Rearchitecting Work: Leading the Shift From ‘Survive’ to ‘Thrive’

Here’s the new mantra for today’s topsy-turvy world: It’s about learning to thrive and not just survive.

Chris Havrilla, Vice President of HR Technology & Solution Provider Strategy at Deloitte Consulting, who spoke at the 2021 FuelX Talent Mobility Conference about Accelerating the Shift to Rearchitecting Work, explained it like this:

“A survival mindset views disruptions as kind of a point in time crises to be addressed with the expectation that the organization will kind of revert to business-as-usual. Once the crisis is over, it’s about doing what’s necessary to succeed today.

However, the pursuit of thriving orients organizations towards using disruptions or ‘new realities’ as opportunities to reimagine norms and assumptions, perhaps not possible before. So, a thrive mindset recognizes that disruption is continuous rather than episodic and embraces disruption as a catalyst to drive the organization forward. It’s about doing what’s possible not just to succeed today, but also to thrive or dominate tomorrow.”

The past year has proven that organizations and workers are capable of immense resilience under pressure when faced with an unprecedented crisis.

Now, according to Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends research, “Executives say their organization’s ability to navigate future disruptions will rely on distinctly human capabilities”.

In fact, one of the key findings from the Deloitte research was “Executives believe that work reimagination will be critical to future success.” As Chris Havrilla put it:

“Prior to COVID, we saw a pretty balanced view towards the work itself … but the reality was that it was already changing. We certainly heard a lot of talk about the future of work. But what we really saw was the power of this notion of work reimagination during the COVID-19 crisis when organizations and workers had to rethink fundamental assumptions about what work really was and how it could be done. The ability to reimagine work according to a different set of assumptions, and putting those changes into practice, proved essential to organizational survival during the crisis … and, it can actually enable them to thrive long after the pandemic recedes...”

HR has a critical role to play in rearchitecting work

Here’s the big question: How are organizations going to reimagine and rearchitect work while dealing with today’s disrupted business and workforce environment?

Deloitte believes that HR must lead the charge to rearchitect work and play a critical role in the shift from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive’. According to their analysis, human resources has an opportunity to take the lead in rearchitecting work.

Here’s how Chris Havrilla described it:

“This is really where HR has a massive opportunity. … HR has a very critical role to play in the adoption of purpose, potential, and perspective across the organization, and in leading this shift from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive’ …

But HR folks, you have got to drive this — from standardizing and enforcing workforce policies to a new responsibility of rearchitecting work across the enterprise. … because there’s no one else who is going to rearchitect the work. And that is a huge mindset shift for a lot of us. For an organization to truly become human at its core, HR, the people that should be the experts in human behavior, have to take the lead in embedding human considerations into every aspect of work.”

Opening up to the art of the possible

Chris Havrilla suggests that HR can begin rearchitecting work by focusing on the following three (3) elements:

1. Optimize. Accelerate skill development programs for high-demand skills and roles.
2. Redesign. Implement new learning technologies and talent marketplaces to build new skills and provide employees a choice in development.
3. Rearchitect. Focus on unleashing worker potential so they can play a lead role in reimagining work for new outcomes.

Chris made clear that to really rearchitect work:

“You have to change the way you’re leveraging technology … moving beyond the notion of substitution or even augmentation, to actually using technology to transform the way we work in ways that achieve different and better outcomes that we maybe didn’t even think that we had before … and it really kind of opens you up to the art of the possible.”

Chris went on to explain how “super teams can play an integral part” in reimagining work:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations actually doubled down on teams and teaming as a survival strategy to enable adaptability and speed. Leaders now have the opportunity to use what they learned to construct ‘super teams’ that pair people with technology to reimagine work in more human ways. By amplifying human contributions to new and better outcomes, super teams can play an integral part in an organization’s ability to grow and thrive.”

Ultimately, what is the goal? According to Deloitte, it is to move beyond managing talent systematically and simultaneously synchronizing the work, the workforce, and the workplace.

“It’s no longer about talent management,” Chris Havrilla noted, “it’s now about the actual workforce architecture.” Chris also emphasized this: “Work is becoming more than a set of activities, tasks, and outputs. It’s the way people interact, create, learn, grow, team, innovate, to produce value-based outcomes.”

That last point is the most critical one.

Work is changing rapidly and dramatically. In the shift from surviving to thriving, rearchitecting and reengineering the workforce will be key — and HR will be the critical element in leading the charge to make it happen.