Navigating Workforce Ecosystems to Unlock Success with Jeff Schwartz and Co-authors

Successful workforce ecosystems to reach strategic goals with people, partners, and technologies. Learn how leading companies foster collaborative communities to tackle complex challenges. Continue reading to discover strategies for building a dynamic culture of inclusion and crowd-powered problem solving.

This book examines how companies can cultivate collaborative communities, or “workforce ecosystems“, that can help tackle complex business challenges. The authors argue that traditional hierarchies and top-down management are less effective in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. Instead, organizations need new approaches that leverage diversity, cross-functional collaboration and crowd wisdom.

The book outlines the key characteristics of successful workforce ecosystems, such as shared leadership, social networking tools, innovation processes and rewards/recognition systems that encourage contribution and risk-taking. It provides case studies of companies that have built vibrant internal communities to improve innovation, problem-solving and change implementation. Through workforce ecosystems, companies can develop more dynamic cultures of inclusion where all voices are heard.

The authors make a persuasive case that the most innovative firms of the future will be those that empower self-organizing teams to work on multidimensional challenges. However, some readers may find the case studies too brief and prescriptive. Additionally, the book does not sufficiently address potential risks and downsides of the ecosystem approach.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking read for leaders looking to transform their organizational models and practices to gain competitive advantages in a fast-changing world. The workforce ecosystem framework offers a promising new approach for cultivating more collaborative and engaged workplaces.

Genres

Business management, organizational development, leadership, innovation, strategy, human resources, social media, networks, culture change, future of work, case studies, collaboration.

Recommendation

The emerging workplace looks very different from the rigid, hierarchical workplace of the past, say writers Elizabeth J. Altman, David Kiron, Jeff Schwartz and Robin Jones. Today’s workforces have more of an ecosystem structure than the traditional silo structure. If you want to lead your workforce to success, you need to know how to orchestrate this structure, while respecting the autonomy of all participants. Learn how embracing a more expansive view of your workforce can help your organization reach its strategic goals. Shift your business mind-set, seeing opportunities for collaboration and growth when others see only the threat of competition.

Take-Aways

• Today’s workforces are more like dynamic ecosystems than rigid silos.
• Leverage interdependencies and complementarities to create more value and reach your goals.
• Consider three essential ecosystem characteristics when creating your strategy.
• Integration architectures can help you orchestrate robust ecosystems and autonomous players.
• Expand your workplace ecosystem with a four-phase approach.
• Attract and engage talent by appealing to workers’ desires for flexibility and meaning.
• Harness the power of technology to better orchestrate workplace ecosystems.
• Navigate a complex future by prioritizing ethics and new leadership practices.

Summary

Today’s workforces are more like dynamic ecosystems than rigid silos.

Executives today must focus on more than profit margins – they must consider their social responsibilities, focusing on issues including preventing worker exploitation, improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) and providing meaningful employment experiences. Today’s workforces include a wide variety of people, ranging from full-time employees to freelance workers and investors, all of whom function much like independent, yet interrelated organisms within an ecosystem. A “workforce ecosystem” is, essentially, “a structure that encompasses actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to create value for the organization.”

“As with biological systems, workforce ecosystem structures can be dynamic: Actors come and go, goals change, and relationships shift.”

Workforce ecosystems are emerging as a response to shifting workplace norms, as it’s now normal for people to work remotely, with gig workers frequently working at multiple companies at once. Rather than try to impose outdated hierarchical structures on today’s workforce, executives that keep pace with change respond with more flexibility, nurturing networks via the ecosystem approach, as opposed to silos. Workforce ecosystems also position organizations to better navigate complex, interdisciplinary challenges, as they can help leaders harness collective intelligence, nurturing innovation on blended, cross-functional teams. The ecosystem approach better responds to workers’ growing desire for autonomy and independent career development, as it supports workers in joining and leaving projects, giving them opportunities to experiment with new responsibilities and build skills.

Leverage interdependencies and complementarities to create more value and reach your goals.

Workforce ecosystems consist of both internal and external actors, with the former referring to employees and those working within your organization, and the latter referring to those outside your organization, such as short and long-term contractors. Internal participants are typically those who receive benefits (for example, health insurance) from your organization, but they don’t need to physically work on your premises, as they can also be remote workers. External participants may work in your organization’s physical space, but they’re not considered “employees.” “Complementarities” are a fundamental feature of workforce ecosystems, meaning that interdependent entities can create more value for consumers, when each provides a product or service that increases in value when bundled with the other’s. For example, a hotdog vendor selling hotdogs and buns from different suppliers is benefiting from complementarities, as selling hot dogs and buns together creates more value than selling them separately.

