A growth plan is only credible if the organization can perform the work required to deliver it. Workforce strategy builds that ability.
I’m skeptical of declarations that “the future workforce will be managerless” or “every role will be human/AI hybrid.” They suggest a common destination for businesses pursuing different ambitions, serving different customers and operating within different cultures.
AI creates new possibilities for how people contribute, sure. But its capabilities don’t predetermine how every organization should assemble its workforce.
Consider two competing consumer companies. One targets growth through ambitious retailer partnerships; another through a leap in product innovation. Both need commercial, creative and analytical capabilities. But one might concentrate expertise in retailer relationships and joint planning; the other in product development and rapid experimentation.
Those workforce choices help each company compete. The right combination of people, expertise and responsibility makes its particular growth strategy more achievable.
Copying a fashionable workforce model could mean investing in capabilities your strategy barely needs while overlooking those that could help you outperform a competitor.
At Braid, we believe workforce strategy deserves the same deliberate consideration as the products and services through which a business differentiates itself. And we believe your existing people should help design it.
Here are four principles for effective workforce strategy.
1. Give workforce strategy a clear business purpose
Here’s a truth Braid takes to be self-evident: workforce strategy is a lever for delivering growth.
So before making any workforce decisions, it’s critical to establish what growth you’re pursuing and how the work needs to change to deliver it.
Without that foundation, workforce strategy becomes an exercise in imagination. Appealing roles and fashionable structures tell you little about whether the workforce will help your business grow.
For our retail partnership-led consumer brand, growth might depend on understanding retailers’ needs, developing strong commercial propositions, and delivering reliably. Workforce planning should establish the expertise and skills required for that work.
For the innovation-led brand, the requirements might center on identifying unmet needs, developing products, and learning quickly from customer response.
AI’s contribution in each scenario will differ, too. It might have the potential to augment all roles. Alternatively, it might be able to automate and remove some roles altogether. There’s no one-size-fits all for AI’s role in your future workforce; its contribution must also be grounded in how it’s helping the workforce to deliver value.
This is why workforce strategy needs to flow from a considered design of future work. Braid’s method for work redesign gives workforce decisions concrete workflows, tasks and outcomes to serve.
You can be surgical in where you start; you don’t have to look at workforce evolution across the whole business at once. You can start by identifying a specific department or workflow that you’d like to evolve. The important thing is to connect each workforce choice to its ability to better deliver value within the chosen department or workflow.
2. Design the workforce with the people doing the work
Leadership can identify broad capability requirements. But it’s the people delivering the work that help make those requirements specific to the way the business operates in the day to day.
Leadership might identify content production capability as one worth investing in. But it’s an account executive, speaking with customers everyday, that identifies a specific technical writing skill as one with highest value within that content production capability.
That’s a different workforce requirement from “another B2B copywriter.” It identifies how a role will specifically contribute to the business’s growth.
Involving employees in discovery is only the beginning (but you’d be surprised how many organizational design programs overlook it!) At Braid, we advocate for their direct involvement in designing future roles.
Our work-redesign workshops map the tasks within a workflow and explore how people and AI could contribute at each stage. We extend that exercise into workforce planning: which tasks belong together, what skills are required to complete those tasks effectively, and might a role be defined?
The people doing the work (that is, managers and below) help answer those questions. They’re the ones dealing with customers’ day to day requests and experimenting with AI’s current capabilities. And so they’re the ones best placed to define the roles within the newly evolved AI-assisted workflow.
So while leaders provide strategic priorities. Managers (with help from People teams) develop skills maps and role descriptions. Together, they turn detailed knowledge of the work into a credible workforce plan.
Understandably, this level of involvement can make leaders nervous. Workforce planning can sound like a polite way of saying “restructuring and layoffs.” Be clear about what employees can influence, what has already been decided and how final decisions will be made.
But in my experience the benefits of involving your existing people in future workforce design vastly outweigh the risks. Co-design makes your workforce plan specific to how your business plans to create value. Your people help translate a broad growth ambition into the particular roles and skills needed to deliver it.
It’s how workforce strategy becomes a source of competitive advantage rather than a copy/paste of category conventions.
3. Develop the potential that already exists in your workforce
A person’s current job is an incomplete picture of their potential.
Existing employees bring relationships, experience, and organizational knowledge that are difficult to capture in a skills inventory. They may also have abilities and ambitions their current responsibilities rarely accommodate.
In my experience, many people welcome the opportunity to bring more of their capabilities to their work: solving different problems or developing expertise they’ve wanted to pursue.
Explore that potential before assuming your future workforce must be recruited from elsewhere. The external search for “AI-native talent” can overlook people already in your business who could combine valuable business expertise with newly designed ways of working.
But you can’t simply will personal growth into existence. People need structured learning and useful tools. They also need to understand how their evolving contribution supports the business, and see a credible path toward making it.
Managers have an important role in making those development paths real for your employees. They connect someone’s development with work the business needs, help them apply new skills, and give feedback as they take on unfamiliar responsibilities.
That makes managers important leaders of workforce change. They see both the contribution the business needs and the person developing toward making that contribution.
This evolving role of the manager is one reason I’m skeptical of blanket predictions about managerless organizations. Whatever the structure, someone needs the time and authority to help people grow into a changing workforce. For many businesses, developing that capability in their managers is an important part of the workforce strategy itself.
Some requirements will still call for recruitment or external expertise. But first, give your existing people a supported opportunity to show what they could become the foundational members of an evolved workforce.
4. Build the muscle for continual workforce adaptation
Workforce strategies should make an organization more adaptive.
As people learn, AI capabilities change, and business priorities shift, the shape of a workforce must adapt too. Waiting for the next workforce transformation project can leave those possibilities unused.
In her account of working at Lovable, Elena Verna describes an environment that challenges familiar assumptions about clearly defined jobs and management. She writes that roles’ limits are purposefully ill-defined, allowing the workforce to adapt to daily operational changes.
She also cautions that it is one company’s experience, rather than a universal model. There are “moments where ‘high agency’ is just a flattering way of describing duplicated work, unclear accountability, or someone stomping on somebody else’s toes. Sometimes the chaos produces a better outcome. Sometimes it’s just chaos.”
So while every business should be building some level of workforce adaptability into their workforce plans, different businesses need different degrees of stability.
You don’t need to make every role fluid to build a more adaptive workforce. Start with a single project. Agree who will own what tasks, considering what this particular piece of work requires rather than automatically carrying over the division of tasks from the last project.
As the project unfurls, give the team authority to revisit those decisions. Someone may be able to take work further than expected; another task may need different expertise than originally thought. Agree changes with the people affected.
Practicing this on individual projects helps people become comfortable with adapting how they contribute to projects, building the organization’s muscle for adaptive teaming.
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There’s no single blueprint for the future workforce. There is your business’s ambition, the work needed to achieve it, and the people who can help you understand what that requires. Build your workforce strategy from those foundations, with those people, and you give it a clear purpose: helping your business grow in the way you’ve chosen.
