Defend, Dissolve, and Redefine Boundaries

Change often causes boundaries to emerge, fade, or move. Many are in play. Employees are unsettled by shifting borders of control, authority, and work hours; strains on human skills and capacity; evolving roles, locations, and career paths. Change by design not default requires clarification and action to indicate new practices, channel energies, and provide relevant guides and guard rails.

“Agility needs two things. One is a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness. And agility requires stability, a stable foundation of things that don’t change." ​Aaron De Smet​, McKinsey '​The keys to organizational agility.​'

Boundaries need strategic review to delineate, diffuse, or divert - borders may need reinforcing, reworking, or rejecting. Boundary intelligence and design enables answers to employees' simmering questions including:

• When do workdays end so I can recharge and sustain daily capacity?
• Where do responsibilities begin/end so I know what I'm accountable for?
• When can I choose where I work to optimise the team's and my results?
• How is digital labour going to affect my team?
• Are contractor/freelance team members part of our community?
• What is my role now as more of my work extends beyond my job title?
• How much must I drive my upskilling and choice of career pathways?

Leaders must collaborate with their teams to define and refine stronger, weaker, and new borders across people's working lives.

Where are the current boundaries of your company's hybrid work policy? What might be a minimum employee percentage for employee/contractor/AI teams? Within blended teams, who is responsible for making what decisions? How are managers defining employees' changing job specs? Is talent able to grow into new roles across company silos?

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Clear daily boundaries? No, "the infinite workday":

• 16% YoY meeting growth after 8pm (more spanning many time zones).
• 20% of employees actively working over the weekend, checking emails.
• >50 messages sent by average employee outside core business hours.
• 29% of workers log back on at 10pm [Microsoft, ​Work Trend Index 25​].

Why does this matter?

• 34% of workers experienced high or extreme levels of pressure or stress 'always' or 'often' in the past year [Mental Health UK, ​2025 report​]
• 9.4 days off sick/ avg UK worker adding up to 17.1 million working days lost per year to UK businesses [CIPD, ​Health and wellbing at work​ '25].

Changing the boundaries of where work happens can help improve employees' results and mental health. However, the dynamics of new work boundaries are themselves still being explored, tested, and refined as the effects on trust, engagement, and performance for individuals and teams emerge and improve.

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Set work model? No, hybrid models are still evolving and being updated, while also not yet well supported:

• 77% of global employees and 81% of global employers acknowledge that RTO mandates stem partly from lack of trust in remote productivity.
• 54% of global workers say their employer's latest policy provides greater flexibility than the policy that superceded it.
• Only 49% believes their organisation supports them with consistent tools and processes to work effectively from any location.
• 50% of high performers work for organisations requiring less than three days in the office per week.
• 73% report higher productivity, self-reporting 19% avg increase under new policy (+7.6hrs for 40hr wk)[Cisco, ​Global Hybrid Work Study '25​].
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Defined human-AI decision and job boundaries? No, and trust is an issue as AI starts to take over more tasks. Who is deciding which tasks?

• 1% of people would trust AI to make important work decisions.
• 63% would trust AI to inform, but not make, those decisions [​CIPD, 25​].
• 46% of employees are concerned about decisions being made without human oversight.
• 35% cite unclear accountability when mistakes occur.
• Only 25% of frontline employees say they have received sufficient support from leaders on how and when to use AI at work.
• Only 33% of employees globally get guidance on how to reallocate time saved using AI, reducing positive impact [BCG, ​AI at Work 2025​]
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Identifiable new non-linear career pathways? No, but internal mobility is increasing as the benefits are discovered.

