How Automation Will Affect Your Workforce

Editor's Note: SHRM has partnered with Harvard Business Review to bring you relevant articles on key HR topics and strategies. Today, executives have to cut through a lot of hype around automation. Leaders need a clear-eyed way to think about how these technologies will specifically affect their organizations. The right question isn't which jobs are going to be replaced, but rather, what work will be redefined, and how? Based on our work with a number of organizations grappling with these issues, we've found that the following four-step approach can help. Much work will continue to exist as traditional "jobs" in organizations, but automation makes traditional jobs more fluid and an increasing amount of work will occur outside the traditional boundaries of a "job."