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Want better business results? Start with your employees. New research links employee-centric workplaces to stronger business performance. Five deceptively simple practices can help leaders create more rewarding, productive work environments. Reading Time: 7 mins read We've been solving the wrong workplace problem, Debbie Lovich, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), told an audience of workplace professionals at the recent WORKTECH26 New York. After decades of prioritizing shareholder returns, followed by an era of customer obsession, organizations now need to become equally obsessed with employees. Advertisements And Lovich has a business case for it. Work is broken. Drawing on research conducted as a Future of Work Fellow at the BCG Institute, Lovich argues that more than 90 percent of workplaces are fundamentally broken because they are insufficiently employee-centric. Advertisements When employees are treated as costs to manage rather than stakeholders whose experiences matter, performance and engagement suffer. Hybrid policies, amenities, and even upskilling programs can't fix the underlying problem, warns Lovich, a co-founder of Future Forum, a global research initiative exploring how work was changing across talent, technology, and space. Speaking with Peter Miscovich, JLL's global future of work leader, Lovich shared lessons from her 32-year consulting career, now captured in her forthcoming bookn Make Work Work. The next revolution: From shareholders to customers to employees. In the late 1980s, "we worshiped on the altar of shareholder value creation," Lovich explained, measuring success with ROI, total shareholder value and BCG's experience curve. Advertisements Cutting costs, achieving scale and maximizing returns to shareholders took precedence over customers who were demanding more products, services, resources and personalization. "All that eats into margin," recalled Lovich of the prevailing sentiment of the time. Then technology turned that thinking on its head, demonstrating that "being customer obsessed is not a trade-off with shareholder value. It's a driver of it." Over the following decades, customer-centricity became a business imperative, with organizations embracing design thinking, customer journeys, segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, and cocreation. Lovich believes we're at a similar inflection point today. Despite decades of attention to employee engagement and wellbeing, workers remain burnt out and disengaged, according to Gallup's employee engagement research, which notes a continued decline. Yet many organizations continue to view employee demands - higher salaries, more benefits, workplace amenities, flexible work, fewer hours - as costs that eat into shareholder and customer value. "Work is the product," Lovich maintains. "Employees are its consumers." Every day, they decide how much of their energy, creativity and commitment to invest. Companies such as Costco, Best Buy and Delta Air Lines demonstrate the potential business value of this approach. Advertisements Delta CEO Ed Bastian attributes the airline's competitive advantage to how it treats its people, despite operating with essentially the same aircraft, fuel costs and regulations as its competitors. Five deceptively simple ways to make work work. After decades of advising organizations on leadership, culture and ways of working, Lovich distilled her recommendations into five practices that employees and leaders at every level can apply. They may sound obvious, she acknowledged, but organizations frequently fail to put them into practice. * Celebrate people. Don't reserve appreciation for formal recognition programs. Tell people when they've done something well and be specific about why. "Think about your happiest days at work," Lovich suggested. "It's probably when someone said something you did was awesome." * Go see and help. Practice servant leadership by getting out of the executive office, spending time with employees, understanding their challenges and pitching in - even on small tasks. Lovich recalled ordering dinner for her consulting team during a late-night work session rather than delegating the errand to a junior associate. No task should be beneath a leader. * Be interested in people. Get to know colleagues as human beings, not just job titles. Ask about their lives outside work, remember what's important to them and demonstrate genuine interest. Lovich keeps notes to help remember personal details about colleagues and their families. People want to know they matter. * Co-create everything. Involve employees from the beginning when redesigning work or implementing technology that affects their daily experience. Don't do things to employees; do them with employees. Lovich argues that organizations spend too much effort managing resistance to changes that employees had little role in shaping. "This is one of the harder ones," Lovich acknowledged, adding "but the payback can be significant." When employees help create solutions, they develop a sense of ownership and are more invested in making them succeed. * Do it first. Leaders must model the behavior they expect from others. Want employees to spend more time with customers? Do it yourself. Want them to embrace AI? Start learning and experimenting with it. Lovich emphasized that leaders must become comfortable being uncomfortable - including acknowledging what they don't know and learning from more technologically proficient colleagues. The business case: Employee-centricity delivers results. Lovich cited research published in Harvard Business Review and by BCG linking employee-centricity to measurable business outcomes, including stronger motivation, improved retention, higher sales productivity, and more successful AI adoption. Advertisements Why employee-centricity matters in the age of AI. Lovich argues that many organizations are approaching AI adoption from the wrong direction: introducing new tools without considering how employees experience the change. For workers worried about job security, increased workloads or losing hard-won expertise, AI can feel more like a threat than an opportunity. Her alternative? Engage employees. Rather than prescribe AI use cases from the top down, let employees identify tedious tasks and experiment with redesigning their own workflows. Such an approach embraces two of her key principles - co-create everything and do it first. Employees should help shape the changes that affect them, while leaders model willingness to learn and experiment themselves. The distinction is important: technology should not just make employees more productive for the organization. It should make work more enjoyable and fulfilling for employees themselves. Making work better is everyone's business. While seemingly simple, Lovich's principles do require a shift in mindset. For organizations accustomed to optimizing work around business performance, employee-centricity asks a different starting question: What would work look like if it were designed to be genuinely rewarding for the people doing it? Lovich argues that rather than compete with business performance, employee-centricity may be the key to achieving it. Verify you are human Checking your browser before accessing this site. Then you will be redirected to the requested content. Ray ID: 8f3a2c1b9d4e5f6a · Performance & security by Cloudflare site-verification-ok Verify you are human Checking your browser before accessing this site. Then you will be redirected to the requested content. Ray ID: 8f3a2c1b9d4e5f6a · Performance & security by Cloudflare site-verification-ok Advertisements Carolyn Cirillo is a New York City-based research and content strategist who studies and writes on design, macro trends, the future of work and the impact of inspiring workplaces on the user experience and organizational outcomes. Working frequently with brands in the built environment and the real estate industry, she focuses on the power of design to improve the human experience in environments where we live, work, learn and play. An avowed urbanist who is passionate about adaptive reuse, she loves to travel and discover new conversion projects, especially if she can arrive by public transportation. AI delivers business value when companies redesign workflows, equip managers, and measure results.

