In march, the billionaire founding father of Austin, texas’ new capital, joe Liemandt, fired off a directive to managers of his military of 2,500 remote employees. The email’s situation line read: “white collar specialization- worksmart work unit.”
with the arena embracing far off work as the brand new everyday, liemandt ordered his managers to design paintings units, specialized duties that workers—basically software engineers should carry out efficiently time and again, as if they had been meeting line people in an old school auto manufacturing facility.
Maximum jobs are poorly concept out and poorly designed—a mishmash of capabilities and sports. Bad process designs are also quickly uncovered with a flow to faraway work,” liemandt wrote.
The answer, liemandt argued in his e-mail, became for managers to look at far off workers and discover repeatable paintings styles with a purpose to create these paintings devices. The concept changed into for managers to fragment white-collar work into small-scale tasks—the writing of precise code by means of a software engineer, a customer service agent fixing a selected technical hassle, or a focused report evaluation. Liemandt desired his managers to create those devices—lots of them.
“well known you aren’t suitable at it, please well known you need to research and exercise. Then put the difficult paintings in to do it,” stated liemandt, in his harsh e mail to managers whom he believed have been slacking. “the enterprise blessings of this are transformative. For a decade, we had been one of the maximum ahead wondering groups on this topic. Take benefit of that reality to reskill for the subsequent decade.”
Ten years or so before the pandemic, liemandt’s esw capital had become one in every of the most important company operations to completely include a far flung team of workers.