The 2026 workforce looks less like traditional employment of decades past and more like a fleet of autonomous vehicles. We can explain. You’ve probably noticed that autonomous driving has advanced right alongside the rise of AI and automation at work. It’s a helpful comparison.
Planning for today's workforce is like navigating that fleet. Many vehicles now drive themselves. Lots of tasks and responsibilities can be automated. Leadership isn't expected to code the autonomous systems or understand every technical detail under the hood. Our value lies in something far more human: judgment.
We must know when automation can be trusted to handle routine routes with speed and precision—and when a human driver needs to take the wheel. We're navigating nuance, building relationships, and making mission‑critical decisions. This places the power of human judgment and connection and the center. Focusing only on delivery times and efficiency metrics risks missing obstacles and blind spots. But if we can cultivate connection between judgement and machine we can unlock something powerful: a workforce that’s stable, agile (more on these two words coming up), and capable of achieving extraordinary things.
As we look to the year ahead, this balance becomes our defining leadership challenge and opportunity. The trends shaping work this year all point to a future where technology accelerates what we can achieve, but human connection drives impact. Here’s what's needed to steer teams, enterprise, and culture forward with both stability and progress in the months ahead.
1. Maximizing the uniqueness of each person for retention, engagement and performance
As the pace of change increases and work grows more complex, expect even greater emphasis this year on strategies and programs that recognize each person’s uniqueness. Now, what does this mean in practice?
Let’s imagine two people: Teresa and Jocelyn. They are identical on paper: same role, same age, and professional interests. However, Teresa is motivated by tangible rewards (success and recognition), while Jocelyn thrives when she feels she's developing her craft and challenged by tackling tough and new problems.
In 2026, we see organizations, like Johnson & Johnson, applying whole-person models that consider aspirations and motivations alongside skills. In applying the whole person approach, Jocelyn might receive modular, high-stakes assignments, while Teresa receives clear learning paths and topical assignments where she can see the connection between her work and the success of the team and company.
Ranked lists and generational preferences are only so helpful. To maximize commitment and engagement, we'll see more of organizations responding with agility and flexibility in building the employee experience. The acceleration of digitalization and the artificial intelligence reshaping many work tasks, will only make this change greater (and more doable).
Seeking to Understand the Needs of the Person
Of course, we can't adapt and meet individual needs we don't know exist. To this end we expect organizations to place even more focus on measuring employee attitudes. and a drive to actively listen to each job group — from the frontline workforce through the senior leaders. Meeting these demands is essential for the stellar employee experience needed for a sustainable talent pipeline.
How could employee listening drive engagement, retention, and performance for your team this year? Take our quick CultureMap survey.
The Shift to Holistic Employee Well-being
We can see how organizations are leaning into understanding the whole person with the increased focus on well-being. Organizations and leaders aren't merely focused on satisfaction and safety. We're looking at all aspects of wellness: physical, mental, emotional, financial, and even social. Building an organization that address the full spectrum of what your workforce needs builds the resources needed for resilience and extraordinary results.
Any wellness or well-being strategy should incorporate evidence-based practices and feedback mechanisms to continuously improve. When we launch programs with organizations we strive for before, during, and post-assessments to capture ROI.
2. Shift to a Skills-Based Talent Strategy and Closing the Experience Gap
The value of traditionally foundational parts of the hiring process, like resumes, continues to not only decline, but actively remove value from the hiring process. One reason is because of AI tools that obscure and distort experience. However, another key reason is we’re increasingly focused on a broad spectrum of skills and capabilities — and this will only become more important throughout 2026 and beyond.
The past several years we’ve heard about companies, like Medtronic, re-credentialling their workforce. Medtronic created the Spark Program; a 10-year global initiative launched in 2025 to create a pipeline of future talent, including a "Spark Credentials" program to equip non-degree individuals with in-demand health tech skills. Their strategy not only removes hard requirements and puts true measures of skill and ability in their place, but supports and grows a wide-ranging workforce. Interestingly, you might note that this connects with the focus on individual differences and maximizing each person's uniqueness, just as we talked about before with the employee experience. Recruiters and managers no longer look as much at how many years someone spent in a seat, but for the potential for transferable judgement, adaptability, and a range of soft skills.
This is where we see a huge opportunity for standardized assessments to drive accuracy, fairness, powerful training, and efficiency in hiring and promotion decisions. Closing the experience gap, by knowing both gaps and strengths, demands robust evidence-based and job-related assessments for hiring and promotion. By isolating and leveraging unique strengths, we will build even more agile teams and address emerging skills gaps, driving workforce readiness for years to come. This resource on competencies provides a thorough review on how to maximize competencies for your skill-focused workforce.
Assessments also provide clarity in a hiring process muddled by AI (combatting the confusion and inefficiency from other sources of information) and help us know with greater certainty a candidate's ability to perform, live our culture, and stay as a strong contributor long-term.
How can measuring the potential to live your culture drive greater success in hiring for your frontline, individual contributor, and leadership workforce? Take our quick CultureMap assessment to benchmark and explore how.
Predictive People Analytics and Integrated HR Tech
Engineering a skills-based workforce makes perennial tools like advanced analytics and integrated technology platforms even more important. How are hiring practices driving the employee experience, and in turn key outcomes like retention and performance? Predictive people analytics make this possible. They enable organizations to proactively shape talent strategies and connect data points from hiring, the employee experience, the customer experience, and hard metrics.
