The Good Jobs Debate: How can we reconcile cost management with what employees want from work?

Session Leader: Alec Levenson

Tuesday November 1, 2022
8:00am PT / 11:00am ET / 3:00pm GMT / 3:00pm BST

Job design in principle takes into account what employees want from work and are willing to do, and balances that against the demands for higher productivity at lower cost. That’s the ideal. The practice? Not so good. Incremental changes over time that appear innocuous often have the unintended consequence of creating discontinuous breaking points: a job can go from seeming like everything is ok one day, to having major issues arise rapidly.

This session reviews case studies from the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) action research with companies on how jobs really get designed, including the sources of major problems that should not be a surprise yet time and again catch our leaders unaware. The discussion will focus on current talent issues facing EEN member companies and the challenges of designing jobs the right way in an inflationary environment with rapidly rising compensation.