I’ve been noodling around with thinking about the future of work since first reading Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux back in 2014.
Laloux’s “Evolutionary-Teal” paradigm started my journey to challenge much of what I’d learnt about organisations and management in my career before then. Teal organisations are characterised by self-management, integration of the whole self at work and serving wider interests beyond profit alone.
There’s a consistency between Laloux’s thinking and the work that Hackman and Oldham did back in the 1970s on what makes job roles motivating and engaging in the first place.
Their job characteristics model suggests five dimensions to create roles that are motivating for people at work:
- Skill variety: The degree to which a role requires a range of activities and skills.
- Task identity: The ability to complete a whole, identifiable piece of work from start to finish.
- Task significance: The perceived importance and impact of the work being done.
- Autonomy: The amount of freedom and discretion someone has over how they perform their role.
- Feedback: Clear information about how effective someone’s being in that role.
That’s been a good starting point for organisational design for a long time now, but I’ve been reflecting on how that might be changing.
The growth of remote work, recruitment challenges and a generational shift in attitudes towards work have led to more work happening beyond the scope of traditional employed roles. Platforms like Fiverr, Upwork and Toptal are the most visible signs of this trend.
In my work with founders, I’ve noticed this greater atomisation and externalisation of work becoming a stronger driver of how organisations and processes are set up. Externalised atomisation offers a level of agility and flexibility that can be invaluable for rapid growth.
Breaking down work into more specialised tasks means that founders to tap into a global freelance talent pool. through platforms and direct relationships.
But I’ve also seen the downsides where a lack of stable core team in a business leads to problems creating organisational memory. This can usually be handled through greater focus on how knowledge is captured and held in a business, but I sense a deeper issue at play here.
As work becomes more atomised and parcelled out to specialist freelancers, what does that mean in the context of Laloux’s thinking?
The positive view might be that they are focussing on work on their terms, able to integrate their personal and professional lives on their terms and explore their professional passions, freed from the shackles of traditional management.
On the flipside you might see greater worker exploitation, less security of tenure and mental health challenges through managing repetitive work without relevance to some wider purpose.
For founders building companies I think there’s a delicate balance to strike.
We build organisations to achieve things that we can’t achieve alone.
But if those organisations are overly dependent on loosely attached freelancers, they feel fragile and lacking the longer term deep human relationships that underpin longer term collaboration, creativity and the development of novel ideas.
In practice there’s also a hidden overhead. The management cost of overly atomised work is something that often gets overlooked in growth businesses. It just takes more time and effort than most founders think.
And as I think about the job characteristics model I wonder how greater external atomisation affects employee motivation.
My sense is that it reduces work to a far more transactional status and even with the best intentions that has a negative effect on quality of the work and the experience for the person doing the work.
Many growth businesses are highly dependent on retaining key knowledge workers. In that context my instinct is that the demotivating effects of excessive atomisation outweigh any efficiency gains.
The harder but long term better path is to conceive organisations that enable Laloux’s vision of work and allow individuals to act with autonomy, making meaningful contributions to the future of the business.
The trend towards atomised work is undoubtedly part of this, but the externalisation of this work may be a second order concern.
Finding ways to atomise work in a way that’s consistent with the Laloux’s thinking and the criteria that Hackman and Oldham developed feels like a good place to start in 2025.
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