What it is: we need to deconstruct jobs into tasks

Why it is important: the old-fashioned “job” is no longer relevant to the new agile company. Retail jobs are shifting too, becoming increasingly polarised between customer service stylists and fulfilment roles. The authors propose a new “operating system” for work.

Agility has become a trope in discussions about how retail is changing, especially since the covid pandemic. Now John Boudreau of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a senior research scientist at its Center for Effective Organizations and his co-author consultant  Ravin Jesuthasan look at what this means for work in an article in MIT SMR, prefiguring their book of the same title, due out next year.

The answer is that we need to deconstruct jobs into more granular units such as tasks and deply people according to their skills in those tasks. This will lead to new forms of recruiting, rewarding and engaging workers as well as a better understanding of how automation might replace, augment or reinvent human work. They describe a work operating system which allows people the flexibility to engage in work beyond their jobs.

In all industries, including retail, we are witnessing major shifts in the tasks expected of employees  (see Article : The Retail Renaissance) as well as a need to be able to adapt in situations of uncertainty.

Work Without Jobs