The workplace is under a new phase of construction. Companies are offering employees unprecedented benefits, among them a week off to focus on personal well-being, absolutely free from work-related phone calls and emails (Spotify), reimbursements of up to $100 per month for activities like massage therapy and cooking classes (Salesforce), and four “work from anywhere” weeks per year (Google). Some celebrate the new rules and laugh at the old ones to promote their products, like HP’s “Work Happy” campaign, which contrasts outdated workplace rules with scenes of people living a remote or hybrid work lifestyle.
CEOs openly admit that “companies are no longer choosing employees, rather people are choosing the companies” as they strive to attract talent in the wake of the great resignation. Most research and surveys, for their part, try to find out what people want. They highlight the gap between what employees prioritize and what employers think people want. They use quantitative tools to solve what is genuinely an unfathomable problem. Why is this approach misguided? Because we are irrational beings and very often we really can’t tell what we want. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, as stated in Henry Ford’s legendary quote.
After decades of watching great leaders break old paradigms and companies’ cultures evolve, I’ve concluded that a more effective way to analyze the future of work lies in Clayton Christensen’s “job to be done” framework.
Jobs to be Done
“Jobs to Be Done” is a framework for better-understanding people’s behavior. While conventional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Christensen’s Jobs Theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. People don’t simply buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. Christensen calls this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and understanding this opens a world of innovation possibilities. The Jobs-to-be-done theory “transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase.”
What they need to hone in on is the progress the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. We can analyze the workplace in this light and ask ourselves: When a knowledge worker chooses to sign on with a full-time employer, what “job” is that worker “hiring” the employer to do for them?
The answer to this question has changed with time. We can describe this evolution as the story between two characters: one of them is the individual, whom we will call “Alex” and whose goal is to find happiness. The second character is the company, which we call “ACME Industries”. The organization’s objective is to maximize shareholder value, in other words, to generate more products, more sales, more profits, margin increases, lower costs, greater speed, and greater profitability, among other functions.
From the 1950s until about 2000, both characters moved towards their respective goals with an implicit contract that worked on two different lines. As an employer, ACME Industries offered Alex job stability – possibly for a very long term or an entire lifetime-, financial security, and a slow but steady progression that we used to call a career. Through this lifelong job, Alex achieved social and economic advancement which produced a feeling of “happiness”. In return, Alex devoted most of their time and energy to the company. During this period, Alex’s definition of happiness was keeping the job; and ACME’s priority was maintaining workers’ high productivity.
In such a world, the most necessary and valued skills were technical: Engineering, Legal, Accounting, Business Administration, and later Marketing and Technology. All of them promised careers with great economic futures within organizations. Another outstanding characteristic of this period was that work was articulated through meticulously defined processes and tasks, which implied a detailed and exhaustive Description of Functions. In the 60s and 70s companies like Caterpillar, General Motors, and General Electric, made use of the “by-the-book”, that is, the manual where all the procedures were found, specifying how each individual should perform his or her duties. Whether Alex got along well with other colleagues was relatively irrelevant to the productivity of the whole. Each one had to do the detailed task assigned to them.
Twentieth-century management was a compendium of how companies were to become more productive. Everything was relatively stable. Through Strategy, Marketing, Re-engineering, Finance, and many other technical and organizational disciplines, business plans and process manuals were reviewed regularly but with several years in between.
Gradually, however, the “pace of change” accelerated to exponential levels and a second stage began to take shape. As new technologies emerged, customers and their needs changed, and this, in turn, led to strong disruptions in all markets. As a consequence, ACME Industries had to update processes and functions frequently, and keeping the legendary manuals up to date became increasingly difficult. Due to the constant revision of processes and tasks, new management mechanisms began to be adopted to coordinate tasks, giving rise to agile methodologies.
Second Stage
Many ACME Industries found it hard to keep up with the pace of change and went out of business or were acquired or merged with others. Many of them adopted new management practices that included regular and sometimes massive layoffs, like the “vitality curve”, designed and promoted by Jack Welch, CEO of GE between 1980 and 2000, who was ranked as the best manager of the 20th century by Fortune Magazine. Stability and job security for life were no longer part of the new managerial mindset and practice. On the other hand, happiness for Alex and many others no longer meant financial security, a lifetime job, or a 25-year career medal at ACME Industries. Happiness gradually stood for making an impact, living with passion, and having a purpose. ACME Industries, for its part, noticed that to attract talent, it needed to define and communicate a clear purpose and take into account the “work-life balance” concept that people aspired to.
As companies started to use agile methodologies to articulate work, more “soft” skills –particularly interpersonal skills– were needed. Empathy and the ability to listen, communicate, and collaborate, among other things, gained relevance as key interpersonal skills. At the same time, defining detailed procedures to coordinate group work became increasingly difficult and a new way of aligning the team’s efforts was needed. It is the era of “People First: Chief Emotions Officers”. During this phase, values and behaviors stood out as crucial in day-to-day tasks. Organizational cultures were designed with a focus on people, with particular attention on motivation and empowerment and people’s well-being was brought to the table. However, ACME’s interest in people’s well-being was still fundamentally driven by its impact on productivity.
From the point of view of knowledge, the acceleration of the pace of change made it necessary for people to keep up with more technical and specific content like cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI, among others. But, at the same time, people had to train themselves in interpersonal skills that helped them work in teams where not every procedure is defined and conversations play a key role in how things are done.
Throughout these processes, ACME Industries’ goal of maximizing shareholder value through higher productivity was always maintained, as well as Alex’s interest in being happy. However, the meaning of productivity and happiness changed as both concepts are in permanent evolution.
The transition between the first and the second phase in the workplace was driven by ACME industries, but the Change of Era that began to take shape a decade ago and led to the third phase was driven by people who, like Alex, are always searching for happiness and shaping what they understand by it.
Third Stage
In the last 10 years another Change of Era began to take shape, and this change was catalyzed and accelerated by the pandemic. In addition to making an impact, living with passion, and having a purpose, Alex wants to practice sports, do yoga, maintain a healthy diet, go out with friends, and even live for several months in different places. As mentioned above, they also want a job that they are passionate about and that helps them to learn and develop; a job that is flexible so that they can integrate personal activities how and when they prefer. In this context, work is no longer the fundamental piece of happiness, but one more piece of a puzzle with multiple components that Alex is trying to put together.
The first consequence of this change is the enormous job turnover, and the decrease in the average tenure in a company. And, although the younger, well-educated generations have led this evolution, the effect is spreading throughout society and projects are arising to find an answer to people’s new demands. An example is the Inner Development Goals
(IDG) project which describes a framework of skills and qualities that relate to what is needed in order to successfully work with complex societal issues, in particular those identified in the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and skills and qualities that are important for general well-being or for empowering individuals to lead satisfying lives.
The Great Resignation is the second and larger consequence of the shift from the second to the third era. Through numerous surveys and studies, the consultancy firm McKinsey has analyzed this phenomenon. In a study comprising five countries (Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and 5,774 people, it revealed that forty percent of the employees in the survey said “they are at least somewhat likely to quit in the next three to six months”. Eighteen percent of the respondents said their intentions range from likely to almost certain. The authors further stated: “Employees are tired, and many are grieving. They want a renewed and revised sense of purpose in their work. They want social and interpersonal connections with their colleagues and managers. They want to feel a sense of shared identity. Yes, they want the paycheck, benefits, and perks, but more than that they want to feel valued by their organizations and managers. They want meaningful—though not necessarily in-person—interactions, not just transactions.”
These new interests and changes in the behavior of individuals affect ACME Industries like never before. With growing pressures to deliver productivity and increase shareholders’ value, ACME Industries must listen and respond to the requests and needs of Alex to achieve its goal. Therefore, it must take care of the individual development and growth of people who have chosen to work full-time in the company. In order to attract and retain talent, the company is asked to act as a center for the training and development of the person from the BEING, and not only from the DOING.
This new raison d’être of the organization is cascaded inwards to each leader and collaborator and makes them wear a double hat: the “businessperson” hat, whereby each leader must deal full-time with all the variables of business, strategic, and operational challenges; and the “coach and mentor” hat, to be a driver of development for each member of their team. This is a Copernican turn in the leader’s role. Empowered by this perspective, they must see themselves and the other people in the group as human beings in all their integrality, hone their capacity to learn, and use different tools to relate to others and understand their vulnerability, and their essence. It is not merely acquiring new skills, it is about recognizing ourselves, developing ourselves, transcending others, loving ourselves, and being loved.
