Published February 5, 2025 in Leadership • 7 min read • 
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Work design was easy in the era of stable workforces of full-time employees: a company simply hired the correct number of suitably qualified employees to get the job done. But permanent hiring and top-down command structures have been turned on their heads. Many companies, especially those in sectors where innovation is essential to survival, have moved toward work designs that rely more on external labor and greater employee autonomy. Even traditional companies may have units or departments – think research and development or new product design – that are unconventional.
While these new models cater to greater needs for flexibility, they present a challenge for organizations. How can companies ensure sufficient proximity to and connection with their workforce? This is important for talent retention and career advancement and ensuring working arrangements can respond to innovation, technological transformation, and changing strategic objectives.
In a small company, where all members subscribe to a common goal and work interconnectedly, it is easy to see how proximity may be achieved in the context of decentralized decision-making. But how can larger organizations achieve proximity when employees are empowered to make decisions? How can companies tame the centrifugal forces that may push apart their various units?
To answer these questions, let’s begin with the concepts of interdependence and autonomy. These are key to understanding the changing nature of work arrangements and defining the best work design model for them. These concepts are not new, but they have become critically important since the widespread adoption of remote working, the advent of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies, and increasingly fluid attitudes toward work relationships and commitment.
Work interdependence is the extent to which performing tasks depends on interactions with externalized labor, such as freelancers or contract workers. Rideshare provider Uber is the perfect example of a company designed around a core of internal employees interacting with an army of external workers – its independent drivers. By contrast, a traditional company such as financial services giant BBVA is built around mostly internal employees.
It is easy to imagine how interdependence affects proximity. Interactions among internal staff tend to be characterized by greater closeness and frequency; colleagues know each other, even if superficially. With external interdependencies, work arrangements are more fragmented. Internal employees may form connections with freelancers who they contract regularly, but there may be many others, especially in large companies, who they know only digitally.
“For organizations to define their work models, it is important to consider the optimal mix of external and internal employees and the degree of autonomy employees will have.”
Autonomy is the degree of freedom employees are given in deciding how their work is done. In contemporary work models, typical manager-designed structures are increasingly complemented by worker-designed elements. People have become more proactive in crafting their work and careers, and organizations need to empower their members to design work. This is not limited to how a specific task is carried out but reflects individual agency in responding to changing work requirements.
For organizations to define their work models, it is important to consider the optimal mix of external and internal employees and the degree of autonomy employees will have.
It helps to conceptualize companies along the axes of workplace interdependence (from mostly internal employees to mostly external employees) and work autonomy (from low to high). That produces four models: command center (internal employees with low autonomy), innovation hive (internal employees with high autonomy), network hub (external employees with low autonomy), and talent nomads (external employees with high autonomy). Most companies fall somewhere between the four, and it is possible to incorporate multiple work designs within the same organization.
This is the most traditional company with a structured, centralized workplace. The vast majority of employees will be stable, full-time employees. Interactions with external workers will be sporadic in order, for example, to fill a temporary vacancy or meet a peak in client demand. This company will have a clear hierarchy and well-defined processes, with centralized decision-making and coordination. The roles of managers and human resource specialists are crucial: they design work activities, evaluate work execution, and map out career paths. Employee autonomy is low, and any self-direction will focus on how a job is performed rather than how it is structured.
As with the command center model, most workers are full-time employees, and interactions with external workers tend to be occasional arrangements to meet short-term needs. But, within the structured containment (the hive), there is a large degree of freedom. The model suggests busy, collaborative internal activity with employees cross-pollinating ideas. Spotify is a good example.
This emphasis on less hierarchical and more self-directed approaches to work means managers and HR specialists must support empowered employees rather than direct them. They must promote common values and norms, not formal rules and practices. Many traditional HR decisions – on hiring, evaluation, and compensation, for example – may be decentralized. This approach encourages team-based work and frequent internal rotations and requires companies to build trust-based relationships.
This model involves a central point coordinating multiple external connections and the organized management of outside relationships. There is a lower percentage of full-time workers and a heavy reliance on outside sources such as short-term agency workers, freelancers, and platform-mediated contractors. It may seem counterintuitive to say that autonomy is low in this kind of company. But, while freelancers may decide how, where, or when to work, the tasks and their structure remain prescribed and clearly bound by the organization. Compensation tends to be based on the completion of predefined tasks or projects. For this model to succeed, restricting external workers’ autonomy in some areas is essential.
“Even organizations with mostly external workforces or with highly autonomous employees must achieve proximity to succeed over the long term.”
This arrangement may reduce company costs, boost flexibility, increase skill variety, and improve innovation. However, the distant working relationship may pose challenges, from potential disruptions to workflow to problems with work quality. Hiring may be centralized, but relationships may be short-term, task-based, or project-based. Performance evaluations often come from customer reviews rather than human resource processes.
This model is the most disruptive of the four and best suited to open innovation projects within established companies, startups, or creative collaborations. It enables flexibility, scalability, and modern ways of working: a fluid, adaptable workforce and access to diverse skills and capabilities on demand. Many outside workers with lots of autonomy come together to design and deliver specific projects. While these workers are generally mobile, they may return to the same organization for future projects, just like nomads return to the same places. Individuals have substantial discretion in crafting and designing their work roles, related responsibilities, and connections to other projects. The challenge of sustaining this model over the long run is clear, but so is the potential for creativity and innovation.
Now, let’s discuss proximity or the sense of connection among people while satisfying their need for flexibility. Even organizations with mostly external workforces or with highly autonomous employees must achieve proximity to succeed over the long term. What that proximity looks like will depend on many factors, including the company’s size and the sector. However, forging productive connections under novel work designs clearly requires a different approach to situations where all employees are working under similar contracts and conditions. Here are four strategies to enhance proximity across your organization:
1. Clear accountability structures. This affects how objectives are set, implemented, assessed, and reviewed. Typical manager-led performance evaluations may be used, but they will sometimes need to be complemented by peer and client-led performance evaluations and feedback, especially in companies with large external workforces. Organizations need to draw on various accountability mechanisms, complementing more typical processes and output control with social control. If not, employees of highly decentralized organizations may feel unaccountable.
2. Structural sources of alignment. Novel work designs may lead to flatter organizations, but management still provides guidance. When autonomy and reliance on externalized labor increases, organizations need to spend more effort on developing an internally consistent management system where its various elements support and reinforce each other, tying together work design, staffing, workflow management, performance evaluation, and incentives. Such a system provides a critical source of alignment and guides work behavior.
3. People-based sources of alignment. Companies should introduce liaison roles to connect and align teams to avoid organizational units drifting further apart. These are pivotal positions where key interfaces exist between a company’s functions, departments, business units, and subsidiaries. For example, such roles can be a team of organizational translators that transfer the company’s management system between units and/or countries, a corporate culture center that helps roll out and diffuse the company’s culture across its different divisions and units, or individuals with cross-functional or cross-cultural experience.
4. Material sources of alignment. Other forms of alignment can help keep companies relying more on externalized labor together. One example is building an early product prototype, which helps create a tangible vision for a product or solution that can unite employees by providing a big picture and a clear direction.
Companies ignore the need for proximity at their peril. For example, freelancers who feel no connection to others in an organization may provide sub-par service and inflict reputational damage. Autonomous workers without meaningful links to a team may undermine project completion. Commitment will waver without sufficient proximity, impacting areas such as talent retention, achieving strategic goals, and innovating quickly. Novel work models allow companies and employees to rethink traditional relationships and structures. Building a new sense of proximity must be part of that process.
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