Rethinking traditional management in workforce ecosystems: Four areas for strategic change
The composition of the workforce is changing—and challenging—long-held assumptions about workforce management. The future of work belongs to those who can adapt as traditional models give way to new frameworks for workforce ecosystem orchestration.
Elizabeth J. Altman
Sue Cantrell
Robin Jones
Steve Hatfield
Ask today’s business leaders to define their workforce, and you’ll get a different answer from each one. But many of them will point to a common story evolving in the business world: The makeup of their workforce is changing in ways that are challenging long-held approaches to workforce management. The standard employee life cycle model of attracting, developing, and retaining employees—and with it, the assumption that full-time employees are the most predominant and important contributors—is falling short as organizations increasingly depend on contingent workers and other partners to do business.
In the third annual MIT SMR—Deloitte Future of the Workforce global study, roughly half of the organizations surveyed reported that at least 30% of their work was produced by external workers.1 In some sectors—like the tech industry—it’s not uncommon for contingent workers to make up 40% to 50% of an organization’s workforce.2 What does this growing reliance on external contributors—long- and short-term contractors, gig workers, partners, and technologies—mean for management models? As the makeup of the modern workforce becomes increasingly diverse, new functional relationships and leadership approaches are necessary.
Based on three years of research, involving multiple global cross-industry surveys yielding more than 13,000 responses and over 50 individual executive interviews, we developed a framework to help leaders move from managing their workforce to orchestrating their workforce. The notion of orchestration—or bringing together disparate elements in a harmonious way—is an analogy for leaders working in concert to coordinate workforce ecosystem members.3 While traditional management generally implies exerting control, orchestrating reflects that while contributors have their own agency or autonomy, an organization can intentionally coordinate participants in an aligned effort toward reaching individual and shared strategic and operational objectives.
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Elizabeth J. Altman
Sue Cantrell
Robin Jones
Steve Hatfield
Cover image by: Sonya Vasilieff