Designing the Future of Work? Start with the Worker.

By Mike Brennan, Chief Services Officer at Leapgen

What does the future of workplace look like? How will people work? How will they work together?

I hear questions like this a lot. To attempt answering them here, I’ll do it from two different perspectives — the workforce and the individual.

Let’s Start with the Workforce Perspective.

When considering these questions broadly from the standpoint of the global workforce, there are a couple of nearly universal answers:

1. We’ll be even more reliant on smart, mobile devices phones, laptops, tablets and wearables. They’ll serve as our sources of just-in-time information and as our entry point for more and more transactions — from time entry and expense reporting to secure building & door entry (for those who still need to head to a corporate office or other type of facility). They’ll also serve as our primary means of live interaction — whether meeting via video, sharing screens, updating a project status or collaborating on a document — or all of these things simultaneously.
2. Topical social networks will become even more prevalent. Relationships and access to brainpower have always been critical to one’s own success. In a global economy where an increasing proportion of work gets done by teams who are not only remote, but are physically hundreds or thousands of miles away from one another, the organizations who successfully scale will be the ones who use social networking to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration — around the clock.

Both of these long-term trends will allow people to better integrate work into their lives (for an overview of what ‘work life integration’ means, check out this article by Forbes contributor, Dan Schwabel). The construct of work-life balance has shifted from looking at how many days one spends working vs. how many days vacation one takes to juggling:

• Daily work commitments — E.g., sharing a proposal with a client, completing a deliverable, attending a team meeting, etc.

- AND -

• Personal commitments — E.g., Picking up a child from practice, getting to the gym, caring for a loved one, completing studies toward a degree, etc.

The innovations that have allowed people to better integrate their professional life and personal life has been driven by the rise in remote work (i.e., jobs that are compatible with at least partial telework) amongst both the self-employed and people who work for someone else.

What About the Individual?

Answering the questions above about the future of work from the perspective of the individual is much trickier. While more and more workers will indeed work online over the next few years, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to defining the workforce experience.

That is because the nature of work people are doing remotely is inherently different. Just think about the variety of work functions commonly done partially or fully in a remote environment — customer service, financial management, equipment-related service and software development to name a few. Some roles are more technical; some require more collaboration than others. What’s more, the capabilities, styles and preferences of the people performing the work in these functions vary.

Therefore, in order for organizations to deliver on the future of work to its workers and reap the benefits — in the form of productivity and profits — they need to take a more personalized approach. This can be a slippery slope for anyone designing workforce solutions and downright overwhelming if you try to tailor things for hundreds or thousands of people.

So what is a digital workforce transformation leader to do?

Use Worker Personas to Your Advantage.

One thing to do is to apply the same consumer-centric design thinking marketers use when designing processes to serve buyers. In other words, think of your workers like customers. Personas are fundamental instrument to this type design thinking. Hubspot defines personas as follows:

Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. They help you understand your customers better.

Replacing the term customers with workers in the definition above is a good first step toward designing worker-centric experiences. Worker personas serve as a good middle ground between painting everyone in the workforce with the same broad brush and trying to be all things to all people. They help thread the needle by helping designers take into account the essence of people and the work they do (e.g., frequency with which they interact with customers, amount of teamwork and interactions with colleagues involved, tools and equipment necessary, etc.).

As Schlomo Goltz at Hearsay Social so eloquently puts it — ‘A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real individual; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people. Each persona represents a significant portion of people in the real world and enables the designer to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters, instead of focusing on thousands of individuals.’

In both the private and public sectors, the quality of the workforce experience has almost universally trailed that of the customer (e.g., retail buyer, patient, student, donor). The job of those attempting to effect digital workforce transformation at their organization is to narrow the gap between customer experience and that of the workforce. They should constantly be asking, ‘How are we removing friction and enhancing the experience for each persona?’ For example:

• An Applicant for a full-time role in an office.
• A New Hire in the Field who needs to be enabled to do quality work and add value.
• A contractor or freelancer who does technical work 100% virtually as part of a team.
• A team leader who needs to engage and manage team members across the globe.

In a future post, I’ll focus on how to construct worker personas as part of a design process. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with these 3 guiding principles:

1. Depict the persona as a specific person.
2. Make that person a composite of real individuals based on actual observations/research — i.e., don’t make them about yourself and the other subject matter experts on your core project team.
3. Be aspirational. If you focus squarely on what people currently do and how they currently do it, you won’t help them make the LEAP.

Mike Brennan is the Chief Services Officer and President of Leapgen. A HR and talent management consulting services firm that works with organizations globally to challenge established thinking and shape their future of work.