With companies opting to slim down their organizational charts amid widespread adoption of AI tools, HR leaders should lean into their business partnership capabilities to thrive.
By Fran Maxwell and Kimerle Campbell
The phrase “The Great Flattening” is used to describe job layoffs and organizational restructuring initiatives in response to cost-cutting mandates and the adoption of AI tools. Most often, it’s executed by large technology firms and affects middle management professionals.
Whether this trend lives up to its grandiose handle remains to be seen. What is certain is that HR leaders have a crucial role to play amid the transformative workforce changes occurring in response to AI adoption, alongside a widespread push to operate in a leaner, more innovative, and more resilient manner.
The Great Flattening is an ideal opportunity for HR leaders to continue to elevate their business partner credentials by reconfiguring job roles, closing skills gaps, supercharging learning and development (L&D) functions, establishing C-suite alignment when managing continuous change, and harnessing organizational culture as a competitive advantage.
Corporations have been putting less hierarchical, less “tall” organizational structures through their paces for decades. The general aim of doing so is to cut through bureaucracy and sluggish decision-making while taking advantage of automation and other technological advances that give employees greater leeway to apply specialized knowledge to innovation.
Current organizational flattening efforts are distinguished by the presence of AI, which can equip senior leaders with sharper, increasingly real-time clarity on workforce performance. AI solutions also broaden the span of control of many traditional management positions. For example, AI-powered automation might enable a general manager who previously oversaw one business unit to manage three. A director responsible for six direct reports can leverage AI to manage two dozen human reports along with a handful of AI agents operating as virtual assistants, content creators, and data analysts. (That director also needs guidance from their HR business partner on human-AI “hybrid management” approaches.)
When boards and C-suites discuss AI enablement, “flattening,” staff reductions, or other large-scale efficiency improvements, HR leaders and their teams should recognize the following.
- Senior business leaders are taking a hard look at spans and layers within the organization to increase operating efficiency, strategic agility, and organizational resilience. Why, for example, does a vice president only have one direct report?
- AI’s impacts on job roles and employee segments vary widely and set off substantial ripple effects. Early-career professionals (e.g., marketing staffers who take meeting notes or benefits specialists who answer employee questions about reward packages) and many IT professionals (e.g., mainframe developers) are experiencing major AI-driven changes to their roles today. Other job types and demographics segments will experience AI-related job disruptions in the months and years to come.
- The HR business partner role is the linchpin connecting strategic objectives to skills development and the employee experience.
Amid AI enablement and sweeping changes to organizational layers and spans of control, HR leaders should focus on the following.
- Identify skills gaps while redesigning jobs and roles. As the advancement of AI and other emerging technologies accelerates, organizations that fail to adapt job roles and skills inventories to these capabilities risk falling behind competitors. HR business partners should assess the skills needed to support current and emerging workforce capabilities and then compare those data analyses to existing skills inventories. Predictive analytics can help HR teams identify evolving skills gaps and develop strategies to close those gaps. Given the pace of innovation, these evaluations should be conducted at least on a semi-annual basis and, in many cases, quarterly. These insights will help HR restructure roles while advising business leaders on how to address skills-development priorities in their domains.
- Elevate L&D. Venturing into the labor market to acquire rare, high-priced skill sets is a non-starter for many, if not most, organizations. These skills are not readily available, nor will they be any time soon. Instead, HR business partners need to work closely with their L&D colleagues to develop repeatable, efficient processes for upskilling and reskilling that can be deployed quickly and repeatedly across different skill sets and organizational groups. Savvy L&D functions are continuing to provide compliance-focused training while embracing personalized development journeys linked to business strategy and skills gaps. Given the talent shortage, it is crucial to manage L&D as an ongoing operational capability as opposed to a series of individual responses.
- Establish and sustain C-suite alignment on change and culture. The magnitude of structural changes caused by AI and other technological disruptions often stimulates deep and widespread uncertainty, and organizational culture is often the first casualty. In their work with the C-suite, HR business partners should emphasize the need for clear, forthright, and consistent messages regarding AI’s impact on jobs and responsibilities. When six different leaders are asked about the purpose of AI adoption, each of their answers should be the same. From a culture perspective, it is important for senior leaders to demonstrate the behaviors they ask the workforce to engage in to foster greater resilience, agility, and innovation. HR business partners can make this explicit to senior executives. In recent years, highly effective senior executives have operated as change leaders by demonstrating the behaviors required to execute a major initiative or a strategic pivot. Today, they need to operate as continuous change leaders because nearly every day brings with it the need for greater agility, resilience and adaptation.
Not all HR leaders operate as full-fledged business partners today. Some HR business partners function more as order-takers: senior business leaders tell them what they need, and these HR professionals then relay the marching orders (e.g., implement a new talent management system or update the total rewards program) to the rest of the HR function. That structure does not suffice in dynamic business environments. To thrive, HR business partners must operate in a strategic and consultative manner while operationalizing agile L&D capabilities and leveraging forward-looking analyses of organizational skills needs.
This “human planning and analysis” work shares similarities with the predictive analytics produced by leading financial planning and analysis groups. This helps explain why data analytics, business strategy experience, strategic advisory skills, and technological fluency represent increasingly important competencies for HR business partners. Rising HR leaders should look to round out their traditional HR skill sets with these business partnership proficiencies. Flatter, leaner, AI-enabled organizations need deeper contributions from HR groups to thrive.
Fran Maxwell is the managing director of people advisory and organizational change at Protiviti and Kimerle Campbell the director
of people and change for the organization.
link