“Organizations are expanding their reach by engaging with a range of contributors to help them achieve strategic goals.”

Workforce ecosystems function best when different entities are interdependent, in that the success of one may hinge on the success of another, creating the need for collaboration toward goals. For example, NASA achieves its goals with help from many actors within its workforce ecosystem, including its employees and its 2,600 commercial partnerships and 150 international partnerships. Robert Gibbs, NASA’s associate administrator and mission support, explains that NASA makes a concerted effort to “work across a lot of different spheres,” leveraging its diverse talents “across this nontraditional definition of workforce.” When you build a robust workforce ecosystem, you may choose to develop relationships with those at other organizations, connecting your ecosystems together to expand your possibilities for value creation.

Consider three essential workforce ecosystems characteristics when creating your strategy.

When creating your business strategy, carefully consider how it relates to the characteristics of your workforce ecosystem by considering the following “3 Cs”:

• Comprehensiveness – An ecosystem low in comprehensiveness is one that lacks a diversity of different types of actors (for example, an organization that focuses primarily on internal employees). An organization that has high levels of comprehensiveness has a robust ecosystem, composed of internal and external actors, who operate with interdependencies and complementarities. If you demonstrate high levels of comprehensiveness, executing your business strategy will likely hinge on leveraging both your internal and external talent.
• Community – The degree to which you’ve nurtured a community (or communities) around your organization will impact your organization’s strategy. For example, a community of freelance designers, who give one another feedback and communicate with one another, is pivotal to the success of the T-shirt company, Threadless.
• Coordination – Who coordinates and manages the various relationships within your workforce ecosystem? To what degree do you have formal processes and consistent, cross-functional coordination in place? You’ll need to make strategic decisions concerning how actively you want to manage internal and external participants.

Integration architectures can help you orchestrate robust ecosystems and autonomous players.

Managing your workforce ecosystem requires more of an orchestration approach than it does a traditional management approach. While management approaches often focus on the idea of top-down control, an orchestration approach respects that all participants have some degree of autonomy and agency. Coordinate internal and external teams to work toward achieving their collective goals by developing an effective orchestration framework. In this framework, the primary orchestrators are your senior leaders, while procurement and human resources teams are tasked with managerial responsibilities related to contributor networks. Finally, information technology, finance and legal enable the effective operation of your ecosystem. While many companies have disconnected workforces today, aspire to build integration architectures that codify and coordinate functions, such as HR, and capture the ways in which you interact with your extended workforce.

“Hybrid teams comprising employees and external contributors, often in different geographic locations, represent another leadership challenge of orchestrating workforce ecosystems.”

Reflect on the culture or cultures you’d like to grow within your workforce ecosystems. For example, employee-centric cultures tend to ignore gig workers and freelancers, focusing primarily on building a consistent culture with internal participants. By contrast, you may also work to nurture a common culture across your entire ecosystem, including both internal and external workers. Alternatively, you may find your ecosystem is so robust that it supports multiple cultures – perhaps workers in different geographic locations have slightly different cultures. If that’s the case, make sure your different cultures align with your strategic priorities, while adhering to regulatory frameworks.

Expand your workplace ecosystem with a four-phase approach.

Consider orchestrating your ecosystem with the following four-stage process that connects decentralized activities to a centralized vision:

1. Create the orchestration team – As a leader, you should assemble a group of local, external and central representatives from your stakeholder groups. Be mindful of the fact that bringing in too much external talent may demotivate your current internal team.
2. Experiment locally – Your legal team should execute pilot programs to explore new workforce ecosystem relationships, noting any gaps between what your managers need from contributors and what they’re capable of providing.
3. Coordinate resourcing and learning – Prepare for disruptions as you switch to an ecosystem approach, looking for any outdated practices or policies you need to update. Embrace an ethos of continuous learning, encouraging team members to share successes and failures with one another.
4. Expand your ecosystem – Don’t let ecosystems grow stagnant; instead, periodically widen central teams to revise goals. Take time to identify new systems, metrics and processes you could adopt.

Attract and engage talent by appealing to workers’ desires for flexibility and meaning.

