Future Work Strategy
Many businesses are preparing for the Future of Work in silos led by strategic thinkers. This unstructured and fragmented approach to the Future of Work risks conflicting business unit priorities, redundant processes and initiatives, and organizational misalignment. Risks can be costly.
A Future of Work Strategy can boost employee engagement, innovation, and competitiveness. HR leaders must build a coordinated strategy to compete in a disruptive and uncertain world as more firms plan for the Future of Work.
However, HR directors struggle to decide how to formalize the Future of Work at their firms. This framework presentation explains how to create a Future of Work Strategy by describing the 3-steps to follow to achieve the Future of Work Strategy:
- Trend analysis
- Scenario Creation
- Future of Work Strategic Planning
We examine each phase and break down the Future of Work Strategy formulation process into 8 steps.
A Future of Work Strategy often assesses current and future workforce needs, plans for upskilling and reskilling personnel, and implements new technology and work procedures. Gartner defines a Future of Work Strategy as a series of activities to address the uncertainties and repercussions of future events that affect how, when, where, who, and even what work is.
The organization or external trends like can cause these changes... (See more)
Trends Analysis
First-phase trend analysis has 3 steps: (1) scoping, (2) identifying, and (3) prioritizing trends and potential disruptions.
Sourced trends from outside specialists, press publications, industry-specific trend studies, and search engine alerts are one way to identify future work patterns. Internal sources include progressive business leaders, talent analytics, board and executive meeting minutes, employee, and consumer surveys. Meanwhile, derived trends by visualizing a possible future and working backward to what needs happen to make it happen. Premortems, science fiction, and cross-industry competitor behavior study can help predict the future.
In the 2nd step of Trends Analysis, we evaluate trends on a spectrum of low to high uncertainty and dependent on external influences. The significance and implications of detected trends are based on low to high uncertainty and external influences.
Trends Analysis concludes by prioritizing trends with the greatest potential impact or competitive advantage. NASA's 3-filter approach and John Deere's megatrend assessment filter approach demonstrate this.
Scenario Creation
Using prioritized Future of Work trends, the 2nd phase adapts to predict and test future business scenarios. Scenario creation follows to develop and test future scenarios.
In the 1st step of this phase, we develop future scenarios by identifying the business implications of each once your scenarios have been developed, using storytelling techniques to build simple and relatable narratives that illustrate the business impact, and assessing the quality of the scenarios.
To test scenarios, we must define possible events that must or must not happen for each scenario to unfold and analyze their likelihood to prioritize the scenarios with the highest probability and disruption.
Strategic Planning
In the 3rd step, a roadmap is created to identify, implement, and track future of work activities. The strategy plan should adapt to trends. Scenario Planning culminates with a strategy plan that can adapt to changing trends and implement future work objectives. Identifying Initiatives, Designing Programs, and Measuring Progress comprise the last phase.
Interested in learning more about the Future of Work Strategy? You can download an editable Future of Work Strategy and template here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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