The Rise of Superteams
A superteam is not just a team of great people. It’s a great team in which members are connected through collective intelligence. The pandemic has...
2 min read
Laurence Collins
:
Sep 8, 2020 12:04:00 PM
‘From structures to skills – organisational success has been re-designed’
COVID-19 forced organisations to conduct a huge experiment – re-organise their work, workforces and workplaces immediately.
Companies like Barclays issued thousands of employees with laptops, built the infrastructure and communication channels for them to work from home effectively and re-organised the way resource, talent and technology was being deployed to fulfil mission-critical tasks, at speed.
This was a workforce optimisation project on steroids – and if nothing else it proved one thing – radical change can be implemented when the strategic objective is clear. It also showed the capacity we have to transform structural elements of the ways in which work is fulfilled.
In this case the mission was:
"Re-organise work, workforces and workplaces to be as safe as possible, as quickly as possible, with minimal disruption to the tasks that need to be fulfilled."
Now, the question is:
"How do companies move beyond the initial implementation of virtual working and collaboration to truly optimise work ?"
So, the next mission is a longer-term project but follows on naturally:
‘Create the optimal blend of human work and digital work architectures to maximise productivity, wellbeing and value creation.’
How To Get Started?
Organisational Well-Being
Begin by running a series of live experiments to test the different signals and variables that can help to optimise human and digital work architectures.
No-one has ever truly optimised the link between organisational resilience, workforce architecture, employee wellbeing and productivity. We refer to this combined set of measures as ‘organisational well-being’. This is what companies need to turn the dial on.
Furthermore, due to:
…we call the programme of change built to improve organisational well-being: ‘human and digital work transformation’.
Finally, we refer to the collective systems an organisation uses to fulfil work as ‘human and digital work architectures’.
What’s This New Language About?
Transforming the language we use is a fundamental part of building new mental models.
You cannot redesign systems and models effectively without challenging your own deeply held assumptions, demanding tremendous clarity on and commitment to strategic objectives, and re-defining the way an organisation is conceptualised.
As such, transforming ‘human and digital work architectures’ requires a high degree of reflexivity, and the ability to instil a new organisational culture. This requires ambition, perseverance and commitment to new language, concepts and models.
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