What HR strategies will you adopt as you redesign work?
Part 7 of a 7-Part Series on Using Collaborative Intelligence (CI) to Improve Company Performance
As I wrote previously, when speaking with company executives regarding how best to use Collaborative Intelligence (CI) to improve their company’s performance, I ask seven clarifying questions, the seventh of which is: “Now that you’ve analyzed the work, how will you staff the work assigned to humans?”
I ask this question to describe various staffing options and to challenge traditional thinking about jobs and how they will get done in a CI-enabled future. Explicitly contemplating this question helps organizations identify the best ways to deploy human resources to achieve performance improvement goals.
Previous articles in this series examined work characteristics and what work to assign to CI. One implication of CI-driven redesign is that, in the short- and medium-term future, CI will complete much of the work done by humans today.
Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and very successful venture capitalist, recently tweeted, “I believe 80% of 80% of all economically valuable jobs will be capable of being done by an AI.”
(In a related story in Fortune Magazine, Khosla advised college-aged students on how to grapple with the question, “How do I ensure that what I am studying won’t be rendered obsolete by AI?” It’s worth reading if this question is meaningful to you or someone you know.)
Assuming Khosla’s estimate is in the ballpark but does not include new jobs that will emerge for creating, training, guiding, and interpreting AI, two important questions arise:
How should an organization staff the remaining 20% of the 80% of jobs done by CI?
How will an organization acquire or gain access to the new skills required for existing jobs and the new jobs that humans will perform?
Human Staffing
The table below lists several human staffing options segmented by employment status. Organizations must decide which option is best for each work unit.
Full-Time Employees/Contractors: If the remaining 20% of a specific job has high capacity requirements, employees/contractors can complete this work, but staff size would be reduced by (approximately) 80%. If not, a full-time position would have to be comprised of some combination of 20% jobs or some number of human tasks from different jobs.
Part-Time Employees/Contractors: Part-time work can be matched to fit the capacity requirements of one or more 20% jobs or some combination of human tasks.
Outsourcers: Completing the human portions of one or more jobs/tasks can be outsourced to a 3rdparty. (They are included in the Full-Time segment because they take full-time responsibility for fulfilling the work requirements.)
On-Demand (Gig) Workers: Workers can be added dynamically to complete specific human tasks. (This option would apply to a subset of organizational tasks.)
Consultants: Consultants can be hired to complete specific projects requiring human expertise or effort. (The work may be full- or part-time, but the consulting firm is engaged as needed.)
Partnerships/Alliances: Organizations can complete human tasks by availing themselves of human resources (expertise and effort) residing in organizations with which they have formal relationships.
Skills Acquisition
Organizations have several options for building or gaining access to the skills they will need in the future, including the following:
Hire/Train: Hire new employees and teach them the skills required to perform specific tasks/jobs.
Reskill: Identify promising employees and teach them the skills required to perform specific tasks/jobs.
Upskill: Teach employees with a subset of required skills the additional skills required to perform specific tasks/jobs.
Acquire: Hire employees who have the required skills.
Contract: Contract with workers with the required skills as needed.