Reimagining Work as a Product

Despite a century of research on work design, managers continue to struggle to deliver a positive employee experience. Trends that emerged in the post-Covid labor market, from quiet quitting to heated disputes over return-to-work policies, laid bare a stark reality: Many employees are dissatisfied with the experience their jobs offer. People stay in roles out of necessity rather than loyalty—an unsustainable arrangement that results in predictably low engagement.

What if managers took a new lens to this problem and designed jobs the way they design products? Borrowing from Clayton Christensen’s jobs to be done theory, which posits that people “hire” products or services to fulfill specific needs in their lives, what happens when managers ask, “What do employees hire their jobs to do for them?”

In recent years one of us (Dart) has been exploring the work-as-a-product approach in his roles as an HR leader at large technology companies and through a popular podcast, Work for Humans. The other (Eric) has explored the effects of daily work experiences on employee well-being through academic research, teaching, and consulting engagements. We believe that companies can benefit from a radical reframing of work as something that employees actively choose to “buy” with their labor—and that must be designed to help them make that choice every day.

Let’s be clear: This idea has only recently begun bubbling up in HR circles and at progressive companies. Although product design has a proven track record of creating better experiences for customers, to our knowledge no employer has yet implemented a fully rendered version of the employee-facing model we’re proposing. But we have seen companies using principles of product design to rethink their employees’ experience—and we’re not the only ones talking about this idea. Consider:

At Asana, a collaboration software company cofounded by Dustin Moskovitz (who also cofounded Facebook), managers talk about what “leadership product” they are delivering to employees. Instead of simply conducting exit interviews when people quit, they regularly ask current employees probing questions about job satisfaction, seeking to understand their needs the way product designers try to decipher customers’ desires. And instead of filing away the answers, they take action to make jobs at the company more desirable. As cofounder Justin Rosenstein has written, Asana managers are encouraged to regularly deliver a message similar to the one flight attendants use as passengers disembark: “We know you have many choices when you fly, and we thank you for choosing us.”

At Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, managers have begun using the tools of customer experience to improve the employee experience. Specifically, they have begun mapping employee journeys. “Within organizations, there are specialized teams solely dedicated to generating customer insights and enhancing the customer experience,” the Columbia Business School professor Stephan Meier writes in his new book, The Employee Advantage, which reports on Eli Lilly’s employee experience. “A similar level of attention has to be given to employees and their experiences.”

At Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company, leaders recognized that just as different groups of customers have differing needs, different segments of Shopify employees have differing needs for compensation. An employee who’s saving for a down payment on a house might want to maximize salary; people earlier or later in their careers, with a greater appetite for risk, might prefer less salary and more high-risk, high-reward equity compensation. So in 2022 Shopify introduced Flex Comp, a program that lets employees choose the combination of salary and stock-based pay that’s right for them. In its announcement the company explained: “Why should a company decide for you how much of your total reward should be in the form of cash vs equity? This makes no sense. Now, our employees can choose.”

Initiatives like these are emerging for a reason: The current approach to the employee experience simply doesn’t work. According to data from Gallup’s 2024 report State of the Global Workplace, only 23% of employees are engaged at work, just 34% say they are “thriving” in their roles (the number is lower for those under age 35), and 52% are watching for or actively seeking a new job. This widespread discontent is causing leaders to acknowledge the need for a major reconception of the employee experience. For example, a KPMG survey of almost 1,300 HR executives revealed that nearly 70% of them feel that HR “needs to completely reinvent and transform itself.”

Discover What People Really Want from Work

Imagine if your employees woke up each morning and asked themselves, Do I want to work for this company today? In fact, across the economy more people are experiencing this sort of freedom. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and others rely on independent contractors who can decide minute by minute whether or not to provide their labor. And more companies of all kinds are relying on contractors or freelancers, who also have far more freedom to decide whether (and for whom) to work. If companies in the gig economy fail to make work attractive, their talent can instantly join a competitor.

Jessica Zwaan, the chief operating officer at Talentful, suggests that all companies—not just those in the gig economy—think about work not only as a product but as a subscription product. People make a purchasing decision every month when they choose to remain employed and can cancel that subscription at any time. Though bound by habit and switching costs, employees can—like traditional customers—“shop” elsewhere. Recent employment data proves the point. In 2022 more than 50 million employees in the United States walked away from their jobs, 35% of them without another job lined up. Nor do employees have to leave a company to stop working for it. They decide every minute how much care and attention to devote to their jobs.

