April 2020
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Adapting to Change by Decentralizing Work

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

The coronavirus outbreak has forced the most significant social change or many of our lifetimes, and the pandemic’s effect on work now and in the future is going to be difficult to understate. It’s not simply a matter of “Well, now more people work from home;” it’s fundamentally changing what work is and how we perform it. Smart leaders are using this as an opportunity not just to get by until work can return to normal but to embrace the change by rearranging work and having team members roles change to better adapt to the evolving needs of the marketplace. They are doing this first by making work portable across the entire organization. If anything, the virus has taught us that mission-critical work needs to be performed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tying it to certain employees’ institutional knowledge or specific locations won’t cut it anymore; it’s important to break functions up into tasks that people with the requisite skills from anywhere in the organization might be able to perform. These marketplaces help enable workers who find themselves displaced to quickly adapt and help take on what is likely a glut of work elsewhere in the organization.

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