A Service System Perspective of Work

With service-dominant logic, or S-D logic, service is the focus. To explain this better, let’s view “work” through a service science lens by expanding our view of business output to allow for a more holistic understanding of how to increase employer profit.

First, we should view “work” and all of its intangible and tangible artifacts as a service provision. Let’s take a moment and expand on this thinking. In a larger societal sense, “work” leads to worker well-being and economic growth. Economic growth is easier to measure than worker well-being; however, service science attempts to recognize both. By utilizing a service system, we are more easily able to identify the interactive nature of “work” in delivering the outcomes that markets, communities, or even societies are seeking.

A service view of “work” recognizes the relational nature of exchange between employers, workers, and suppliers, such as education and training providers or assessment and testing companies. Solution providers, therefore, need to develop an architecture of participation that enables stakeholders to connect and collaborate through a shared vision. This means solution providers must focus on collaborating, sensing, responding, and learning from the journeys of “work” experiences.

The solution, therefore, is a market network business where strategy is increasingly about joint ventures and collaboration in a system of open innovation and co-creation of value that is worker well-being. A shared vision of worker well-being drives the development and placement of abilities towards right-fit and promotes the implementation of executive-level strategies towards increased profit.

Dominant logics of how to succeed are complex to change. However, in times of turbulence and upheaval, it is essential to be receptive to shifting frames of reference and alternative ways to respond to new logics. “Work” is experiencing one of these turbulent upheavals where it is difficult for human capital leaders to separate the noise from the signal.

At Placement Loop, we are suggesting that an increasingly audible and clear signal is emerging that provides a strong message: The “product” of “work” is a co-created service to improve worker well-being.