Research shows that unmet expectations in the workplace are associated with lower organizational commitment, reduced job satisfaction, and even increased sabotage.

To better understand what leads employees to “purchase” their work each day, Dart has applied tools from product research, relying on qualitative interviews and other data collection techniques to understand what people really want from their jobs. His results reveal that their needs go far beyond commonly discussed factors such as income, purpose, and belonging. For example, some employees report hiring their jobs to give them interesting puzzles to solve, tools and materials to build with, messes to tidy, a stage to perform on and an adoring audience, broken things to repair, worthy opponents against whom to compete, teams to amplify their contribution, a platform from which to make the world a better place, or the opportunity to leave a legacy. Some people want their jobs to help them escape monotonous or challenging home lives, spend time with friends, provide structure to their days, seek refuge from personal challenges, repay a debt to the family that helped them get where they are, or see those around them shine. Even when employees talk about pay—an obvious reason to choose to work—they often talk about the deeper motivations that compensation serves, such as caring for their families or demonstrating to others that they are living up to their potential. These deeper reasons for choosing a job don’t typically show up in traditional HR instrumentation.

As with any purchasing decision, employees also consider cost. Dart’s research has revealed that how employees experience the cost of work is nearly as diverse as how they experience its value. Respondents cite their commute and time away from family, status threats, social anxiety, the opportunity cost of not taking on other work, the tedium of repetitive tasks, and a lack of autonomy, among other things.

Professionals who are trained in product design can help companies uncover these motivations. When Dropbox began exploring policies around remote work during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Allison Vendt, its senior director of people operations, decided to bring Alastair Simpson, the newly hired VP of design, into the process. The design team helped the people operations team conduct user research and qualitative studies to understand employees’ deeper feelings about working without in-person offices. Then the two teams collaborated to set up trials, tests, and experiments—a process that led to Virtual First, Dropbox’s new operating model. If people operations had done this work without involving designers, the outcome might have been less user-centric.

Once organizations have a better sense of what employees really want from work, the challenge becomes how to meet their diverse needs.

Find the Work That Helps Employees Thrive

Many of the companies most interested in the product design approach to the employee experience are in the tech sector. That makes sense because professionals at those companies often have unique skills that give them many employment options. Managers in this environment improve the employee experience by carefully balancing the projects that are assigned to teams, aiming not only to meet the company’s needs but also to identify the tasks that employees find most satisfying.

Managers who take this approach try to balance the company’s labor needs with what each employee finds most rewarding. To manage this, Dart and others he has trained assemble monthly data into a bubble chart that tracks how much of each team member’s time has been devoted to each type of work. The proportion of attention allocated determines the size of each bubble, and its color shows how the employee regards the work: Green indicates that the work is highly rewarding, and red indicates that employees dislike it. (See the exhibit “Balancing Company Needs with Employee Satisfaction.”) When the manager is doing well at balancing the organization’s needs with those of individual employees, the chart shows large green bubbles clustered high and to the right—meaning the team is doing high-value work that matches its unique skills and that employees find satisfying. If bubbles begin turning yellow or red or falling out of the top right quadrant, it’s an early signal of trouble. At that point the team works together to find solutions.

See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals

Not every red bubble can be eliminated, of course. All companies have some tasks that nobody wants to do, and unlike a freelancer, a regular employee usually can’t cherry-pick projects. Still, we’ve found the bubble chart to be a valuable tool. For example, on one of Dart’s teams a bubble turned yellow because the client’s time zone forced the employee to work through his kids’ breakfast hour. Once this was surfaced, it was easy to assign the project to a team member in a better-aligned time zone.

For this system to work effectively, though, managers must be deeply engaged with employee preferences. We find that’s not often the case. Many organizations overemphasize employees’ skills and capabilities, and HR’s tendency to focus on skills-based learning and development can exacerbate that. Skills and capabilities matter, of course, but they don’t adequately factor in what type of work employees want to be doing. Managers must learn to listen to those preferences the same way product designers tune in to customers’ needs.

When managers recognize a recurring gap between employee preferences and work assignments, they must identify a way to close it. When Dart led the business architecture and process improvement teams at Cisco Systems, he had two creative team members who were consistently dissatisfied with the analytic projects the team was assigned. He worked with them to identify services with a creative component that were adjacent to the work the team was already delivering. Together they identified employee-experience design as work that was currently underserved, would clearly benefit the company, and would appeal to the creative needs of the two staffers. After testing the market to confirm that there was true demand for the service, the team successfully made the case to leadership that this work should become part of its portfolio—and the bubbles of the two valuable team members shifted from red to green.

To be sure, this approach to matching employees with rewarding tasks requires managers to have different kinds of career conversations with subordinates. Historically such interactions have revolved around identifying which skills would allow employees to advance to their desired future roles and creating plans for how they might gain those skills. When a manager starts trying to design a job that will best suit an employee, the interaction is transformed into a “needfinding” exercise in which they work together to articulate what the employee desires from the in-the-moment experience of work. The manager plays the role of designer here, listening intently for the customer’s needs, making sure that the most appealing attributes of the product are not overlooked, and then doing whatever possible to modify the product.

Because this is a complex task, some companies see benefits from splitting the manager role in two—an idea discussed by Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton in “Managers Can’t Do It All” (HBR, March–April 2022). Asana, for instance, practices what it calls “distributed responsibility,” with program leads in charge of making sure that their teams are doing the most important work toward an objective, and managers focusing on crafting desirable work experiences for their employees. Employees who have worked in this system say the split allows managers to worry less about deadlines and day-to-day deliverables, freeing them up to act more like coaches who think about employees’ long-term development.

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The Challenges of Implementing This Model

When we talk about these ideas and interact with companies that are beginning to implement them, we consistently hear about four challenges.

Changing HR.

Today most companies view human resources as a cost center that serves top leaders. Its charge is to procure and maintain the workforce. Work-as-a-product requires a new HR mindset. Consultants and business leaders who have championed these nascent approaches tell us that the people most eager to embrace the change tend to work in customer experience and product design roles, not human resources. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Many in HR justifiably feel that they are already overburdened, working with limited budgets, or underappreciated. As a result, they are reluctant to take on a huge new responsibility without solid evidence that leadership supports it. Skeptics may ask, “Will traditional HR processes such as workforce planning, performance management, rewards and recognition, cascading goals, skills and capabilities management, and learning and development go away?” No. The approach we’ve outlined does not displace those practices. Nonetheless, investments to optimize traditional processes should be balanced against investments in newer practices aimed at designing and delivering a quality work experience to employees at a reasonable cost.

Balancing employee preferences and organizational needs.

Companies need certain tasks done, regardless of whether employees find them satisfying. Even as managers and HR leaders try to give employees a more engaging mix of assignments, they must avoid setting unrealistic expectations. To address this challenge, they should embed expectation-setting conversations in the work-experience design process and articulate the types of future circumstances that may affect employee opportunities. Getting all parties on the same page is crucial: Research shows that unmet expectations in the workplace are associated with lower organizational commitment, reduced job satisfaction, and even increased sabotage among disgruntled employees.

Maintaining flexibility and fairness.

When managers begin trying to deliver work that specific employees want to do, it can raise concerns about fairness. Some employees may perceive bias or favoritism in the allocation of desirable work or in the way various work experiences are crafted and rewarded. Maintaining flexibility and fairness can be especially difficult in large or rapidly growing organizations, where offering tailored work experiences for a large number of employees is daunting. Furthermore, a model that emphasizes individualized experiences can result in subjective performance reviews and may lead to inconsistencies in assessment. To mitigate these concerns, teams should have clear rules for how work is given out, explain openly how decisions are made, and create a culture where fairness and shared values are emphasized when allocating flexible work.

Aligning incentives.

Managers often face short-term performance goals that overshadow the importance of supporting employees’ long-term career fulfillment. However, trade-offs between the present and the future are a familiar challenge for companies. Additionally, myriad organizational benefits are associated with having a happy workforce, including increased productivity. Thus managers should be encouraged to prioritize employee happiness not only as an end in its own right but also as a means of achieving their short-term performance goals.

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Viewing work as a product and employees as customers is more than just a conceptual shift; it’s a comprehensive call to action. It challenges organizations to elevate work design to the same level as product design, drawing on tools from that discipline to better understand what people desire from their work—and then finding ways to give it to them.