THE past decade was marked by considerable economic and social disruption in the world of work. Organisations scrambled to stay in front of those disruptions, making point-in-time adjustments to their business models and processes to try to remain competitive in a quickly changing landscape. But when the events of 2020 created disruptions with orders of magnitude greater than what organisations were used to dealing with, it became unequivocally clear that point-in-time responses were not enough. As plans laid in 2019 were shattered, so too were organisational views of preparedness. Executives recognised that planning for expected and incremental events is not a solid foundation for thriving in multiple unknown futures, and they are shifting their approach to preparedness as a result (figure 1).

What also became clear is that preparedness for the unexpected depends crucially on an organisation’s handling of work and the workforce. 2020’s global health, financial, and social equity crises may have had their most profound impacts on work and workers, with organisations making sweeping changes to what, where, how, and by whom work was done. The primacy of work and workers in the ability to navigate the year’s disruptions demonstrates that, when it comes to preparing for unknown futures, organisations have an imperative to structure work and support their workers in ways that enable them to rise to the challenges that disruption may bring.

Perspective challenges organisations to operate boldly in the face of uncertainty. Rather than being paralysed by a multitude of futures and options, organisations that employ perspective use disruption as a launching pad to imagine new opportunities and possibilities. We assert that the ability to take confident steps forward rests on the re-architecture of work. The re-architecture of work is reimagination put into practice; it is the act, the how, of deliberately designing work in ways that allow human capabilities to flourish in the search for new outcomes and new value.

The 2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report called on organisations to look at work and the workforce through these three lenses to transcend a perceived conflict between humans and technology. This year, having seen how organisations are making their way through the COVID-19 crisis, we suggest that these three attributes are essential for organisations to move more quickly from survive to thrive in a world of perpetual disruption.

Purpose in a world disrupted: Establishing a north star

2020 taught us the importance of purpose in establishing an organisation’s direction in the face of disruption. We saw that organisations that embraced purpose were able to anchor their workers, teams, and leaders to a common understanding of what they were trying to accomplish. These organisations used purpose as a driving force to sift through competing priorities, unite workers under common goals, drive belonging, and focus energy and resources on their most pressing organisational and societal goals.

Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, credits Delta Air Lines' sense of purpose for helping the organisation through the COVID-19 crisis. “When I took over as CEO, we studied what our mission was and what our purpose was, which has helped us post-pandemic because we were clear pre-pandemic. Our people can do their very best when they have leadership support and feel connected to the organisation’s purpose. Our mission is to connect people. No one better connects the world.”¹

Purpose is inherently human because it relies on the uniquely human ability to identify where economic value and social values intersect. Understanding these intersection points can then allow leaders to identify a purpose consistent with both economic value and social values, and to use that purpose to guide their choices on an ongoing basis.

A powerful manifestation of purpose is bringing economic and social imperatives together to drive meaningful change inside an organisation and in society. One example of such an organisation is Edison International and its largest subsidiary, Southern California Edison (SCE), which decided to publish equal employment opportunity commission (EEOC)-type information on the company’s workforce and inclusion commitments to its employees, board members, and external stakeholder groups. As Natalie Schilling, SCE’s vice president of people, culture, and strategy, puts it: “We want to create more transparency for our employees and leaders about where we have opportunity [to further our commitments to make our organisation more inclusive].”² Liji Thomas, SCE’s head of diversity and inclusion, amplifies this view:

Part of being authentic on this journey is to go first and to lead from the front with transparency. In order to be successful and to shift an entire industry, or to create long-term sustainable change in the Fortune 250, we need to have other players at the table that share their data, particularly around pay equity.³

By being transparent about this DE&I-related information—and, by implication, its commitments and values around DE&I—SCE has given itself a platform to add its voice to public conversations on issues that matter to their organisation and workforce. That platform allows them to encourage other organisations to create lasting change by following its lead, while also empowering SCE’s workers to raise conversations and topics that can drive real change within the organisation.

Potential in a world disrupted: Capitalising on human capabilities

To thrive amid constant disruption, organisations need to capitalise on the potential of their workers and their teams. Organisations that understand and activate workforce potential will be better able to capitalise on human ingenuity and achieve organisational speed and agility. Our survey results show that most leaders agree: Seventy-two per cent of the executives in the 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey told us that “the ability of their people to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles” was either the most important or second most important factor in their organisation’s ability to navigate future disruptions. However, only 17% of these same executives said that their organisation was “very ready” to adapt and reskill workers to assume new roles, pointing to a substantial disconnect between leaders’ priorities and the reality of how their organisations support workforce development.

This disconnect may exist because many organisations still take a limited view of their workforce. Many tend to think of workers in terms of static role descriptions rather than considering workers as individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and interests who are capable of continuous growth. Because of this, organisations miss the opportunity to foster their workers’ potential and to harness their passions in the pursuit of organisational goals.

AstraZeneca is an example of an organisation that capitalised on worker potential to quickly mobilise its resources to meet a pressing need—in this case, to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Tonya Villafana, AstraZeneca’s vice president and global franchise head of infection, credits the company’s accelerated response to its ability to tap into a varied pool of experts, both across the company and through its collaboration with the University of Oxford. But more than this, AstraZeneca not only involved top experts but also added “high performers who were really passionate and wanted to get involved” with the vaccine development team.

