In one of the thought-provoking articles, Hemant Asher (Co-Founder and COO | Enquero – A Genpact Company) talks about the paradigm shift in the workforce mindset and the shifting of the balance of power from an employer to that of an employee. In this context, he has outlined the futuristic perspective of treating ‘Employment’ as a product and an employee as a ‘Customer’. This statement has deep routed multi-faceted dimensions associated that must be leveraged by organizations to truly transform towards this relationship model.

In this article, we would be addressing how an employee should ensure the ruggedness and endurance of an ‘Employment’ product purchased or earned from an employer as a customer or a custodian of this product. 

How an employee can continue to reap the benefits of employment as a product

First and foremost, as a custodian and consumer of the benefits of this employment product, an employee should understand the dynamic and ever-changing meta characteristics of the product. Unlike physical products that lose their charm, ruggedness, and endurance over time, employment as a product, if treated and operated properly, will strengthen even further.

So, what are the key capabilities that an employee must fine-tune and sharpen to boost the product’s ruggedness and endurance?

‘Being relevant’ is a fundamental quality that an employee must showcase as an operator of the employment product. Employee relevance, from multi-dimensional knowledge segments, is directly proportional to this product’s ruggedness and endurance.

The knowledge dimensions are centered around being relevant to:

• Clients that an employer serves
• Next-generation technologies
• A customer’s domain 
• Legacy and future business models

while being able to:

• Comprehend legacy digital backbones to visualize the ‘to-be’ modernization
• Effectively leverage existing and available foundations, such as managed service offerings, reusable assets, and so on
• Avoid reinventing the wheel by recognizing the critical success factor of faster go to market (GTM)
• Correlate the interconnections and dependencies that lead to technological evolution and process transformation

Let us break the relevancy aspect into 3 core dimensions:

• Technology
• Domain
• Process

Technology

Employees should embrace learning and understanding the latest technologies, advancements, history, and evolution over the years. For example, as a data-focused digital transformation solutions provider, we, at Enquero, extensively leverage Big Data technologies to process billions and trillions of customers’ data. To understand these technologies in-depth, it is equally important to understand the background of what existed prior and the evolution of the prerequisites that provided the foundation for today’s computing revolution along with the understanding of the augmentation brought about by the semiconductor evolution.

Employees, as the core and key operator of the employment offering, must constantly ensure their relevance through connected learning. In the technology learning world, it is all about expanding the learning horizontally and vertically to broaden and deepen the spectrum by becoming a true subject matter expert (SME). Horizontal learning is about the incremental additions to the multi-linguistics capabilities. Vertical learning is about learning the syntax of core technologies and then correlating and connecting the associated ones through the understanding of the architectural evolution towards micro-level context bounding, decoupling of storage, processing, service delivery, governance, and so on.

Domain

Today, the selling and the buying models have undergone drastic transformations as competition has manifested in a non-traditional way for any digitally backboned business models even though their core product or service delivery stakeholders and the buyers have remained the same.  

As the competitive landscape has become unpredictable due to the disruption caused by non-traditional players across industries, every business must continuously evolve and expand horizontally and vertically through bundled extensions of their products on their own or through their partner offerings. Defining and redefining customer journeys for what every business and its ecosystem offer has become a prerequisite for relevance and existence. From a digital transformation standpoint, it means evaluating customer journeys on how well their systems, processes, and operating procedures (SOPs) are integrated, the ability of the system nodes to establish intelligence-driven bi-directional and real-time interactivity, and the ability of quick B2B workflow realization matters. 

In a competitive landscape, most industries have transformed their ways of transaction between value chain stakeholders and buyers and have adopted digital platforms that don’t require any physical interfaces. Decoupling of transactions from physical goods or services exchanged and from physical premises has given rise to new forms of business model value chains that re-define production, distribution, and micro retailing or last-mile delivery. This optimizes and globalizes businesses of today.  For example, Uber’s aggregator business model is a true reflection of this segmentation and decoupling that is being embraced today. 

Process

It is critical to comprehend and learn process modeling with domain business value chain and business models. Along with the shift from operational to customer-centric business models, process models are shifting as well. ‘Farm to fork’, ‘beans to coffee’, ‘farm to fabric’, ‘care (virtual) to cure’ are kinds of models that are examples of such customer-centric business process transformations. 

Let’s explore how a retail supply chain process is visualized for both operational and customer-centricity process model scenarios.

In an operational scenario, a supply chain solution’s focus will be on cost optimization and operational optimization while accommodating the context of the customer towards just delivering a fair set of checkpoint updates on where the shipment has reached.

In a customer-centric setting, however, experience delivery will be the primary focus. Here, the solutioning approach will include IoT and associated sensor technologies that are mounted on cargo containers for detecting climatic parameters like temperature, pressure, humidity, and sensing the shipment vibrations and acceleration, braking and cornering (ABC) parameters of the cargo vehicles carrying the shipment, among other things. Instead of checkpoint-driven shipment scan updates, customers would receive real-time updates encompassing the shipment’s 360-degree meta insights.

This preceding supply chain example showcases how the context and premise of a solution change depending on who is the central party or the root node visualizing those solutions. 

Hence, an employee needs to be relevant from a domain and a process value chain context along with being tech relevant. Just as the balance has tipped in favor of an employee, it is equally critical for an employee to leverage this employment as a product by being relevant for ensuring mutual success.