Organisation Overview
Bupa is a global healthcare organisation focused on helping people live longer, healthier, and happier lives. Operating across insurance, health services, and care, Bupa serves millions of customers and is committed to delivering high-quality, human-centred experiences.
Problem Statement
Bupa’s Talent Acquisition function supports large-scale, complex hiring across multiple business units. Like many Talent Acquisition functions, Bupa was navigating increasing hiring demand while looking for smarter, more scalable ways to support the business and improve delivery. However, there was limited visibility into how work was being done, and whether effort was aligned to both business value and team experience. A significant proportion of time was being spent on tasks that didn’t fall into highly energising or highly impactful.
Primary Goal
The work began with a fundamental shift in perspective: 👉 Move from roles and processes to tasks and lived experience of work
The key question: How can we redesign work to deliver more value while creating more joy for our people?
Strategic Alignment
The initiative aligned to Bupa’s broader focus on productivity, employee wellbeing, and delivering better customer outcomes. Rather than treating productivity and engagement as separate challenges, the project reframed work design as the lever to improve both simultaneously. The goal was to create a more human, future-ready TA function where people spend more time on meaningful, high-impact work.
Stakeholder Engagement
This was a deeply collaborative effort across internal and external stakeholders.
- TA Leadership: Set direction and sponsored the work
- TA Team: played a critical role in surfacing how work felt day-to-day, not just how it was designed on paper
- TQSolutions: Led design, analysis, and insights
- Beamible: enabled detailed task-level analysis and scenario modelling
- TA Teams: Provided real-world input and validation
Task Intelligence Analysis
- Time-in-motion style analysis of TA work
- Mapping tasks by:
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- Business criticality
- Level of enjoyment / energy
- Identification of friction points:
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- Process bottlenecks
- System inefficiencies
- Poor access to information
Task Segmentation Framework
Work was classified into four categories:
- High value + high enjoyment → protect and amplify
- High value + low enjoyment → redesign or support
- Low value + high enjoyment → refocus
- Low value + low enjoyment → eliminate or automate
This reframed productivity as:
Efficiency + Value Creation, with Enjoyment as a multiplier
Scenario Modelling
- Simulated impact of changes (e.g. using AI for scheduling interviews)
- Quantified impact on time, cost, and team capacity before implementation
Ethics & Governance
- Focus on augmenting human work, not replacing it
- Careful consideration of fairness, transparency, and experience
- Strong emphasis on protecting meaningful human work
Communication
- Clear narrative: this is about creating better work, not cutting roles
- Ongoing engagement with TA teams to build trust and ownership
Outcomes & Results
Quantitative Results
- Only ~33% of time was spent in work that was both critical and energising
- ~31% of time was spent on work that was low strategic value – the biggest opportunity for change
- ~35% of work identified as not requiring human input and suitable for automation
- Significant time concentrated in low-value activities such as:
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- Resume screening
- Scheduling
- Compliance checks
- Manual reporting
These activities alone accounted for ~25% of total team time.
Qualitative Results
- Clear shift from “doing more work” to “doing more meaningful work”
- Increased awareness of what drives energy vs burnout
- Stronger connection between recruiters and business impact
- Reframing of TA as a strategic, human-centred function
- Created a shared language around value, energy, and work design
- Positioned joy as a legitimate productivity lever
Challenges & Do-Overs
Key Learnings
- You cannot optimise what you cannot see
- Starting with tasks unlocks clarity and better decisions
- Productivity is not just efficiency – joy materially matters
Advice for Peers
- Don’t start with technology
- Get granular on how work happens
- Protect the work your people care about – it often drives the most value
Next Steps / Ongoing Work
- Scaling task-based work design across TA
- Embedding AI into targeted, high-friction areas
- Continuing to shift time into high-value, energising work
- Exploring application of this approach across broader HR and business functions