They were the right people at the right time to put into that role. Not everyone has to be an infectious disease expert. It was more about having that kind of passion to deliver and the energy to want to do it.⁴

AstraZeneca also tapped into the potential of its ecosystem. United by a common purpose, the company collaborated with academia and regulatory agencies and employed new ways of working that allowed them to begin vaccine trials in record time, doing in weeks and months what might have taken months or years in the past. They hope the success of those collaborations will lead to meaningful change moving forward. According to Villafana:

I think it has fundamentally changed the industry in terms of how we will work going forward with each other. I hope we’ve learned as a human race that we should do this better.

ServiceNow, a digital workflow company, also recognised the value of leaning into workers’ potential for growth and high performance during the crisis. “We delivered two major, high quality product releases on-time, and the amount of code we wrote during the pandemic actually went up,” ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott says. “There’s no question that this brought a lot of awareness to the management team about human capacity and how great work can happen from anywhere, if you enable it.” He stresses the importance of trusting workers to bring creativity and initiative to the job. “Talent will work where they are trusted and respected, and their productivity, individuality, and creativity get unleashed in new and unusual ways—unusual because people want to do things that have never been done before, not do things because that’s the way they’ve always done it.”

Perspective in a world disrupted: Re-architecting work to take bold steps forward

To act on the perspective that uncertainty is an opportunity to create one’s own future, organisations need to be poised to take bold steps forward even if they go in a different direction from what was usual and comfortable before.

ServiceNow is one organisation that shifted direction in this way during COVID-19. In March 2020, the company held a “blue sky” strategy session as a forum for leaders to discuss the future of work, the future of digital transformation, and the future of the company. But as they considered these issues under the cloud of the emerging pandemic, CEO Bill McDermott realised, “If we can’t help the world manage the pandemic, there won’t be a blue sky.” He pivoted the meeting to focus instead on how ServiceNow could quickly innovate and bring new products to market that would help organizations maintain business operations during the pandemic. As part of this effort, ServiceNow quickly built and deployed four emergency response management applications as well as a suite of safe workplace applications to make returning to the workplace work for everyone.

Our view is that being prepared to take bold steps forward in uncertainty depends on a deliberate effort to re-architect work, putting work reimagination into action by constantly examining work to find ways to open new pathways to an organisation’s goals. We saw the power of work re-architecture during the COVID-19 crisis when organisations had to rethink fundamental assumptions about what work is and how it could be done. The ability to re-architect work according to a different set of assumptions and put those changes into practice proved essential to organisations’ survival, and it can also enable them to thrive long after the pandemic recedes.

Perhaps for this reason, most executives in our survey are now prioritising how they look at work. Sixty-one per cent told us that their work transformation objectives going forward would focus on reimagining work, compared to only 29% who were thinking that way before the pandemic (figure 2).

Re-architecting work means more than automating tasks and activities. It’s about configuring work to capitalise on what humans can accomplish when work is designed around their strengths. This may be why executives in our survey identified the two factors most related to human potential as the most important to transforming work (figure 3). While technology is important, this is not a challenge for technology alone, but for humans and technology together.

To bring out human potential, leadership is critical. Indeed, leadership was the top factor our survey identified as a driver of change. Sixty per cent of executive respondents said that leadership behaviour was critical to achieving their future vision of preparedness; they also identified several leadership issues—prioritisation; skills, experience, and culture; and visioning—as the three biggest barriers to work transformation.

Delta Air Lines CEO Bastian stresses the need for strong leadership during a crisis. The business experienced a dramatic swing in circumstance, from record-high revenue and performance in February 2020 to only about 3% of that revenue base a mere 30 days later.⁵ “In our 95-year history, our company has never needed its leadership more than it needs it now,” Bastian reflected. But he also gives Delta Air Lines' workers credit for helping the company weather the crisis. “We’ve had a lot of great leaders who built this company, but it’s the people who are in the chairs today who are more important than at any time in our history. It can be hard, and the stress and the challenges are amazing, but [it is an] honour and a privilege to be serving in a time like this.”⁶

ServiceNow’s McDermott has also risen to the call for strong leadership. “I’m leaning in with everything I’ve got to reform, reshape, and reimagine the future without any interest in harvesting the past, because I truly believe we will never go back to the way things were before the pandemic,” McDermott says. The future, he believes, is one where humans take center stage in enabling an organisation’s success. “We’re in a world now that’s all about people. We’re in a truly human moment where any connection that doesn’t absolutely lean into people will go nowhere.”

A call to action

If the past year has shown us anything, it’s that putting people at the heart of an organisation’s decisions about work and the workforce pays off in the ability to better stay ahead of disruption. Putting that ability into practice entails thinking about work and the workforce in terms of purpose, potential, and perspective to build an organisation that can thrive in an unpredictable environment with an unknown future. Leaders should find ways to create a shared sense of purpose that mobilises people to pull strongly in the same direction as they face the organisation’s current and future challenges. They should trust people to work in ways that allow them to fulfill their potential, offering workers a degree of choice over the work they do to align their passions with organisational needs. And they should embrace the perspective that reimagining work is key to the ability to achieve new and better outcomes in a world that is itself being constantly reimagined.

ServiceNow’s McDermott may have said it best: “Leaders of consequence understand that what must be done eventually should be done immediately.” Now may be a unique moment in history that gives leaders the impetus to move into a significantly higher level of action and vision. It is up to them—to us—to seize that moment, making meaningful changes in how we approach work and the workforce that position our organisations to thrive.

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