How Abby Rich is building Medtronic's in-house team to redesign work

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Abby Rich, Director, Enterprise & Workforce Design at Medtronic, sees work redesign as expertise an organization needs to own. As technology changes, people need a team that understands their work, can rethink it, and can help them succeed with new responsibilities.

Her approach starts with the outcomes a role needs to deliver. She examines the tasks, where they belong, and where human judgment matters before deciding how technology should contribute.

Working with Reejig gives Abby’s team the work data to make those decisions. Her ambition is to build an ongoing internal practice that connects work redesign with employee development and clear expectations for how people contribute.

Putting her approach into practice

Employees needed more than tools and training

Medtronic’s initial approach to AI in the workforce included giving people tools, offering prompt training, and encouraging adoption. But employees still had practical questions: how should they use these tools, and how did they fit into their roles?

Abby recognized that deploying technology needed to be accompanied by a clearer understanding of the work. Employees needed to know how their responsibilities would change and what they were expected to accomplish.

That meant examining work before deciding where agents and technology belonged.

Abby used work data to guide redesign

With Reejig, Abby’s team examined the work happening within role groups and individual roles.

That detail supported decisions about where tasks belonged. Some work might sit in shared services, some with business partners, and some could be supported by AI. Understanding those responsibilities came before choosing the technology.

Her approach connected this analysis with Medtronic’s digital teams, so decisions about deploying solutions followed a considered view of how the work should operate.

The question extended beyond whether AI could perform a task. Abby wanted to understand whether it should, how it would fit into the workflow, and what the change would mean for people.

HR’s experience created demand for internal expertise

Medtronic’s broader HR transformation helped build executive confidence in redesigning work. As other leaders explored what change could look like in their own functions, they needed expertise to support them.

For Abby, meeting that demand meant building an internal team that could keep doing this work as technology and business needs evolved.

External support could help the organization get started, but her ambition was to develop expertise Medtronic could retain and apply over time.

This connected HR’s experience with a wider organizational need: people who could understand work, guide redesign, and help employees adapt.

“You need to have that internal capability and expertise in-house.”

Work analysis opened up development possibilities

Understanding tasks also sharpened Abby’s attention on human expertise and career development.

Seeing similar work across different roles opened conversations about upskilling, reskilling, and less traditional career pathways. A task-level view could reveal connections that job titles alone might obscure.

Abby also emphasized the support people need when roles change substantially. Leaders first need to define the new responsibilities and expectations, then help employees develop the skills to succeed.

For her, that support is part of work redesign itself. Changing a workflow creates a responsibility to explain what the change means for the person doing the work.

“What are the human elements of a role that need to remain uniquely human?”

Next: defining how people use the time gained

Abby’s next priority is making expectations clearer when AI changes how people spend their time.

Time gained does not automatically become more valuable work. Employees need to understand what they should do with it, which outcomes matter, and how their contribution will be assessed.

That requires deliberate decisions about how time will be reinvested, alongside measures that reflect the redesigned workflow.

Abby’s internal practice is intended to support this continuing work: understanding what changes, helping leaders make decisions, and preparing employees for new responsibilities as technology evolves.

What other leaders can learn

Connect AI tools to people’s actual work

Explain how technology fits into employees’ responsibilities and the outcomes they need to deliver.

Build expertise you can keep using

Develop an internal team that can support redesign as work and technology change.

Define what happens with the time gained

Give people clear expectations and support to use that time well.

The work intelligence behind the approach

Reejig gives Abby’s team the data to examine tasks within roles and consider where work should sit before designing technology around it. That understanding supports decisions about AI alongside the implications for human expertise, employee development, and changing responsibilities.