As you embrace a workforce ecosystem approach, participants will have more opportunities for learning and development, which requires a mind-set shift: Rather than focus primarily on enhancing workers’ skills to better serve your organization, center learning and development around workers, creating opportunities in which they can rise to their full potential. Learning and development can also be worker-led, enabling workers to take initiative. For example, at Schneider Electric, workers identify new skills they want to develop, as well as projects and roles they want to try out, listed on the organization’s internal talent marketplace. When you make options and resources within your workforce ecosystem visible, you’re giving workers the information they need to make choices and direct their own career growth.

“When leaders manage with an eye toward unleashing workers’ potential, career paths open up.”

It’s time to replace the metaphor of a “career ladder” with that of something more multidimensional and wide-ranging, such as a jungle gym, a climbing wall or a lattice, as career paths aren’t as linear and clear-cut as they once were. When you ignore workers’ desire to move flexibly throughout your organization and try new roles, you may lose talent. For example, the Deutsche Post DHL Group lost employees after making a policy that they had to remain in their roles for a year before they could apply for new positions within the organization. Engaging workers today who, unlike workers of the past, are unlikely to remain in their companies long-term, requires a flexible approach to career planning (for example, through talent sharing programs), and respecting their desire for change and variability. Organizations must also respond to today’s workers’ increased desire for meaning, investing in creating meaningful work experiences.

Harness the power of technology to better orchestrate workplace ecosystems.

The following five technologies can help leaders orchestrate ecosystems, as they enable and enhance workforce management capabilities:

1. Work tech – Productivity-enhancing tech can range from algorithms to robots. Consider adding machines to teams, as you can combine artificial intelligence with the intelligence of human participants to drive value.
2. Workforce tech – Manage your integrated workforce with workforce management technologies, such as learning platforms, HR systems and talent marketplaces.
3. Workplace tech – Consider leveraging technologies that facilitate distributed work, ranging from Zoom to emerging metaverse technologies.
4. Verification and credentialization tech – Workers will need standardized digital credentials such as badges and tokens, to help them move across workforce ecosystems. Developers are currently creating new verification systems to track the mutable value of credentials, such as dynamic NFTs.
5. “Technology as a participant in workforce ecosystems” – Humanity is moving into a future in which machines can function as workers within workplace ecosystems, which means technology’s role is changing from that of an enabler of work to a potential participant.

Navigate a complex future by prioritizing ethics and new leadership practices.

Aspire to be a socially responsible organization, taking responsibility for the welfare of your extended workforce and employees. Just as you have ethical responsibilities to your workers as an employer, contingent workers have ethical responsibilities to you as their employer. For example, workers with access to your sensitive data have an ethical responsibility to meet the security requirements and expectations that you share with them. Aspire to build an inclusive organization, in which workers feel a sense of respect, belonging and being appreciated for creating value. Your organization also has a responsibility to demonstrate ethical conduct as a player among interdependent organizations. For example, the pharmaceutical company Regeneron failed to fulfill its ethical responsibilities when it broke the law by paying health care foundations for copay subsidies of its drugs, deceiving both government and its customers.

“A workforce ecosystems perspective allows leaders to take a much richer and more nuanced view of organizations along with the people, partners and technologies on which they rely to capture and create value.”

Moving into the future, as a leader, you must embrace several shifts to thrive within workplace ecosystems. Cultivate a more expansive mind-set, considering the needs of both your own ecosystems and other connected ecosystems, rather than focusing only on the needs of a single organization. If you’re a manager, focus on collaborating with actors from other organizations to create new credential-based systems, helping employees move across ecosystems with more fluidity. Finally, competing companies must learn to identify the advantages of aligning their ecosystems to achieve goals together they couldn’t on their own with strategic alliances.

About the Authors

Jeff Schwartz is the author of Work Disrupted, as well as an adviser on the future of work for Deloitte Consulting, and the vice president of insights and impact at Gloat. Elizabeth J. Altman is an associate professor of management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Manning School of Business. She’s also a guest editor of the MIT Sloan Management Review Future of the Workforce project. David Kiron is the editorial director of research at MIT Sloan Management Review. He’s also a program lead with MIT’s Big Ideas research initiatives. Robin Jones leads workplace transformation at Deloitte, and she serves on the CEO’s Marketplace Leadership Team with Deloitte Consulting.