Retaining the Human Touch in the Age of AI

Today’s business leaders have a pivotal role to play in developing the mindsets, behaviors, and organizational knowledge that will drive worker ingenuity while also cultivating the specific skills that are needed as the digital workplace evolves. Putting the right people in the right places will mean combining highly diverse values, behaviors, talents, and skills.

As more and more routine jobs become automated and vanish from the workplace, durable skills will come to the forefront of every organizational initiative. Along with technological know-how, businesses will require workers to display greater creativity and emotional intelligence. Even if machines usurp more and more routine tasks, every worker will have to develop many new human-centric skills, including sense-making, advanced cognition, and the ability to collaborate virtually with subordinates in cross-cultural settings while demonstrating both adaptive and computational thinking.

As shown in Figure 1, this age of AI demands that workers shift their focus to skills like critical thinking, creativity, complex problem-solving, and open-mindedness, while machines will solve repetitive and analytical challenges at far greater speeds than is humanly possible.

Figure 1. Durable Human Skills in the Age of AI

Realization of these skill sets entails redesigning organizational processes to embrace innovative work on different timescales, promoting more agility for working on the edges of cognitive interaction, building the motivation and mindsets necessary for essential human-machine collaboration, and nurturing a company-wide culture of meaningful human work and engagement.

Employee learning and adaptation must become constant goals as digital ecosystems gain ever greater footholds in traditional organizations, while digital native companies will be in a prime position to leverage the advantages of horizontally aligned chains of command and the advanced technological momentum that is a natural part of their organizational fabric.

Yet skills in isolation are too tactical to develop the momentum that is required for organizational change. Today, long-term operational strategies must address several factors that impact the very nature of jobs and roles: evolving business models, talent needs according to growth objectives, automation in future work, and emerging employment contracts. Tomorrow, those strategies must adapt and incorporate ongoing impacts to jobs as business models mature and new relationships form.

The task of designing new ways of work cannot be reduced to merely finding new people or catching up on new skills. Changes to work, horizontally across organizations, will become a constant condition. Every shift in new business models will usher in shifts in work design, so business leaders and managers must plan accordingly, even iteratively, and ask tough questions about how jobs themselves will change.

The Importance of Work Design

“Workers need to know the “why” and they need to understand how the new why affects their new work. Workers should participate in new work design. Companies must model new behaviors to demonstrate what good looks like. The latitude and room to explore and learn is critical.”

The most successful businesses are responding quickly to the opportunities presented by advances in AI and ML, and are leading through disruptive innovation. To build this capability, organizations are racing to find, attract, and retain the best managerial and employee talent. But investing in brilliant new hires isn’t enough; the pace of disruption means that information and skills become obsolete quickly. To foster knowledge as a scalable, sustainable enterprise capability, businesses need to instill knowledge practices through organizational and new work design.

The first step is to recognize that the daily activity of workers that fuses skills, practices, relationships, activities, resources, and technology is architected in work design. It’s here where the performance of people is managed relative to work scenarios. For example, the system that measures, assesses, and rewards the appropriate human judgment that’s applied alongside machine intelligence in decision-making.

Good work design enables new knowledge practices at the individual level, but should also reach beyond individual roles, competencies, and skills to address the collective practices that are needed. For example, traditional models assume that the information used by workers in everyday scenarios is structured, static, and based on documented, repeatable skills that are passed on through conventional education pathways and “owned” by experts. Those models are no longer relevant. Today’s managers need to understand that effective learning means that workers are most adept at challenging assumptions, unlearning what people already know, and creating and sharing new knowledge in new contexts. Individual learning practices fuel the proliferation of insights across distributed networks and help the business move quickly in response to change. Crucially, they instill insights that last, even when human experts leave the company.

Collective Intelligence – The Intersection of Humans and Machines

As this Age of AI gathers momentum, companies are picking and choosing their way through what some see as a digital minefield. When we talk about envisioning the workforce of the future, we need to understand which work will be consumed by humans and which will be handled by machines while relying on managers to ensure that the workers understand the scope and boundaries of their responsibilities.

Collective intelligence embraces both people and computers. The role of the human as a trainer might include aspects of creativity, abstract thinking, and intuition, while the machine acting as a guide may include validation, interpretation, benchmarks, best practices, and shared learnings.

One way to think about human-machine work redesign is to consider the intersection of the four key areas of new work: human-only tasks, humans as trainers, machines as guides, and machine-only tasks. Humans as trainers and machines as guides are both areas in need of particular focus. We can even evaluate the future of computers as tools, assistants, peers to their human counterparts, and even as managers.

Figure 2. Humans as Trainers and Machines as Guides

As workers partner with machines more and more, how people get jobs done cannot be a reactive response. New work has to anticipate a blended human-machine workforce. Employees will be able to choose from an array of different work arrangements that suit them personally – for example, contract work, gigs, and freelance opportunities, and alternative employment will fundamentally change the relationship with managers.

Organizational Capabilities and the Creation of Value

To be relevant, workers will need to understand the value that they offer relative to the new value creation needed in digital-first business and operating models.

Organizational capabilities become foundational to executing business strategy and empowering successful participation in new business ecosystems. They enable the relationships and experiences that put platforms into operation. As change becomes the new norm, there are certain capabilities that managers will need to cultivate now. We foresee a dramatic shift in the workforce as roles, jobs, and partnerships are redefined to meet organizational goals and objectives. Resilience and flexibility will need to reside in the hands of workers while managers provide the necessary tools and capabilities to enable transformation.

Once an organization’s capability to create value in a digital world is understood, it is critical to focus on nurturing a workforce that possesses the ability to adapt quickly, is comfortable with change, is not afraid to take risks, is highly collaborative, and consists of critical, systems-based thinkers. Managers must recognize that these are not your traditional employee profiles, but rather a new breed of workers who will flourish in harmony with machines to realize the desired end state of any transaction.

Summary

We have learned from neuroscientists that uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity accompany major changes in organizational ambition. Just as the onset of the Industrial Age saw the resistance of technology-averse Luddites, the 4th Industrial Revolution is spawning a new form of challenge to workers that needs to be carefully considered. The goal of any contemporary organization should be to combine the prowess of both humans and machines.

There must be a concerted effort to not only design for cultural change, but also a recognition that traditional operational models do not necessarily fit into digital solutions, and a reconsideration of how workers create and disseminate what they have learned. Trust is the essential ingredient to boosting employee engagement, motivation, and openness through transparent privacy, security, accountability, and participatory practices that establish a powerful aura of managerial competency.

Traditional hierarchical organizational structures, with rigorous job descriptions, managerial spans of control, and siloed functions based on specific jurisdictions, are already being replaced by agile organizations in which the company functions as a flattened structure with end-to-end team accountability and flexible resources. This approach will be designed to complement the implementation of standardized processes that facilitate rapid changes.

As work moves towards experience and skills-based job structures, agile practices will demand far greater flexibility and pursue work activities that cannot be constrained by siloed functions. Unlike a functional hierarchy, people management then becomes separated from work management, as workers are assigned to project tasks that embody cross-functional deliverables designated by the flow of work. In this way, reskilling and upskilling become a worker’s prerogative, while agile ways of working, cost containment and rapid outcomes become viable for managers.

Today, regardless of whether an organization has implemented centralized, remote, or hybrid work arrangements, business models need to embrace not only a new normal in terms of work flexibility and remote work, but also worker well-being, technological adaptation, and new social contracts with the workforce, irrespective of where the employee is physically located. Business leaders need a longer-term view aligned to strategic workforce management and, critically, manager capabilities in terms of remote employee engagement and retention of top talent.