The Ready

The future of work’s arrival has been long-heralded. But consider work’s current state—global employee engagement is down; employees across different identities and positions are reporting ever-higher levels of burnout—and it doesn’t feel or look encouragingly forward-thinking. Sitting at the crossroads of these challenging realities is HR.

HR touches countless functions. It’s arguably an organization’s most cross-functional and people-first department. That means HR is uniquely positioned to lead significant change and instantiate new ways of working across a company. This potential, however, often runs into substantial structural hurdles: divided attention and competing agendas can trap HR in an endless tug-of-war between requirements for responsiveness and calls for innovation. Rather than unleashing its own potential, HR remains stuck in its own brand of bureaucracy.

Hoping to bust up this stifling status quo, The Ready, a future-of-work change agency with a global roster of clients, has developed a new HR-specific service offering. The agency’s first-hand experience helping clients adopt more adaptive, meaningful, and equitable ways of working led to the creation of a five-level maturity model that guides HR teams into the future of work. “We take an emergent outlook in reimagining work,” says Rodney Evans, a partner and organization designer at The Ready. “We inspire and enable our clients to make safe-to-try, purpose-driven decisions while allowing everyone the freedom to choose when, where, and how they work.”

The Ready reimagines work through participation, not elaborate planning or strategizing. It focuses less on a company’s “what” and more on its “how,” making space for new ways of meeting, deciding, communicating, and tooling—and coaching teams on how to scale what best suits their ambitions. They follow the same proactive playbook when helping clients assess where they currently sit on the maturity model and teaching them the practices needed to level up. “Our process is to embed within organizations and co-create short experiments,” says Matt Basford, a partner at The Ready who helps lead new product and service creation. “We learn, iterate, and steer as we go instead of delivering a deck and hoping clients figure it out themselves.”

The Ready’s maturity model begins in familiar territory: A functional hierarchy that’s designed to mitigate risk and reinforce silos. The Ready call this first level “The Classic” and with good reason. But as new capabilities are taught and tested, teams evolve and ascend. Each level, which teams move toward and through at their own pace, aims to continually unlock HR’s ability to spot openings for innovation and improvement—and assemble teams to chase after impactful opportunities.

The Ready views this shift as a critical one—as HR’s version of the “Hollywood model.” Here, HR business partners act more like coaches and are responsible for standing up mission-based teams. These cross-functional groups have their own purposes, principles, and workflows. They identify novel organizational challenges, design and run experiments to test hypotheses, and disseminate findings and ideas to the rest of the organization. Steering this work from start to finish are HR business partners-turned-coaches, who are now both delivering value to internal clients and funneling data back to HR’s centralized department.

As The Ready sees it, this is the future of HR—one in which determining which capabilities to centralize and decentralize, establishing missions, and stewarding organization-wide adaptivity aren’t extracurricular labor, but rather the new work and rhythms that shape HR’s value and success.

When it comes to a thriving, prosperous future of work, HR can be the catalyst for modeling adaptive ways of working inside organizations. The Ready’s maturity model—emphasizing how to charter mission-based teams, create a marketplace of reimagined roles, and strengthen new skills—can help HR better respond to complex and dynamic organizational challenges while maintaining a people-positive mindset. Mastering these moves will allow HR’s impact to be made visible— and essential.