In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Structure Determines Behaviour,” new employment legislation presents an opportunity to reshape our approach to finding, training, and retaining talent.

In response to the Labour budget, I recently facilitated a roundtable engagement with angry business owners. The deeply furrowed brows of concerned senior leaders concluded with a paradigm shift that opened new growth pathways.

WATCH more on this here

The recent UK budget and tightened employment laws may feel like an attack on business, but they also present an opportunity to redefine how we structure our organisations. The post-COVID remote work and the post-Brexit skills crisis have stretched and reshaped the traditional employer-employee compact. This could be the perfect moment to rethink and rebuild for businesses looking to thrive.

The value exchange in employment

At its core, the employer-employee relationship is a value exchange. A business pays a salary or bonus to derive measurable value from the employee’s work. Yet, many organisations need to quantify this exchange effectively, leaving them vulnerable to inefficiencies and misaligned expectations. If we can measure the value of tangible assets like machinery, why not apply the same principle to our people?

Consider the machine in a cheese-slicing business. The machine’s performance is precisely measurable: slicing 528 monthly blocks under optimal conditions. The operator’s role, which includes setting up, running, and maintaining the machine, can also be broken into measurable activities. This clarity in defining measurable tasks allows for more effective recruitment, value exchange and performance management. Each party knows what’s expected of them!

This same approach can—and should—be applied to every role in your business. It’s even more necessary in a services business where the assets (your people) walk out the door every evening. By viewing roles as systems comprising sequential, measurable activities, you unlock opportunities to improve recruitment, streamline performance management, and ultimately increase your return on employment.

Systems thinking for a changing workforce

The escalating costs and risks of employment demand a new way of thinking. Systematising work not only improves clarity but also highlights activities that can be digitised or automated. This frees employees from mundane tasks to give their time and attention to more interesting work. It also allows leaders to focus on core, strategic areas as they lighten their management load through effective, sticky delegation, which also helps reduce fixed costs.

This method addresses immediate challenges and builds resilience. Systematic roles and processes simplify delegation, training, and scaling. Far from constraining employees, it gives them freedom within a framework to fully express their potential in a role. As employment laws become stricter and employment costs rise, this structured approach offers sustainability, cost management, productivity gains, and resilience.

Engineering for the future

The Labour government’s changes may feel like a setback, but they invite us to rethink how we structure work. Redefining roles into systems will improve your recruitment success, employee tenure, and productivity and open pathways to digitisation, automation, and outsourcing. In this, a more agile business can be built, and without compromising customer experiences, a less cumbersome salary bill will help lighten the load of senior leaders to focus on what counts – growth.

When structure determines behaviour, thoughtful engineering of your business systems and roles can turn the challenge presented by Labour into opportunities.

By Pavlo Phitidis