Elevating Human Purpose And Well-Being Through Redesigning Work With AI

The transformation of work around AI has the promise of lowering costs, but it also has the potential to elevate the sense of purpose and human connection that people have with their work.

At the heart of this transformation is the idea of “pixelating” work—breaking it down into its constituent outcomes, tasks, and skills, and then reassembling it in a way that optimizes for both business objectives and human fulfillment. This involves deeply understanding people’s inherent and learned capabilities, as well as their motivations and aspirations, and then matching them with the work that will allow them to contribute meaningfully while growing and developing.

“In order for organizations to sustain performance and for humans to be well, and for those things to be completely integrated, the time has come to redesign work,” says Sam Schlimper, Managing Director at Randstad. This pixelation of work is not just about coupling humans and AI, but about fundamentally rethinking the nature of jobs and the relationship between people and technology. Historically, jobs have been defined as a collection of tasks, many of which were not inherently meaningful or fulfilling for the people performing them. AI presents the opportunity to automate many of these routine tasks, freeing people up to focus on higher-value creative and strategic work.

Human work will become more complex

However, this transition also presents challenges. Schlimper says that when AI takes on easily automated tasks, what is left for humans is more complex, intellectually challenging work. “That’s exactly what we should be doing,” Schlimper says, “But what does that mean from a well-being perspective and how do we support people we’re going to ask people to use a lot of intellectual and emotional power on complex work when we take away some of the simple quick to do’s?”

The pivotal role of HR and the CHRO

Addressing these challenges will require a concerted effort from HR to redesign work practices and support employees through the transition. Nichol Bradford, AI + HI Executive-in-Residence at SHRM, explains, “A job is basically what you hope to do, plus all the tasks you didn’t sign up for. It’s what Microsoft actually calls the ‘joy versus toil ratio.’ The key is automating the things you didn’t actually sign up for.” The challenge is that we all tend to think of jobs as a collection of tasks rather than creations tied to outcomes. We need to shift our thinking—or get stuck in the old “AI is coming for our jobs” school of thought. HR will need to educate employees, build buy-in for the changes, and enable individual successes that will collectively translate into organizational AI maturity.

Research by BetterUp underlines the importance of role-modelling. Inevitably, teams with leaders who embrace AI are more ready to adopt new tools and AI-enabled practices than teams with managers more reluctant to explore AI’s potential. BetterUp Chief Innovation Officer Dr Gabriella Rosen Kellerman said, “Many organizations are keenly aware that they need to drive AI adoption among their workforce, but they don’t have a strategy for how to do that. This is challenging not because of the tools, but because of the pace of human change. In our research we have found one specific mindset that differentiates employees ready and willing to adopt AI from those that are not. We call this the Pilot mindset. It’s defined by a combination of agency and optimism. Pilots are 75% more likely to use AI than their counterpart, the pessimistic Passengers. Setting a business up for success in the era of GenAI amounts to one thing: shifting mindsets to create more passengers.” BetterUp Labs has found that leaders with a pilot mindset are three times as likely to have teams with this mindset; and that managers are the most important factor influencing mindsets, above peers, culture, or other external influences. Kellerman adds, “Organizations must empower managers to prioritize the deeply human skills of management like recognition and motivation, skills that inspire agency and optimism, and learn to offload less human tasks like deadline management to AI.”

Elevating the human experience of work

Ultimately, the goal is to elevate the human experience of work. By pixelating work into its essential components and then reconfiguring it in a way that leverages the respective strengths of humans and AI, organizations can unlock previously untapped potential for both business performance and employee well-being. As Schlimper put it, “You are doing at-scale personalization, which leads to organizational outcomes.”

To bring this vision to life, HR leaders must move beyond incremental policy changes and perks, and truly dig into redesigning jobs and reengineering workflows. Shivani Parekh, a Partner at Kearney and a leader in the firm’s Communications, Media, and Technology practice, says, “Companies need to unlock the ‘whole brain’ of the organization. This means combining the power of human intuition and emotion with the potential of AI to not just redesign jobs, but also end-to-end collaboration, decision-making and drive better outcomes.” The convergence of powerful AI capabilities and a growing employee wellness crisis has created a burning platform for change. Organizations that successfully harness AI to improve the human experience of work will thrive in the years ahead, while those that fail to adapt risk obsolescence.