For Love or Money 3: Opportunities for Re-engineering

I've had a chapter on reward included in MuseumEtc's book, 'For Love or Money': Re-engineering the Way Museums Work. However, I would hope the content will be relevant for people working in other sectors too.

The changes required to support both customers and employees / workers are often going to be very significant and may require radical re-engineering rather than more incremental improvement (although implementing these radical changes in an ongoing, agile manner is often the very best approach).

As shown in figure 3, re-engineering means developing new processes and services to meet particular objectives, without being constrained by the way things are currently done. However a key requirement in today’s digital age is that these objectives now need to refer to employee expectations as well as business and customer needs. In addition, redeveloping processes and services to meet these needs will often benefit from including design thinking, personas and journey maps to help ensure interactions with employees at key touchpoints within or around the process are as positive as possible.

Once processes and services have been redeveloped it is possible to identify new roles and skill requirements to support these, allowing staff appropriate discretion to identify new ways of meeting customer needs in order to provide exceptional experiences.

These roles can then be grouped together to provide new jobs and gigs to be performed by people acting in the different segments of the workforce. These jobs and gigs need to be supported by the use of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and robotics (Jesuthasan and Boudreau, 2018), as well as outsourcing, to ensure core, contract and peripheral staff can concentrate on the most valuable activities, as well as the digital gig working platforms required to support contingent workers.

These jobs and gigs can then be grouped together into an updated organisation design. Whilst most organisations, in the museum sector and elsewhere, have traditionally organised themselves using functional and divisional structures, they are increasingly using new organisation models (Ingham, 2017) based on project teams (the main opportunity for contract and especially contingent staff), and communities and networks (core, peripheral and contract staff). They are also increasingly using new approaches such as self management. Museums should also look at using these more modern approaches, particularly as they tend to support people’s sense of purpose and empowerment, helping them to add value to their customers.

Based upon the above steps, museums can then check whether they have the right people working in these redesigned roles and reselect people into them as appropriate. Museums should also think more broadly about recruitment pools which may help them improve the diversity of their workforces.

They also need to set up mechanisms to support changes in the workforce, such as the HR and management processes required to support the various workforce segments. One particularly important requirement is to update the museum’s reward strategy and practices.

Jon Ingham, @joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham
Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive
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info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134