• 3-5x reduction in costs with internal redeployments achieved in only 20 days vs traditional recruiting models.
• 62% retention rate of lateral internal moves vs 45% for external hires.
• 5.4 yr employee tenure with higher internal mobility vs 2.9 yrs at low-mobility organisations [JobsPikr, ​Talent Marketplaces are Rising​ 2025]
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In this VUCA world, there are innumerable unknowns that we continually gather intelligence on, informing how we best morph and mould as we achieve greater clarity. As we advance, employees need guidance and reasonable, relevant limits. Identify the wavering and shifting boundaries to determine the status of each and the boundary action needed:

• DEFEND - strengthen and maintain to protect, preserve, or promote
• DISSOLVE - deliberately blur or fade to allow filtering and flow
• REDESIGN - shape with strategic intent to adapt and augment
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“Ambiguity is the enemy of productivity. Well-designed organizations make it crystal clear who is responsible for what, who has decision-making authority, and how teams and individuals are held accountable." ​Forrest Advisors research​.

Your Boundary-Intelligence Framework
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Audit current boundaries across the Defend, Dissolve, and Redesign domains:

HUMAN CONTROL & CAPACITY:

CURRENT: Are limits explicit around job responsibilities, decision-making, work hours, availability, and recovery time? Are employees sharing data to inform and update each other? Can employees delegate any decisions for certain reasons to whom?

DATA: Clear assignments, decision processes, people and workflows. After-hours connectivity pressure and patterns, burnout symptom reports.

QUESTION: Are parameters and scope reviewed and updated at reasonable intervals? Is governance complete, communicated, and followed? Are workday boundaries modeled by most leaders with their teams? Are boundaries strong enough to protect employees from burnout?

WORKING MODEL:

CURRENT: What implicit or explicit policies exist around office attendance, remote work flexibility, synchronous vs. asynchronous work, and location-based decision-making?

DATA: Current hybrid adoption, employee satisfaction with flexibility, office attendance patterns and coordination, and performance metrics across locations.

QUESTION: Are we providing clarity and a flexible framework? Do employees have the right tools to support distributed work performance? Are we enabling burnout reduction or inadvertently increasing stress through poorly managed boundaries? Are we checking for proximity bias undermining the hybrid model benefits?

WORKFORCE COMPOSITION:

CURRENT: How do employment arrangements affect participation, opportunity access, decision authority, work locations and hours, cultural alignment, community involvement and performance metrics? What are target blended workforce ratios? Have these been communicated widely?

DATA: Percentage of contractors/freelancers (benchmark: 36-40%?), integration efforts and effectiveness, AI integration and utilisation by unit, shadow AI usage (baseline: 54%).

QUESTION: Are we maintaining employment boundaries that limit talent while lacking decision/accountability boundaries that protect performance?

CAREER PROGRESSION:

CURRENT: How fixed are job descriptions? What percentage of employees' tasks are outside their job scope? How many employees know their skills? How visible are internal skill-based opportunities? What percentage of early career employees have changed job across divisions or departments? Are employees offered side projects to develop new skills or experience?

DATA: Average tenure per role, internal placement rates, up-to-date skills inventory, trending skills needs, skill acquisition speed.

QUESTION: Have we developed enough defended progression pathways to replace fading job scopes?

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For each boundary zone, deliberate analysis and design are required to stop drift into a suboptimal default shift. Instead actively decide and document where to Defend, Dissolve, and Redesign.

‍Human capacity limits supported by aligned behaviours to prevent burnout; Decision authority/accountability clarity for decentralised responsibility and employee-contractor and human-AI workflows and AI usage; Progression visibility and opportunity fairness in skills-based systems; Strategic, ethical, and people decision-making that remain human-critical.

‍Employment arrangement distinctions in team participation and opportunity access; Credential requirements blocking skills-based access; fixed job descriptions preventing faster skill acquisition; geographic/location boundaries that constrain extended talent pools.

Evolve job titles to skills competency levels; organisation chart hierarchies into project-based authority; shift tenure milestones to capability progression markers; redefine employee/contractor distinctions into contribution/accountability spectrums.

