The Rise of the Connected Knowledge Worker

Pick a workforce survey and you’ll find that most report that about 85% of today’s workers are disengaged. Fears about automation and long-term job sustainability mean that many workers have mentally checked out.   

It’s time to change the narrative so that you are bringing out the best of your people’s cognitive, creative and collaborative abilities, writes contributor Brent Kedzierski. Here’s why industry needs to move towards treating people as “connected knowledge workers.”

American  businessman John D. Rockefeller, who pioneered the industrial monopoly concept, famously said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”

Those sentiments were echoed by Rockefeller’s key business and investment advisor Frederick T. Gates. “We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science,” said Gates.

Words like these from titans of industry entrenched industrial era thinking. Workers exist to do rather than think, according to this train of thought.

Far too many industrial companies have embraced this way of thinking. That’s one of the reasons that automation sparks such fear in workers.

If you believe that a worker only exists to do it is relatively easy to replace a worker through automation. Such fears are common; global survey results reveal that workers (60%) remain worried that automation is putting jobs at risk.

Too many companies have failed to systemically address these human elements of job/task displacement and reinstatement through automation. Industrial workers see no sustainable career path; the current labor shortages are one symptom of this problem.

Can the Size of the Connected Knowledge Worker Prize Drive Change?

Now, more than ever, industry must embrace the idea that “action follows thought,” and change only happens when we change our thinking. The mandate for industrial workforce management must recast the frame to create a meaningful value proposition for the industrial worker.

That means industry must change the narrative to one where automation is not making humans superfluous; it’s setting them up to be essential to the future.
 
The fundamental shift in thinking is to openly embrace a strategy where automation is fully leveraged to optimize mass production. The work of humans will be to drive the new industrial era of mass personalization where products can be tailored to individuals.
 
This means getting workers to see the value and embrace the reality of leveraging automation to displace all high-volume, dirty, dangerous, and mundane tasks as well as some lower order knowledge tasks. Workers are then free to pursue high value, knowledge tasks.

However, this first concept is only the starting point.
 
The transformation of the industrial workforce will require a lot of work and empathetic leadership as you introduce new processes, systems, and new ways of doing things.
 
Showing people, the “what’s in it for them” may help to engage and address their fears. Research shows that people who have connected to a purpose greater than themselves are more committed and resilient in the face of adversity.
 
Who wouldn’t sign up to actively engage in an era where the cause is helping industry reinstate the substance and value of humans as a means of promoting industrial progress?
 
At its core, manufacturing is a creative expression of the human mind and seeks to deliver goods and services that make life easier. No machine possesses the real-world context of joys and pains of human existence to make relevant and meaningful interpretations for other humans.
 
The new job modeling framework for developing the industrial workforce is built on two simple principles. The first is that automation is distinctive in its capacity to drive mass productivity.

The second principle is that connected knowledge workers are distinctive in their abilities to drive a new era of mass personalization.

So how do you evolve work to better support these two principles?

The concept of a “super job” is a strategic job modeling response to our changing world of cyber-physical enabled work. Super jobs recognize the dynamic nature of our new, connected plant environments and how they necessitate looking at the role of people within them differently.

Super job design addresses the impact of social and technological factors on work activities, competencies, connected environment context, and worker engagement.

Meanwhile, cyber physical system (CPS) capabilities, such as big data analytics, are enabling the radical emergence of dynamic, multi-source, real time data that opens new doors for aspiring connected knowledge workers.

Connected data advances are making work more knowledge intensive with access to “in context” data that workers then apply their own fluid and crystalized¹ knowledge to create even greater meaning.

The shift from “hands on” to “minds on” requires moving the industrial workforce away from fixed jobs that apply narrow skill sets in performing repeatable tasks.

Traditional silo-based job design simply doesn’t support the more demanding connected plant environments, the performance of knowledge workers or evolving worker expectations.

CPSs are the spark for super jobs as connected knowledge workers generate value through their contextualized knowledge. CPSs add depth, breadth, relevance, and significance to the role that humans play in enabling a sustainable industrial future that relies on addressing more challenging problems, decisions, and opportunities.

The new super job celebrates automation as a way of taking a broader view of human contribution in terms of the 4 C’s of mass personalization of industrial goods and services – connection, cognition, creativity, and collaboration. 

Power Skills

Power skills - or better said, “human power skills” - are skills that can’t be replaced by machines. These dynamic skills give humans the power to not only reinstate but shift and increase their relevance and ensure their sustainability in the advanced industrial economy.

Rather than remove human contribution, power skills enable humans to recast the value they offer to industry in ways that automation doesn’t and that CPSs require in terms of human intervention.

Connected knowledge workers are professional thinkers who take time to think, share insights, innovate, and collaborate.

The type of context rich interconnected data insights brought on by CPSs require connected knowledge workers to thrive in sharing, applying, and extending their thinking skills. CPSs provide knowledge workers a broader system understanding and a frame for interpreting the larger operational picture.

Exploiting the idea of connected knowledge workers filling super jobs requires a new and sizeable demand for upskilling and reskilling.

Connected knowledge workers with access to a constant feed of intelligent data must be able to apply short term strategic and extended thinking skills. 

These types of thinking skills leverage deep knowledge using reasoning, planning, and applying evidence to explore questions with multiple possible outcomes and solve problems with unpredictable solutions across networked organizations.

In some cases, power skills are emergent skills and in other cases they are a new and distinctive take on traditional skills. What defines a skill as a power skill is the fact that they celebrate expanding and refining those capacities that are uniquely human and that automation lacks.

Conclusion

Industry is misfiring in how today’s workers should be developed and deployed. Low engagement scores reveal the extent to which workers are concerned for the sustainability of their careers and dissatisfied with current job designs. 

Those companies that effectively marry cyber physical connectivity with new knowledge worker capabilities will see the ROI of knowledge worker contributions jump exponentially due to increased engagement and connection.

For engagement to thrive the whole person must be deployed. This means engaging their cognitive, creative, and collaborative abilities in ways that provide clear purpose, autonomy, and challenge.

To start the journey industry must shift their workforces from worrying about their jobs or being frustrated with job design (perceptions of skill variety, autonomy, task identity, significance, and experience meaningfulness) to developing the connected knowledge worker role.

The connected knowledge worker role represents a capitalization on the confluence of advanced automation, the changing nature of evolving industrial work and the connected skills that humans are best at performing.

End note: 

[1] Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to reason and think flexibly. Crystallized intelligence refers to the accumulation of knowledge, facts, and skills that are acquired throughout life.

Interested in learning more about this topic?

As COVID-19 restrictions ease and the manufacturing industry rebounds, industrial employers face an urgent imperative to prepare for the future of work. Learn how to navigate transformation, close the digital skills gap and push innovation, productivity and quality at our Connected Manufacturing Worker Summit. Join over 300 industry leaders on 27-29 June, 2022 in London and learn how to build a connected workforce to improve resilience, agility and growth in a recovering economy.