This month Harvard Business Review published its list of the 20 most important management ideas for 2008. I enjoyed thinking about this question from a workforce perspective, and offering my perspective on one idea that I believe represents a fundamental shift hovering on the horizon. I hope you’ll share your view – and any examples, if you’re already heading in this direction.

In a nutshell: how do you define a job? For most organizations today, it’s based on the unit of time – 40 hours week, for example – but I believe that definition is rapidly reaching the end of its useful life. Going forward, many jobs in our economy will be better defined by and compensated according to the task performed, regardless of the time spent achieving the desired outcome.

Ironically, the switch from time to task takes us back to the way most workers were compensated for centuries. In both agricultural and craft-based economies, rewards were directly related to output created: the amount of farm produce, the number and quality of pottery pieces, and so on. Even in the early days of the industrial revolution, workers were paid by individual piece rates, in most cases with no guaranteed base pay. As late as 1920, 80% of all workers in the U.S. were paid on a piecemeal basis or in some other way that linked pay directly to the quantity of results produced.

As the industrial economy gained pace, concerns over piecemeal pay grew. Standards and rates used before the early 1900s were haphazard and prone to manipulation by unscrupulous owners or supervisors – standards were poorly set, employers cut rates when workers earned "too much,” and workers would conceal their real capacity for production to keep standards low. The scientific management approaches introduced by Frederick Taylor attempted to make the system fair, engineering differential piece rates by dividing work into discrete tasks and determining minimum times required to complete them, but the challenge of defining the individual task and matching it fairly to compensation proved increasingly difficult. As industrial production shifted from the discrete output of individual workers – for example, a textile worker sewing on buttons – and became a complex, integrated process, the feasibility of task-based jobs declined.

The concept of jobs defined primarily or exclusively on time entered the labor world in the 1930s and 1940s as post-depression era government regulations and the rise of unionization pushed for standard hour plans, with seniority and cost of living based increases. Merit increases, career ladders, and detailed job analysis rose to prominence until the 1950s and 60s. Measuring time made sense in a complex industrial economy.

But the economy has shifted significantly over the past decades and the drum beat for change in the way we define a “job” is becoming louder.—particularly as Generation Y enters the workforce and corporations’ struggle to attract and retain this critically important – and very different – workforce segment.

The majority of workers of the western world are now employed in service industries – and already more than half of those are knowledge workers, paid for writing, analyzing, advising, counting, designing, researching – and countless related functions, including capturing, organizing, and providing access to knowledge used by others. Time-based jobs make little sense for these workers. Who’s to say how long it will take an individual to write a report, conduct an analysis, or produce a piece of software? Why not specify the outcomes that each individual is responsible for producing, and let each knowledge worker determine how much time is required to do the job well? Task-based makes sense in a knowledge economy.

And the reality is, many corporations are there already – but just haven’t acknowledged it. The move to telecommuting is essentially trusting that the task will be accomplished, although in most cases the job is still stated in terms of an expectation to work a specified number of hours from home. As virtual work continues to spread, the logic of confronting this slight of hand, of making the stated expectation fit the operational reality, grows.

Most companies already have significant experience with hiring on a task basis – the growing trend toward the use of contract labor and outsourcing provides experience in this way of thinking.

The idea of task-based jobs deserves to pick up momentum this year. Is the ball rolling in your firm?

Read all of Tammy Erickson's "Across the Ages" posts.