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Boundaries work to promote agility and provide stability when they're embedded in systems and incentives. For boundaries that you:

Technology enforcement: Meeting-blocking tools, after-hours response delays, decision approval workflows; Policy clarity: Written decision authority matrices (employees-only, employees-contractors, human-only, human-supervised AI, AI-autonomous); Metrics: Track defended boundary violations such as security permissions, document access, after-hours contacts, decisions without human oversight; Consequences: Manager metrics include supporting capacity boundaries and relevant individual and team self-direction.

Process redesign: Opportunity visibility systems that don't distinguish employment type; Access infrastructure: Talent marketplaces showing all opportunities to all contributors; Participation parity: Contractors in team rituals, skip-levels, feedback systems; Skills infrastructure: Clear skill definitions, assessment, and matching algorithms.

New frameworks: Skills progression maps replacing job ladders; human-AI teams including digital labour. Training: AI upskilling for employees; Manager capability to navigate skills-based mobility vs. job-based hoarding; Incentives: Reward employees for AI experimentation and productivity improvements; managers for team members' growth beyond their team; Transparency: Visible pathways from current skills to desired opportunities; AI integration targets and timelines.

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Boundary architecture succeeds if it achieves the intended outcomes:

DEFEND boundary health with Team agreement documentation; Office days coordination (where applicable) improvement; Core working hours utilisation; Meeting hours weekly decrease; Burnout risk reduction; Human oversight confidence with reduced decision concerns; Capacity sustainability - measuring after-hours contact frequency and recovery period utilisation.

DISSOLVE boundary effectiveness with Talent access expansion - measuring contractor integration quality, time-to-fill reduced days; Mobility acceleration - measuring internal placement rate with increasing tenure target; Skills acquisition speed - measuring capability development rate.

REDESIGN boundary clarity with Progression transparency - measuring employee confidence in career pathways; Opportunity fairness - measuring access equity across populations, rejection handling quality; Skills development - measuring utilisation of training/development resources and skills gap closure.

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“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything." — ​Warren Buffet​, Founder, Berkshire Hathaway.

HubSpot​'s "Hybrid by Design" builds new hybrid boundaries through connections and maintains a strong culture by design including remote meetups, location-specific Slack channels, virtual coffee chats, office and remote culture champions.

​Schneider Electric​'s Talent Marketplace dissolves boundaries between silos, giving access and visibility to internal opportunities, unlocking 127,000 hours of hidden capacity in a few weeks, creating $15 million in productivity gains and lower recruitment costs.

​IBM​'s "SkillsBuild" allows employees and non-employees to pursue microcredentials encouraging cross-company transitions and non-linear career progression."​My Career Advisor​" helps retention with (AI-driven) 95% accuracy for predicting workers about to quit.

​PwC​'s My Marketplace powers internal mobility, providing personalized dashboards with opportunities tailored to skills, experience, and interests giving visibility and access into what's available.

​Atlassian​'s Team Health Monitor works across blended teams of fulltime employees and contractors which defines and tracks metrics, supports psychological safety and team culture boundaries.
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🗞️ ​Workers have unequal access to hybrid working​ - revealing data.

🗞️ ​Human & Digital Employee Collaboration to Transform Workplace Design​

‍🗞️ ​Work and Personal Life Boundary Management​ - interesting research.

🎶 ​Boundaries​, Big Sean - mellow, vibing, drawing a line in the sand.

Boundaries aren't set in stone. Far from it. They cannot be during these 'messy' turbulent times. Your business and employees need new agility and sufficient stability. Guard rails help channel energy and efforts. Find the key constraints that strengthen your company's vision and alignment and the key borders to relax and release to unleash more potential.

I bring my rich strategy background and extensive Future of Work experience to engage leaders to identify critical limits and shift where necessary to expand flexibility and capacity. ​Click here to book a 45-minute session.​

Sharing a temporary boundary on my side - I'm off to Bhutan shortly on vacation in the mountains. There will be no newsletter next week.

See you again in December!

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Sophie