Many COOs are already creating more community-based teams and organisations in order to break silos and foster collaboration and decentralised decision-making. It is a big cultural change, founded in empowerment of your people.
I think we can all agree that we are operating in a human-powered economy. Everywhere, companies of all sizes and industries have already transformed from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy and now to an economy that is powered by the hearts, minds and essential human traits of people.
For COOs, too, many will now say nothing is more important than people, from workers and contractors to customers and community members. These human connections now drive everything of value to an organisation, including operational excellence, innovation, efficiency, brand relevance, productivity, retention, adaptability, risk and more.
Is it an easy transition? No! First, the geo-political shocks have forced COOs everywhere to re-evaluate partnerships and offshore service delivery models; while it may not be the ‘end of globalisation’, organisations are seeking to de-risk their delivery models and bringing some of their activity onshore.
Add to this, the rapid rise of AI and GenAI, also forcing (or allowing) COOs to re-architect the work they expect their workers to execute. Among other things, this means redesigning work to emphasise what humans do best, prioritising work that celebrates and depends on human capabilities such as creativity and problem-solving, and making it clear how the work connects to broader motivations and goals for the organisation and society.
When people thrive, operations thrives
The moral of the story is Operations depends on its people! Yet, current efforts to prioritise these all-important connections are sometimes falling short – maybe in part because many organisations are stuck in a legacy mindset that centres on extracting value from people rather than working with them to create a better future.
To be honest, most of us probably only have a partial grasp of the skills that will be necessary in the next decade, or even lack them entirely. The people strategies we are adopting most often relate to workload volatility, tactical changes to staffing or standardisation of policies, processes, and systems.
Yet, there are much bigger tasks ahead for COOs, which is how to rearchitect work, recharge the workforce, and reimagine the workplace. Even if we are able to attract the right people now, we might not be able to attract the right people in the future. Whether we are front-runners or late-adopters of people-centric strategies, now is probably the time to take a step back and consider how to really deliver on the new people agenda.
Are we actually creating value for people? Are we leaving them with greater health and well-being, stronger skills and greater employability? Do we actually provide good jobs and opportunities for advancement? And are we really progressing toward equity, increased belonging, and heightened connection to purpose? Just a few of the questions we need to ask.
What to consider
In spite of the complexity, the good news is that COOs now play a more pivotal role than ever in today’s fast-moving and ambiguous business landscape, also on the people side. Creating a differentiated and compelling employee experience that empowers your workforce, fosters an adaptive and entrepreneurial mindset, and ultimately drives productivity in Operations is something that is (or at least should be) core to the role of the COO.
Other good news is through smart hiring, COOs now have access to a much wider talent pool, providing a unique opportunity to tap into distributed and diverse talent. However, it is equally important to remember existing employees who have stuck around, some of whom have been pulling double duty to fill in for those who left. That means giving people the kind of time, resources and support they need in a work landscape that continues to shift under their feet.
Besides these initial considerations, here are five other things for COOs to consider in order to win the people agenda:
- Focus on the why: It is always a good idea to design with the end in mind, but it is not enough to just clarify measures of success or key performance indicators. COOs should also focus attention on WHY the work is being done and what the ultimate desired outcomes are, beyond incremental activities and processes along the way.
- Anchor to human potential by investing in enduring skills and capabilities: Shifting to a model that focuses on outcomes over outputs, flows over processes, and skills over jobs means redefining expectations for performance and what success looks like. Desired outcomes should be clearly articulated and understood by everyone around the COO, and the approach to measuring success should reflect a reimagined work environment in which human and technological capabilities (like GenAI) function together in new ways.
- Elevate middle managers’ human role and empower them to own it: Middle managers typically play a crucial role in advancing human sustainability, as they are the frontline leadership helping employees develop skills and creating psychological safety and belonging in teams. COOs should empower managers with training, resources, and the autonomy to align policies and workloads with human priorities.
- Culture still eats strategy for breakfast: Post-covid working norms offer COOs much greater access to specialist resources, but increasingly we also need to tackle new challenges that arise in a hybrid workforce – for example how to foster a shared sense of culture and encourage individuals, especially those at the earlier stages of their career, to develop softer interpersonal skills and nurture personal networks.
- Deploy and refine – continuously: Re-Architecting work is not a simple, one-time fix for the COO, nor does it involve simply changing one or two areas of the organisation. It requires constant sensing, re-evaluation, and revising of aspirations and target outcomes. Thus, the capability to constantly rearchitect work in the face of future, often unpredictable disruptions is important.
For today’s COOs, the people agenda is a long-term play: The strategies put in place today will help determine whether your company can flourish for future generations. But more than that, it is a path towards creating a better future for us all, underscoring the interconnection between everything we do as humans. First and foremost, it calls on us as leaders to act on the role we all play as guardians of human thriving, making a commitment to prioritise, measure and improve human outcomes as much as we possibly can.
Forfatter spotlight
Tore Christian Jensen
As a part of the Strategy & Operations practice Tore has worked with analysis, development and implementation of operational strategies. Tore has deep experience with aligning business models to changing market demands through optimisation of business processes and aligning systems, organisation and governance accordingly. He has industry experience from manufacturing, transportation, consumer products and energy. His main focus is on on the operational core processes but he also covers administrative support processes. As a program manager Tore has been leading transformation projects for international clients heading multiple parallel projects and reporting directly to executive committee members. His responsibilities cover everything from initiating assessments, identifying opportunities for improvement to building business cases and following up by designing solutions and driving teams through implementation.