3. Intense Focus on Leadership Development and Coaching
Remember our metaphor about driverless cars? The leaders in our example had to make decisions about when to automate driving and when (and what) human capital is required. As organizations flatten (we saw the cutting of mid-level roles in 2025) and automate routine coordination tasks through AI, the the responsibility and nature of management changes. Leaders must now evaluate trade-offs and build connection between human judgment, emotional intelligence, tech-driven systems, and the ability to guide teams through complexity and change. That's not a small order.
This puts even more importance on developing managers as coaches and talent accelerators. Of course, growing true leaders who go beyond supervising tasks has always been a priority (or point of frustration), but we expect this to absorb greater energy this year. Whether it's upskilling, performance feedback systems, or scalable coaching, right now we're working with organizations to establish support — and accountability — for growth and development.
Similarly, as organizations focus more on the responsibility of leaders to grow talent we also expect to see more organizations codify the importance of development into their mission and core values. Expect to hear more, both through employment branding and beyond, how organizations support growth and connect it to their purpose.
4. Designing and Transparently Communicating the Employee Experience
With a greater focus on the uniqueness of each person, the employee experience is no longer a one-and-done static concept. It's dynamic and intentionally architected for and consistently reinforced as economic and business forces evolve. For organizations committed to building high‑performance cultures, leaders and HR/people teams in shaping experiences that authentically reflect organizational values and support strategy. With an eye to retention, skill, and navigating fast change we expect that leaders and HR will provide even greater clarity around expectations, growth pathways, and what it truly feels like to work within the culture.
As AI‑driven tools become more integrated across talent practices—from hiring and development to performance and engagement—transparency becomes essential to building trust. Words and phrases like governance and 'black box decision-making' get at the business risks and concerns around new tools. We expect organizations to speak more concretely this year about expectations for how AI will influence the employee experience, as well as how to meet employee needs. This mirrors what we'll see for job candidates. Employees (and candidates) want to understand how decisions are made, what data informs them, and how technology supports rather than replaces human judgment. By leveraging continuous listening and evidence‑based insights, HR can refine the employee value proposition in real time, ensuring it evolves alongside workforce needs.
For our work, this means using validated tools like assessments, transparent culture and people analytics, and human‑centered design practices to create experiences that are consistent, fair, and aligned with desired business outcomes.
Photo by Murilo Viviani on Unsplash
5. Navigating 'Stagility': Balancing Organizational Agility with Worker Stability
If we think about this decade you might agree that a drive for greater stability is just as salient as the need for agility. There's also a conflict: while 85 percent of senior leaders say organizations must become more agile to adapt, 75 percent of workers are hoping for greater stability.
Workers can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet—like the GPS keeps rerouting and no one told them why. They’re asked to constantly learn new skills, adapt to fresh technologies, and weather an average of 10 major enterprise changes a year. That's five times more than in 2016. It’s little wonder that about two‑thirds of workers feel overwhelmed by this pace, and nearly half worry they’ll be left at the side of the road.
Enter the concept of 'stagility'—the balance between organizational agility and the workforce stability that's needed to sustain it. Innovation and sustained excellence require resilience, because we know we’ll all stumble at some point. While agility supports rapid adaptation and innovation, stability ensures continuity and trust.
Clear career paths, shared understanding of strategy and the expectations that flow from it, and transparent communication form the foundation for the stability that drives agility. This balance is fundamental for growing resilient teams and maintaining trust during periods of change.
Driving Stagility by Reducing Nonessential Work
Collaboration overload and digital busywork have become the equivalent of potholes and traffic jams. constantly jarring momentum and slowing progress. As leaders build the scaffolding for consistency, they’ll increasingly clear the path forward by streamlining processes, eliminating redundant work, and freeing employees to focus their time and energy on the high‑value work only they can do.
Through the application of intelligent automation and clear work design, we can reduce distractions, boost engagement, and unlock the full potential of their workforce, enabling teams to deliver greater value with less friction. That reduction in friction will reduce strain and free resources for the deep work required for innovation and change.
Elevating Human Skills for Employee Engagement and Retention
With constant tech disruption, the value of distinctly human skills—empathy, curiosity, flexibility, open-mindedness, and emotional steadiness—has never been higher. Try as we might, these capabilities are stubbornly resistant to automation—and they’re the secret sauce behind high‑performing teams and cultures.
Organizations must invest in solutions that rigorously assess, intentionally develop, and meaningfully recognize these core human skills. The cost of not is languishing — or worse.
The path forward means -
- Using validated, and evidence-based tools to surface strengths and gaps, as well as hire candidates with the potential to perform, live your culture and thrive long-term
- Target development and coaching to build capability, and
- Consistently implement performance and reward systems that clearly reinforce these behaviors.
When human skills are measured and managed with the same discipline as technical expertise, organizations see gains far beyond “soft” benefits: engagement and retention rise, leaders navigate change with greater confidence, and teams are better able to innovate, collaborate across functions, and sustain high performance. In short, elevating human skills and our potential —fueling innovation, resilience, and long-term business growth.
