Employee Experience Modeling

By developing agile approaches that realize both scale and responsiveness, coupled with sustainable business practices, organizations can activate new business models that funnel through the operating model to work design and ultimately to a fulfilling employee experience that embraces large-scale digital business transformation, while at the same time cultivating the cultures, mindsets, and behavioral changes necessary to succeed in this age of AI.

One thing we have learned with certainty is that we must design, build, and continuously improve our digital workplace, with an augmented employee experience at its center. Change and innovation must be organizational capabilities. New value creation must be a key focus of the employee experience. Speed, quality, and value must replace time, scope, and cost.

In the organization of the future, human work will naturally be more ambiguous. Teams will be small, cross-functional, and cross-cultural, and the worker experiences will be driven by data and learning on the fly.

To support this digital workplace, policies will be rationalized and simplified. Data will need to be transparent, clean, and secure. Project-based and gig workers need access to many of the critical tools and insights afforded to employees. Vendors will need to open their systems and platforms for seamless ecosystem interoperability to create smart, dataful employee experience platforms critical to human work.

The future employee work experience will be entirely different from that of earlier industrial revolutions. Skilled workers will be in high demand and therefore far more selective about their place of employment. They will demand and expect to receive extreme flexibility in their working arrangements. The movement towards remote and hybrid work will continue and centralized offices will have to adapt to become collaboration spaces for knowledge transfer and organizational innovation.

Business Agility will assume prominence in every successful organization’s culture, leadership, strategy, and governance. This is a sea change from the days when agility was the exclusive domain of information technology development groups. In the future, businesses that reduce organizational complexity and embrace agility will adapt faster, manage changing priorities, change course rapidly, and emphasize employee work experience. Rapid response teams will be used to relay quick, informative strategies that are designed to create value and quickly steer the company toward operational success through faster turnaround times, transparency, and higher employee engagement.

So what will it take to transform a rigid, complex, and bureaucratic organization into an agile and adaptable business leader as the third wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) evolves? Redesigning to streamline hierarchical organizational structures – including roles, processes, rules, and layers – and replacement of outdated technologies are two of the most apparent imperatives. After all, at the dawn of the 4IR, technologies were built for stability rather than agility. In the future, it will be essential for almost instantaneous changes to be implemented without any loss of business stability.

As shown in Figure 1, Organizations will use productivity technology to surround the augmented worker with new and exciting work experience possibilities. Employee wellbeing, particularly healthcare, hygiene, and safety, will also receive far greater digital focus, while initiatives such as remote teambuilding will assume new prominence as companies seek to use the digital workplace to increase collaboration amongst hybrid workers. A seismic shift in work practices will continue to emphasize the development of digital distance coaching.

Talent Cultivation

By implicitly understanding where value will be created in the organization as it moves forward, a company can pinpoint exactly where new talent or at the very least new skills are required. Yet despite the global reach of contemporary recruitment, talent today is considered to be the rarest resource of all.

Digital skills for key roles will be in short supply as incumbents in traditional industries compete for scarce talent, even as tech companies expand. As institutional innovation evolves, companies will have to fight fiercely to attract and retain top-quality talent in higher cognitive areas such as quantitative analysis and critical thinking, as well as advanced technical skills and business development. These roles will develop hand-in-hand with the scale and pace of technological disruption. Many companies will seek to fulfill these needs through internal initiatives rather than external recruitment.

Human skills must be evaluated based on whether or not the organization is properly equipped with the talent necessary to realize institutional innovation. If not, the organization must invest in its existing workforce’s skills while also attracting and retaining the most appropriate new talent.

While constant learning should be a core organizational expectation of employees, business leaders must also recognize that a strong sense of purpose, a meaningful employee experience, and the key attributes of diversity, equity, and inclusion must all be strategic priorities.

Value Creation

In his visionary book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge was the first to define systems thinking as a value-creating discipline for seeing interrelationships rather than just “things” and for visualizing patterns of change rather than just snapshots.

Unlocking innovation and value will be driven by multidimensional systematic thinking that views the business environment as a complex network in which everything is interconnected. As organizations begin to veer away from rigid job titles and start to assign more granular roles, creating value through interrelationships will become a key part of the employee experience. Workers will seek to distinguish themselves from increasingly powerful and adaptive technologies by adding new dimensions of creative thinking and problem-solving.

The organization of the future will also seek to instill an effective value delivery system into the employee experience by targeting the exclusively human competencies workers want to develop and the organization most desires, whether these are allied to productivity, profitability, innovation, or even effective team leadership.

Intelligent Flexibility

Allied with business agility, flexibility in the third wave will not simply be about permitting workers to get work done on their schedule, boundaryless work arrangements, or work-life balance accommodations that are available upon request. The definition of flexibility in the future will reach far greater depths within the realm of the employee work experience, as it exemplifies the ability to make novel connections between emerging ideas and pragmatic solutions.

Creativity, imagination, curiosity, and empathy are qualities that will attain far greater prominence as flexibility becomes a focal point of the employee experience. The human capability of ‘learning to learn’ and being flexible about how we learn is key to optimal decision-making. Flexible employees who can extract information about the structure of a complex environment and decipher what appear to be initially incomprehensible streams of information will excel as institutional innovation evolves. These are the individuals who will rapidly adapt to unexpected events and problem-solve to find an optimal solution.

Mobile Metaverse

While flexibility will be one key to attracting new talent on a global scale, mobility will be the key enabler and support mechanism for the hybrid or remote worker experience. Mobility in this sense can be defined as driving and enabling work from anywhere. By strategically aligning this to the operating model, it can leverage both data and technology while also fully utilizing people’s capabilities, regardless of physical location.

Despite the failed hype and its current association with other struggling Web3 technologies, we will most likely continue to see the development of what the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson once coined as the 'Metaverse'. This confluence of technologies that could further facilitate remote work through virtual offices and mobile applications by using extended reality (XR), has failed to keep pace with developments in areas like Generative AI and may take several more years to provide a 3D experience layer over the Internet.

Conclusion

These rapidly improving digital work technologies will only increase the number of people working at home without losing productivity. Enhanced by mobile, they will increase productivity to a point where many people would be more productive working in a digital environment than a physical one. Third-wave organizations will need to align policies, processes, and service delivery models to support this shift, as the mobile workforce becomes an integral part of the employee experience, in addition to enabling the business to integrate and deliver new and innovative business services faster.

For example, bringing advanced data analytics into the mobility equation will facilitate the strategic decision-making process by consolidating data and information across business platforms. As mobility becomes cheaper, faster, and more convenient, it will lead to significant demand for jobs, thereby negating the attrition caused by automation.