“The challenge for leaders is this,” said Boudreau. “It is not enough merely to be good leaders for their employees, because they may be missing a critical proportion of the people who are really doing the work. They have the chance to engage and lead a whole ecosystem of potential workers who may come to them in many different ways.”
The Deloitte research suggests, however, that “most organizations look at alternative work arrangements as a transactional solution, not as a strategically important source of talent. 54% of respondents said they either managed alternative workers inconsistently or had few or no processes for managing them at all.” And yet, these roles are often the opposite of transactional. Freelance CFOs, for example, are sometimes used on a consultative basis to help with a big round of funding or during a transition between other CFOs. The report emphasizes the strategic importance as well: “It enables an organization to put the right talent in place where and when it’s most needed to get results in a labor market where traditionally on-balance-sheet talent is becoming ever harder to find.”
According to the report, “Organizations that take this workforce seriously can build strategies and programs to access and engage talented people wherever they may sit in the labor pool, driving business growth and extending the diversity of the workforce.”
From Jobs to Superjobs
Machine learning is quickly becoming integrated into many aspects of our daily lives. Think medical devices, driverless cars, temperature controls in commercial buildings, and Netflix recommendations, to name a few.
But many questions continue to go hand-in-hand with any discussion about machine learning and automation: How will these technologies affect job roles? What new jobs will they create? What tasks will disappear?
Roles are changing, Deloitte’s report reveals, but perhaps not in the ways we might expect. Paradoxically, the findings state, “To be able to take full advantage of technology, organizations must redesign jobs to focus on finding the human dimension of work. This will create new roles that we call ‘superjobs’: jobs that combine parts of different traditional jobs into integrated roles that leverage the significant productivity and efficiency gains that can arise when people work with technology.”
Organizations aren’t shying away from the challenge. According to the report, a majority of organizations expect to increase their use of everything from cognitive technologies to robotic process automation over the next three years.