TalentNeuron and BCG partner to help companies redesign their workforces for AI. Oct 19, 2026, 08:34 ET Partnership combines BCG's transformation expertise with TalentNeuron's workforce intelligence, so leaders can base decisions about AI, cost and skills on how work is changing inside and outside their organizations NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - TalentNeuron and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) today announced a strategic partnership to help organizations make faster, better-evidenced decisions about how AI, cost pressure and changing skill needs will reshape their workforce. The partnership combines BCG's talent, organization and transformation expertise with TalentNeuron's workforce intelligence technologies, including labor market intelligence, skills intelligence and internal talent intelligence. AI is the primary force in an era of massive workforce transformation. BCG Institute research published in April 2026 estimates that over the next two to three years, 50% to 55% of jobs in the US will be reshaped by AI, and that 10% to 15% of jobs in the US could be eliminated over roughly five years. BCG's 2026 AI at Work survey of close to 12,000 frontline employees, managers, and leaders in more than a dozen global markets found that 72% say AI has already considerably changed skills expectations in their roles. The same research shows that strategic clarity from leadership pays big dividends, lifting measurable business impact by 25 percentage points, while better tools without strategy and redesign only move it by about 5 points. Companies therefore need to redesign work and operating models around people rather than just deploying tools. Combining Strategic Expertise with Workforce Intelligence The partnership addresses the questions now on most executive agendas: how AI will change the work each role performs, how to manage workforce cost while protecting the capabilities growth depends on, and which skills to build, hire or automate. Together, BCG and TalentNeuron provide organizations with an informed view of their current and future workforce that is grounded in the external labor market and connected to business outcomes. BCG brings deep expertise in talent, skills and organization design, along with the experience to carry workforce plans through to execution. Its Talent & Skills practice includes an extensive global network of specialists with an established track record of delivering impact for clients across industries. TalentNeuron brings a workforce intelligence and planning platform used by more than 60% of the Fortune 100. The platform connects a company's internal workforce data to more than 25 years of labor market intelligence, covering roughly 2 billion candidate profiles, more than 65,000 skills and about 3 million job postings processed each day in 33 languages. From Insight to Action Working together, the two firms will help clients see how AI will change work at the level of individual tasks and roles, model the cost and capability effects of different scenarios, and decide where to hire, reskill, redeploy or automate. TalentNeuron's platform can remain in place after an engagement, so the workforce plan can be updated as business strategy and labor market conditions evolve. "Most of our clients know AI will change how work gets done. Far fewer can say which roles it will change, by how much, and how their workforce will need to evolve as a result," said Suketu Shah, BCG managing director and senior partner, and global topic leader for talent and skills. "TalentNeuron gives our teams a market-calibrated view of roles and skills, so the workforce decisions we help clients make rest on evidence from the labor market as well as their own data." "Every company now faces hard questions about automation, skills and how its workforce should change under different scenarios. Few have built the capability to answer them, because it takes expertise and technology together, at a scale most organizations don't yet have," said David Wilkins, Chief Executive Officer of TalentNeuron. "BCG brings the judgment to reach clear, defensible answers today. TalentNeuron gives clients the system to continuously update those answers as work and labor market conditions inevitably change over time." About TalentNeuron TalentNeuron is the only solution that drives workforce transformation by unifying internal talent intelligence and external market insight. Over 60% of the Fortune100 are using TalentNeuron to move beyond fragmented talent planning and toward a model where strategic workforce decisions are made through comprehensive analytics, including demand forecasting, automation impact analysis, scenario modeling, and talent optimization. Powered by advanced AI and machine learning, TalentNeuron delivers real-time workforce intelligence across markets representing over 96% of global GDP. With this intelligence, organizations use TalentNeuron to understand labor market and competitor trends, identify current and future skill requirements and gaps, and shape a future-ready workforce. About Boston Consulting Group Boston Consulting Group bridges the gap between ambition and outcomes for the world's leading companies and organizations. We are built for this era of unprecedented change - bringing strategic clarity rooted in over 60 years of deep domain knowledge, combined with applied AI shaped by our practitioners. BCG works shoulder-to-shoulder with CEOs across industries and geographies to deliver transformative impact at scale: stronger returns, transferred capabilities, and change that sticks. For more information, visit BCG.com. SOURCE TalentNeuron