Put your talent where the task is

The challenge facing every organisation today is how to respond flexibly to changing circumstances. A major part of this challenge is finding ways to align work and the people who perform it in an unpredictable environment. In practice, there are no easy solutions. Together with Factor Vijf, we explored a fresh perspective on this challenge in a special Brightpaper.

More and more work and organisational challenges are being addressed through flexible workflows that cut across hierarchies, departments and roles. The people and skills required increasingly vary from one situation to another. At the same time, there is a growing call to align work more closely with the contributions people themselves are willing and able to make, taking into account their talents, including those yet to be discovered, and their development ambitions. The question organisations face is whether to fit talent into existing structures or adapt those structures to accommodate talent.

However, finding ways to match talent with work remains a challenge for many organisations. In current practice, static job structures and rigid cost centres still play a dominant role. Yet there is a growing recognition that aligning people and work more effectively leads to a better match. This led us to the question: how can organisations optimise the match between people and work, enabling them to respond flexibly to a constantly changing workload while making full use of people’s existing qualities and capabilities?

In exploring this question, we reached an important conclusion: as no two organisations are alike and every individual is unique, it is becoming increasingly important to deploy people flexibly where they can make the greatest contribution and where their intrinsic motivation is strongest. To provide leaders and HR with a framework for addressing this strategically in practice, we have developed a model that helps organisations identify which approach to tasks and talent best suits their work, and which mechanism for matching the supply and demand of work is most appropriate.