Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals With People, Partners, and Technologies

A pioneering guide to understanding and leading workforce ecosystems, which include not only traditional employees, contractors, and gig workers, but also partner and complementor organizations that work with companies to accomplish enterprise and individual goals.

Who is your workforce? This was a simple question when most organizations focused on hiring full- and part-time employees, but now organizations engage with both internal and external collaborators including subcontractors, freelancers, app developers, marketplace sellers, and others. As technology enables new, more efficient forms of working, and roles become more project- and outcomes-based, workforces are evolving into workforce ecosystems requiring updated strategies, leadership, and management practices.

Workforce Ecosystems by Elizabeth J. Altman, David Kiron, Jeff Schwartz, and Robin Jones is an essential research-driven framework for leading these complex, interconnected workforces. Drawing on case studies, worldwide surveys, and extensive interviews with C-suite executives and senior leaders from Amazon, IBM, Mayo Clinic, NASA, Nike, Roche, Unilever, the US Army, Walmart, and others, the authors explore what workforce ecosystems are and how to navigate their unique challenges and opportunities.

Practical and field-tested, Workforce Ecosystems will prepare leaders to identify distinguishing characteristics of workforce ecosystems; take advantage of their increasing relevance as the world becomes more interconnected and technology-enabled; refine business strategies to incorporate them; focus leadership, management practices, and technologies to leverage them; and traverse the ethical, societal, and public policy considerations of workforce ecosystems.

Elizabeth J. Altman is Associate Professor of Management at the Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Guest Editor, Future of Workforce for MIT Sloan Management Review. She is coauthor of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

David Kiron is the Editorial Director of Research at MIT Sloan Management Review and Program Lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives. He is coeditor of The Consumer Society and Human Well-being and Economic Goals.

Jeff Schwartz is Vice President, Insights and Impact, Gloat, and Adjunct Professor, Columbia Business School. He is the author of Work Disrupted.

Robin Jones is Principal, US Workforce Transformation Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP.