future of work. From Jobs to Superjobs — lessons from the elections

Every job that adds value can become a superjob, asserts Anand Shankar, Partner, Leader - HR Transformation, Deloitte. A superjob, according to Shankar, is when the full advantage of technology is leveraged keeping the human dimensions intact to redesign jobs.

Speaking at the just concluded SHRM HR Tech APAC Conference, he was sharing vignettes from the 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey, released during the event which had some forward looking insights. Sixty two per cent of respondents to the Global Human Capital trends survey said they were using automation to eliminate transactional work and replace repetitive tasks, 47 per cent said they were also augmenting existing work practices to improve productivity and 36 per cent were “re-imagining work”.

Most respondents said they were doubling down on re-skilling.

Piecing together the findings, Deloitte’s Human Capital team found that when parts of the job, usually process-oriented ones, are automated, the parts that remain manual need more interpretive skills. These create what they call hybrid jobs, and these are the fastest growing jobs today. In this, the nature of the job has not changed but only the nature of the skill to do the job has changed.

However, according to Deloitte, there is a next level of shift coming where technology not only changes the skill requirement for the job, but also changes the nature of the work itself, to give unimagined productivity gains. That’s the superjob.

Catching up with Shankar later, he explains the concept in detail through an analogy: Elections in India. “Look at how the government amazingly transforms the country during the elections. The way lakhs of people are assembled, trained, disassembled — all for one day’s work. Every government employee that comes together to conduct the elections is highly involved and enthused.”

There is immense amount of mapping of data, bunching it together, tagging tech, geo positioning tech, algorithms that match a voter to a polling booth, etc. It’s the classic example of technology married with purpose and a goal using a transient workforce, says Shankar. For him, this is a superjob.

Corporates have a lot to learn from election organising, he says. Rather than saying ‘I need my permanent employee’ they should look at a hybrid workforce. Certain talent you can keep in-house. This is the core group. Certain talent you hire for expertise for that particular moment or project. Certain talent should be transient.

If HR has to convert jobs within the organisation into superjobs, it has to manage transient, hybrid and migrant workforces. “So that’s the reason I brought up the elections example,” says Shankar.

He points out how, during the elections, the workforce planning is so meticulous that on the day of voting, at every booth, there are back-ups. “There is no margin for error on that day and so there are back-ups and back-up to back-ups.” The way they look at data redundancy, etc, is amazing, says Shankar.

Currently, corporates do use a hybrid workforce model — but they do it more for transactional purposes or for seasonality, when there are more projects.

Mapping value

So how do you create superjobs?

The first step is to question the value of every job. “Let’s dig down and find the true value. You have to sweat that part. For example, an advertising person’s job — is it measured by the prizes an ad wins or the products it sells? What if the product does not sell at all? So go back to first principles.”

The next step after understanding the value of the work is to train the employee to imbibe that value and deliver it. The organisation has to re-imagine all the job functions, how these will integrate with new technologies and alternative work arrangements (flexible, gig, transient etc).

To illustrate the shift from jobs to superjobs, the Deloitte report cites the example of Cleveland Clinic, a medical centre in the US.

It did a big rethink and redesign of its entire enterprise, including job definitions and roles. Whether clinical or not, each position in the hospital was evaluated for how it could be made more efficient, more viable and the skill levels needed.

After that, specialist doctors in the hospital were asked to be more flexible and dynamic — not only did they need to have medical knowledge but also understand what went into patient care, the role played by nurses and attendants, so that they could synergise better with them. Thus, there was an expansion in their roles.

According to Shankar, many gig jobs are already super jobs. “That’s because freelancers do more upskilling as their survival depends on it,” he says.

The dark side

The report warns that the advent of superjobs could potentially have a backlash as there could be a polarisation between commoditised jobs, microtasks and complex jobs. “Already, commentators are seeing a bifurcation of some work and jobs into highly augmented, complex, well-paid jobs on the one hand and lower wage, lower skilled work across service sectors on the other,” notes the report.

The challenge is to execute the reinvention of work in such a way that all types of workers are taken along.

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