean Start-up, Prototyping) between 1985 and 2000
3. Customer- centricity (Value Proposition Design, Jobs to be Done and Design Sprints) between 2000 and 2015
4. Knowledge-worker-centricity with New Work?
This rough classification allows us to assume why New Work is so popular in 2020: New Work has emerged to fill the existing gap of the human needs in labour. To date, there is no school of thought that offers practical models and best practices for creating knowledge worker centricity in companies. Up to now, the topic has been rather belittled and willingly left for HR departments. Nevertheless, the most innovative companies (Adobe, Google) started to take measurements: To increase the innovative strength of their employees but also to survive in the war for talents, they have introduced flexible working models and methods that consciously promote creative and personal freedom. Examples of this are participatory organizational models such as Holacracy, the so-called dual operating system from John P. Kotter and network approaches such as the RenDanHeYi Model. In the latter case, old grown companies are even entirely broken up into many start-ups that are then loosely connected.
“The corporate form of the empire (with a traditional closed pyramid), should symbolically transform into a rainforest (with an open, networked platform of distributed power and authority),”
says pioneer of the approach and Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin.
On the way to the Teal Organization with New Work
New Work calls for the age of the Teal organization. In 2013 Frederic Laloux landed a hit in the academic world with the description of a so-called evolutionary and learning organization form described in his bestseller — Reinventing Organizations. Characteristic of these organizations are self-management, wholeness and a broad striving for meaningfulness. Teal organizations operate largely without organizational charts, management hierarchies, quarterly targets or other traditional management strategies. Instead, they are characterized by features such as self-managed teams, intuitive thinking and decentralized decision-making. A Teal organization is a complex, fluid and constantly evolving system; a learning organization.
The link to New Work, however, seems to be particularly strong with the Wholeness concept of Laloux. According to Laloux a central and essential corporate characteristic for a learning organization.
Wholeness instead refers to practices that encourage us to regain our inner integrity and bring all that we are to work, rather than just a shaped version of ourselves, according to Laloux. The author places people and their need for wholeness at the center of a successful adaptive organizational system. A striking analogy to the New Work approach, which is doing the same with the unfolding of human potential. New Work, therefore, corresponds to an attitude towards work; basically, the freedom of the individual to shape and perform work in a self-determined way.
New demands = New Work!
To the critics, the New Work concept reaches rather into vague spheres of personal sensibilities. However, especially the shift of the workplace from the public to the private sphere, triggered by the pandemic in 2020, has fired the desire for a general debate on the way we work in society at large. Old-fashioned and merely rational approaches to the way we work become blurry when, during a conference call with a manager, you watch his infants run through the screen.
Demands (purpose, goal vs. time measurement, flexible time-management and so on) that were previously only placed on the workplace by the Z&Y generation have become acceptable and became mainstream in 2020.
It’s interesting that it took so long. The concept itself has already been introduced by the philosopher Frithjof Bergmann at the end of the 1970s. In 1984, Bergmann founded an association called the Center for New Work in Flint, Michigan. The Center’s goal was to help automotive workers, who were worried about the increasing level of automation in manufacturing, identify and then monetize meaningful “new work”. According to Bergmann, since the Industrial Revolution, the purpose of work was to perform a specific task, such as a step on the assembly line. The means to accomplish this purpose was the working man, who therefore functioned as a mere tool, so to speak. The ideal form of the new work, as Bergmann understands it, reverts this relationship: New Work should now be how a man can realize himself.
Nowadays, the perspective on New Wok can therefore be narrow, as in the case of Bergmann, on the importance of wage labour for the human being, but also very broad, up to virtually all contemporary initiatives on the way to a holistic, learning organization. However, at the core is the self-realization of the knowledge worker within his work activity. The premise is that the effort companies invest in the holistic design of their employees’ workspace exponentially affects their ability to remain innovative, agile and flexible.
Key Findings
New Work is a comprehensive concept for approaches that focuses on the individual and the way we work together.
New Work can be lived low-threshold (emphasis on HR) or comprehensive (emphasis on co-determination, autonomy and self-realization).
New Work approaches can help companies to put their corporate culture to a critical review to find out if an agile operating model can be successful.
New Work Beginner Guide for Enterprises and Organizations