Leaders now ask each of their employees how they are doing, how they could help them grow, where they see themselves in the future, if they imagine themselves being in or outside the company, and how they can help them get to where they want to be. Training is fundamental and highly valued; not only the training that is useful to the company to improve productivity but the training that becomes handy to people like Alex in their happiness project. If they coincide, bingo! Because the power of negotiation has mutated: from being totally on the company’s side to leaning on the individual’s side. Although the negotiation is still going on, Alex, more than ACME Industries, is leading the process and shaping the “future of work”. In this new era, the individual and the company share responsibility for achieving each other’s goals: that is, the individual’s happiness and the company’s productivity. The main driver in an individual’s happiness is no longer job stability and financial security but rather achieving personal and professional growth. This is the new “job to be done” by ACME for Alex.
Looking into the Future
In this new era the company’s responsibilities have multiplied. It is no longer enough to increase shareholder value and keep productivity high. Now it has to carry out a more humane role to attract individuals who dream of an impactful life with multiple interests and desire to keep a rich and integrated professional and personal life.
What knowledge is needed in this day and age, and where do we learn it? The answer is a new kind of knowledge that allows us to be better, more mature, and more generous people! A knowledge that will enable us to live better begins with self-knowledge and interpersonal skills, such as humility, appreciation, empathy, and compassion, among others.
It is a new imperative on multiple levels: more and more technical knowledge is being incorporated, and at the same time more and more soft skills and, better still, “life skills” are needed. The way to learn “life skills” is very different from learning technical knowledge. Technical contents are mainly learned with a master class, with a video, with a book, that is to say by studying, because they are essentially cognitive. On the other hand, “soft knowledge” and “life knowledge” are acquired through practice: above all, we learn through experience and exercise. We could even coin the word “exersperiencing”, because it is necessary to pass the experience through the body. The development of soft skills is a permanent process, associated with the progressive increase of maturity… it is life itself, the development of consciousness.
This type of knowledge is incorporated in a very similar way to what we get from practicing at the gym or in sports, where you must constantly go over and over to get a good result. There is a need for “Self Leadership Gyms”, where one learns by practicing these new life skills.
Understanding this change and its impact on the future of work is decisive in creating more fruitful relationships. If companies want to attract the best talent they have to take note and start asking EACH individual how to collaborate with them in that goal.
Focusing on the human being is becoming a hot topic that prestigious management thinkers, like Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, Amy Edmondson, and Tal Ben Shahar, among the most distinguished names, are dealing with. Although the eras were mentioned sequentially, they are more like “geological layers” that coexist simultaneously (A summary of the main drivers and characteristics of each era is added in the appendix). Thus, we find organizations that put people first coexisting with others that still pretend to relegate individuals to their role in the productive chain. Even in the same organization, we find managers who behave according to these three different models (see Table 1 for a summary of the main dimensions in each period).
The “job to be done” is different in each era. In the first stage, it is mainly about money, stability, predictability, and safety. To fulfill their other needs, people “hired” other institutions (like churches, civic service groups, friend circles, and families). In the second stage, the “job to be done” was about giving a purpose, meaning, and a place to channel their creativity and passion. In the third stage, the “job to be done” is about giving knowledge workers a “place to grow”, where personal and professional development flourish. At this stage, some people have abandoned the classic social, capital institutions and reached a point of expecting employers to fulfill their needs, giving them meaning, purpose, community, belonging, mentoring, creative outlets, and social impact. But at the same time, some people are running in the opposite direction, opting for more transactional relationships with employers, offering a wide variety of services that range from driving an Uber to being expert professionals for hire. They are “hiring” a paying company only for the cash and not expecting or wanting it to take over other functions they can find better providers of. And so many companies have started to view themselves as an “ecosystem” that coordinates gig workers and full-time employees, temporary service providers as well as long-term partners.
The changes we are experiencing in the workplace can be better understood and explained in light of these three stages. Recruitment, loyalty, and talent strategies that take into account the new kind of knowledge that is needed (life skills) will be much more effective than those that can be designed with the sole focus on the company and the organization. And we will be contributing to developing people and, each of us, becoming Chief Loving Officers.
[1] Miki Kuusi, CEO at Wolt, during NBF, September 2022.
[2] “Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan. Harvard Business Review, September 2016.
[3] The study of milkshakes sales is one of Christensen’s most widely known examples. As the company was analyzing how it could improve its sales, it found that many milkshakes were sold in the morning. Further research revealed that customers were buying milkshakes for breakfast during their morning commute. Instead of caring about thickness or flavor, customers were actually drawn to the fact that it was relatively tidy and could stave off hunger until lunch. In this instance, the competitor wasn’t other milkshakes, but easily consumable breakfast foods like bagels or bananas, giving the chain an entirely new perspective on ways to compete.
[4] It was the era of “private life and professional life” seen as two separate spheres.
[5] In his book Abundance, Peter Diamandis dives into the changes that exponential technologies are bringing about in business and society and its possible future implications.
[6] It is the era of Empowerment and Motivation, precisely because we need the individual close to the problem to decide in order to maximize productivity; not because we want to give him real empowerment, decision and well-being as a person.
[7] Welch considered that, to maintain their vitality, companies should review their employees annually, promote and generously reward the top 20%, give standard compensation to the middle 70% and fire the 10% of the workforce with the lowest score.
[8] Proof of this is the explosion of volunteer work, where the main payoff is to have purpose and impact (gathering of data supporting this in progress).
[9] People First Leadership: How the Best Leaders Use Culture and Emotion to Drive Unprecedented Results, by Eduardo Braun. McGraw-Hill, 2016.
[10] GPTW begins to measure trust in organizations.
[11] Some companies are already applying the new meaning of happiness in their marketing campaigns. When launching its “Work Happy” campaign, HP stated: “Success and even happiness look a lot different today than they did years before, both in our professional and personal lives. HP is focusing on solutions and products that allow you to work in whatever way works best for you, and together our goal with this campaign is for everyone to find a way to ‘Work Happy.”
[12] Great Attrition or Great Attraction? The choice is yours. McKinsey Quarterly, September 8, 2021.
[13] Coaching explosion in the world.
[14] In this new era, soft skills are a consequence of growth in being, and not an induced behavior for doing. Based on the Inner Development Goals defined by UN as the transformational skills for sustainable development, we consider the following interpersonal skills: Appreciation, Connectedness, Humility, Empathy and Compassion, Communication Skills, Inclusive mindset and intercultural competence, Trust, Mobilization skills, Courage, Creativity, Optimism, Perseverance.
[15] Based on the Inner Development Goals defined by UN as the transformational skills for sustainable development, we consider the following intrapersonal or “life skills”: Inner Compass, Integrity and Authenticity, Openness and Learning Mindset, Self-awareness, Presence, Critical thinking, Complexity awareness, Perspective Skills, Sense-making, Long term orientation and Visioning.
[16] Tom Peters’ latest book is entitled “Extreme Humanism”. Gary Hamel has recently published “Humanocracy” and created the “The Human Movement” project, Amy Edmondson, named the #1 management thinker in the world by “Thinkers50”, proclaims the importance of psychological safety; and Tal Ben Shahar, who from positive psychology has had a tremendous impact on the corporate world in installing.
[17] Happiness is the consequence of love. The Chief Happiness Officer that some companies have, falls short of the challenge.
Appendix
Table 1: Evolution of key dimensions in organizations and individuals’ drivers
| Stage | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 |
| Key Dimensions | |||
| Job to be done (Main drivers that impact what happiness means to people) | Job stability Financial security Career advancement | Making an impact Having a purpose Being passionate about what you do | Making an impact Having a purpose Being passionate about what you do Integral wellness |
| Maximizing shareholder value (Main drivers that impact maximizing shareholder value) | Scale Standardization Massification | Technologically driven, customer-oriented innovation Teamwork | Technologically driven, customer-oriented innovation Teamwork Company’s co-responsibility in its people’s growth and development |
| Work coordination | By the book processes Job descriptions | Corporate culture based on purpose and values Meetings and conversations | Corporate culture based on purpose and values Meetings and conversations Coaching and mentoring |
| Key knowledge/skills | Technical knowledge | Technical knowledge Interpersonal skills | Technical knowledge Interpersonal skills Intrapersonal skills |
| Learning paths | Formal education, 4+ years Classes in university campuses and educational institutions | Formal education 4+years Classes in university campuses and educational institutions Lifelong learning concept Short certified courses Coaching and mentoring Online learning | Formal education 4+years Classes in campus/educational institutions Lifelong learning concept Short certified courses Coaching and mentoring Online learning On the job training Self-managed learning Experience-based sessions |
The transition between the first and second stage is mainly driven by companies, as they react to a more pressing competitive environment and exponential technological change. The transition between the second and third stages is mainly driven by a change in people’s demands and interests, a change that was catalyzed by the pandemic.
