For some time now, there has been talk of a new role in businesses concerned with work efficiency and employee experience: the “Chief of Work”. I am not in favor of adding “Chief Of””” to every new matter that emerges, but this does reflect a concern about who is responsible for how work is designed, orchestrated, and experienced today.
In short:
- The role of “Chief of Work” is emerging in response to the fragmentation of responsibilities in businesses, focusing on the design, coordination, and practical experience of work.
- This position differs from traditional HR functions by integrating operational, technological, and managerial dimensions, with a more cross-functional approach focused on the real work context.
- The creation of this role reveals a structural flaw in organizations, which struggle to design work in a coherent and collective manner, often preferring to add positions rather than rethinking existing practices.
- The example of Moderna illustrates a possible alternative: merging HR and IT to address the human and technological challenges of work together, without resorting to a new title.
- Work design should be a responsibility shared among all stakeholders in the business: a Chief of Work is only legitimate if they help build a shared culture of continuous improvement.
A symptom of fragmented responsibilities
Initially, the Chief of Work is responsible for repairing the consequences of fragmented responsibilities (Chief of Work: A Modern(a) C?Suite Role).
HR manages people, IT manages tools, managers manage objectives, but no one really manages the “work itself.” What employees experience on a daily basis—navigating between tools (What (digital) workplace experience for your employees ?), vague expectations, wasted time, process overload, and organizational complexity (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience) are too often the result of a lack of both organizational design and work design.
From this perspective, the Chief of Work is seen as a cross-functional conductor, ensuring a smooth, human, and operational work experience. This role is all the more important as digital tools, AI, and hybrid organizations have made work more complex, but also more disembodied.
The Chief of Work is not a Chief Employee Experience Officer
You might say that some businesses already have employee experience managers, regardless of their title or rank, and you would be right. I was one myself.
But the problem with these employee experience managers is that they too often come from the world of HR, with a background mainly in HR and a focus on quality of life at work.
This is something I really experienced when I took this position, and I quickly realized that by staying within this scope, I wouldn’t be of much use because the real problem for employees isn’t that they need to be coddled when they’re not working, but rather that they need to be taken care of when they are working, in their work context by acting on everything that influences that context (tools, processes, management, etc.).
This has been confirmed by studies (2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions) and quickly made me realize that the employee experience has two legs: People and Operations (HR and Operations: the only viable duo for driving employee experience and Is it heresy to put “people” and “operations” in the same sentence?).
This is what led me, after pushing the boundaries of my scope to the limit and working with a number of managers to help them improve the way they organized their teams’ work, to eventually take on the role of head of operations in addition to my people role.
So in a way, this confirms the need for a Chief of Work if, given the profiles available and their reporting lines, your employee experience boss can’t extricate themselves from HR (People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work).
The creation of a role often hides a design flaw
What this function reveals, however, is less a need than an admission of an organization’s inability to think about work in any way other than through silos.
Yet employee failure is rarely due to individual skills, but more often to poor work design and an unsuitableenvironment (Right fit, wrong fit). Work design is not a cosmetic issue, but a prerequisite for efficiency and engagement that can only be addressed across the board.
The Chief of Work may therefore be a solution, but it is also the expression of a problem. I share Yves Morieux’s fears and comments about appointing a “head of something” as soon as a new issue arises (How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated).
I will use the example he gives: when you have a quality problem, instead of appointing a “head of repairability”, isn’t it better to collaborate across the board to eliminate the root cause of the poor quality rather than organizing yourself to repair what breaks down, with all that this entails in terms of adding hierarchical levels, processes, and everything that goes with them?
But if we don’t want to or can’t make work design, operational excellence, and employee experience a shared culture at all levels of the business, then we can appoint a Chief of Work, which amounts to entrusting an individual with the task of fixing a systemic problem.
In this case, the risk is twofold: either the business appoints yet another role with no real power and doomed to failure (as Clémenceau said, “when you want to bury a problem, create a commission“), or it thinks that creating the position is enough to fix what strategy and governance have allowed to deteriorate.
In this sense, the Chief of Work could well join the list of titles that are rich in promise but weak in impact, like certain Chief Happiness Officers.
The Moderna example: rethinking work without adding another layer
More recently, the example of Moderna provides a more operational response (HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI and HR/IT and the reality of working at Moderna: the unspoken truths of a reorganization).
The business has merged its HR and IT functions to create a unified function, led by a Chief People and Digital Officer, with the aim of no longer treating people and technology separately, but rather designing work as a flow where humans and AI agents collaborate in a regularly reevaluated system. There is no Chief of Work here, but governance has been realigned with the work itself, even if this does raise some questions (Thinking of work as a flow: appealing, but is it realistic?).
Moderna shows that you can tackle the root of the problem without creating a new position, or even by eliminating one, which reminds me in some ways of my own experience. Their approach is based on empowering existing functions, strengthening the link between HR and IT (but where are the Ops?), and understanding the frictions of everyday work. It’s a more demanding approach, but also a more sustainable one.
Work design: a shared responsibility
This may seem at odds with my experience, but I believe that work design should not be centralized in a single position, but distributed across HR, managers, operations, IT, and employees themselves. Designing effective work is first and foremost a collective skill.
Appointing one person means accepting that the organization cannot move forward on its own, that it lacks the right culture or even collective intelligence (Just because work is invisible, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved and mproving a team’ s work: a story of continuous improvement). This may be a transitional phase, but in my opinion, the purpose of such a position is to organize its own obsolescence once the right reflexes have permeated the organization.
It’s about empowering everyone to identify points of friction, suggest adjustments, and participate in the continuous improvement of their work environment.
This requires a cultural shift away from treating work as a fixed entity and toward making it a subject for debate and experimentation.
Bottom line
In conclusion, the question is not so much “Do we need a Chief of Work?” as “Who is responsible for work today?” While this role can be a lever for transformation, it must not become an excuse. It is only useful if it is symptomatic of a broader ambition: to rethink work not as a result, but as an object of design and shared responsibility.
Making work simpler, more understandable, and more consistent is not a project that can be delegated to a single title, but rather a challenge for organizational maturity. In this context, the Chief of Work can be useful, but only if they are not the only one working on the work.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
