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Stability in the workplace used to mean predictability: Clear roles, steady career paths, operating models that changed slowly enough for people to catch up.
That version of stability is gone.
According to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs 2025 report, employers anticipate that nearly four in 10 core skills will change by 2030. The organizations that hold up will be the ones built for the capacity to absorb that disruption.
The instinct in HR is to ask employees to adapt faster. Yet while adaptability is a mindset you can encourage, it becomes durable when there is a system underneath it
Adaptability requires new mindsets & systems
Artificial intelligence is making this shift distinctly different than past technology waves.
Employees getting ahead of the organization isn’t actually new. After all, SaaS gave us ‘shadow IT’ and mobile gave us BYOD (bring your own devices), both adopted long before policy caught up.
What’s different this time is that those earlier waves were largely perimeter problems about unsanctioned tools and data in the wrong places, which IT could eventually contain. The shift today is about the work itself: the judgment people apply, the output they produce, the skills a role actually requires.
In other words, there has often been a gap between individual adoption and organizational readiness, but instead of it being an IT issue to respond to, this time HR is the function that most needs to respond with a new system.
The instinct in HR is to ask employees to adapt faster. Yet while adaptability is a mindset you can encourage, it becomes durable when there is a system underneath it.
Building that system is, therefore, a two-way contract.
HR’s job is to design the structure, tools and expectations that make adapting possible; the employees’ job is to actually use them.
What HR actually has to build
There are three parts to this. Skipping any one of them will usually stall adaptability initiatives.
1. Structure: Fixed job descriptions and static team structures were designed for a world where responsibilities evolved gradually. That world is gone. Roles now need to flex around a new set of business skills.
For example, at my company, we mapped roles to a defined level of AI capability and built those expectations directly into how we hire, onboard, set goals, and evaluate performance. As a result, “adapt” stops being advice and starts being part of the job.
Turning workforce data into early warnings for high-cost employees
2. Enablement: Access to a tool isn’t the same as being equipped to use it well. Enablement means making learning purpose-built and use-case-driven rather than a generic “intro to AI.” It also means HR should be first movers in changing the operating model and adopting new ways of working.
This is the case for us at Avalara. If HR isn’t willing to work through the friction of changing how work gets done and how quickly it gets done, it has no credibility asking the rest of the business to do so.
3. Expectation: Building the structure and the enablement earns the right to set a real expectation – that employees own this movement and aren’t simply passive consumers. Employees are also the ones closest to where AI actually changes the work, and their inputs should shape how we apply it, not just react to it.
That’s why we rewrote our performance rating definitions so that using AI where it improves the work is now part of meeting expectations. The goal is improving the work, rather than just using new tools.
Leaders set the tone
Employees do not take cues from a strategy deck, instead watching how leaders respond when something changes, including whether questions get treated as resistance or as a normal part of figuring things out.
One thing we've learned at Avalara is that pushback on a new AI-driven process is rarely about the tool itself. It's usually a sign that someone hasn't yet connected the change to what it means for their day-to-day work.
Fixed job descriptions and static team structures were designed for a world where responsibilities evolved gradually. That world is gone
The goal is to build an organization that learns how to respond to every shift that AI or other external forces may bring. For HR, that means designing the structure and the enablement and then holding the line on the expectation that people will use it.
Adaptability must become a standard you build into the system and hold both sides to.
Ee Lyn leads Avalara's global People and Culture team responsible for helping Avalara execute its business strategy through initiatives related to the people and culture of our company. Ee Lyn brings two decades of human resources, talent management, and diversity and inclusion experience to Avalara. She has held human resources leadership roles at global companies, including Amazon and General Mills.
