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

Meet Abby Rich, Director, Enterprise & Workforce Design – Organization Transformation at Medtronic

Abby’s path into work design ran through leadership development, HR strategy and strategic workforce planning. Understanding the workforce increasingly meant understanding the work itself.

She now leads enterprise and workforce design at Medtronic, where she sees work redesign as expertise an organization needs to own. As technology changes, people need a team that understands the work, can rethink it and can help them succeed in new roles and responsibilities.

Like many organizations, Medtronic began its AI journey by giving employees tools and prompt training. A familiar question soon emerged: how did any of it fit into their actual work?

“Great, but training for what?” Abby recalls. “Like, how am I supposed to use this?” That question became the starting point for a deeper shift: understanding the work behind each role, deciding where people and AI could contribute, and building an internal team to keep that work evolving.

Start with the outcomes, then redesign the tasks

Within HR, Abby and her team examined the work behind roles: what belonged with a business partner, what could sit in shared services, and where AI could contribute. Reejig’s work data made it possible to examine roles at that level.

Her starting point is simple: what does someone in this role need to achieve, and how can we better support them to do it? From there, the team examines the tasks and subtasks in a workflow, such as month-end financial reporting, to see where AI could assist and where people’s expertise is needed. It also surfaces work that continues simply because it always has.