HR vs. Volatility: The High-Stakes Playbook for 2025

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HR VS. VOLATILITY: THE HIGH STAKES PLAYBOOK FOR 2025

Volatility is hitting hard this year. A melting pot of instability (from massive layoffs, “voluntary buyouts,” AI disruptions, and socioeconomic uncertainty) has made one thing clear: stability in the workplace will not be achieved easily in 2025.

HR leaders face a tough ultimatum—adapt or risk losing your best talent, culture, and competitive edge.

The scary truth for many is that workforce stability is cracking under pressure—and volatility is the culprit. The World Economic Forum predicts that 44% of workers core skills will be disrupted by 2027. Mass job cuts are surging, global burnout rates are hitting record highs, and instability is becoming the new norm.

Employees are anxious, disengaged, and looking for leaders who can offer something more than empty platitudes—and we’re here to help you become that leader. 

More than ever, preparing your workforce to face uncertainty and volatility is imperative. In a leaked all-hands meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees to “buckle up” for an “intense year.” Plus, nearly half of companies are likely to lay off workers this year, citing new Trump-era policies and AI disruptions. 

Amidst so many external changes, how can HR maintain a steady, positive culture? Continue reading to learn how…

Inside this edition

• The real impact of volatility on employee engagement, performance, and retention

• How VUCA and BANI can help HR leaders navigate uncertainty

• Your 3-step roadmap to building an agile, future-ready HR strategy

• How Zoom turned volatility into opportunity (and how you can too)

Plus: A free self-assessment tool to pinpoint workforce alignment challenges 🎁

🗞️ In case you missed it: Economic volatility continues as tariff threats loom and job openings sink to their lowest since September. 

SPREAD FOR YOU
📢  CAUTION: VOLATILITY AHEAD

How leadership can shape organizations as workforce burnout and employee anxiety hit record highs.

Volatility is unavoidable. In 2024, uncertainty was rampant as we waited for the results of a high-stakes election and policy predictions—but that uncertainty is now manifesting itself with real-world impact:

▶️ A new administration introducing policies that create uncertainty for diverse employee groups, affecting employee well-being, workplace protections, and DEI initiatives.
▶️ Economic shifts due to tariffs and trade policy changes, leading to inflation concerns, supply chain disruptions, and shifting job markets.
▶️ Rapid AI advancements sparking fears over job displacement and market instability, as companies reassess workforce needs and automation accelerates at an unprecedented pace.

HR leaders are tasked with navigating a workforce that feels increasingly anxious, disconnected, and uncertain about the future—and the cost of getting it wrong is staggering, from high turnover to low productivity to burnout.

Making Sense of Chaos: How VUCA and BANI Help HR Navigate Uncertainty

According to McKinsey research, organizations with resilient behaviors are better prepared to overcome major disruptions. 

Two frameworks—VUCA and BANI—help HR leaders maintain a resilient culture by understanding disruption and managing its impact on employees. 

Pre-pandemic, VUCA was the main framework organizations used to describe the rapid, unpredictable changes, such as globalization and technological advancements. BANI gained significant traction during and after COVID-19, when massive changes, such as the shift to remote work, brought on new emotional and psychological challenges. 

Let’s break each framework down:

✔ VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) explains external challenges, like market shifts and industry disruptions, that demand agility and innovation.
✔ BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) explains the human response to disruption—rising anxiety, instability, and unpredictability—that requires psychological safety and resilience.

HR must address both external (VUCA) and internal (BANI) forces to cultivate resiliency and create stability. Here’s how: 

• Prepare for VUCA → Build agile leadership, adaptive strategies, and flexible work models. 

• Manage BANI → Prioritize well-being, psychological safety, and a sense of purpose.

When HR harnesses VUCA and BANI together, disruption becomes an opportunity to strengthen leadership, boost engagement, and build a thriving workforce. 

While frameworks like VUCA and BANI help us understand volatility, turning this knowledge into action requires a strategic roadmap. Continue reading for a 3-step playbook to find opportunities for success in a volatile environment…

HR HURDLES
HR’S PLAYBOOK: YOUR 3-STEP ROADMAP TO TURN VOLATILITY INTO OPPORTUNITY

A guide to developing nimble, productive teams that turn challenges into opportunities.

Let’s be real—volatility isn’t going away any time soon. HR leaders who embrace change can turn disruption into a strategic advantage.

A simple 3-step roadmap can help you harness uncertainty to transform it into an opportunity to develop leaders, engage employees, and build a future-ready workforce that’s prepared to tackle uncertainty head-on.

Step 1: Assess and Anticipate a Volatile Landscape

Understanding what you’re up against—the risks, disruptions, and challenges—allows you to anticipate potential challenges and move your approach from reactive to proactive. 

Prepare leaders with crisis-ready training to make quick, strategic decisions in uncertainty. Lean on data-driven workforce planning to predict skills gaps, retention risks, and talent needs before they arise or escalate.

✅ Use scenario planning and stress modeling to assess what could happen in the future and how equipped your organization will be to handle it and find opportunities within the chaos. 

• Identify key workforce risks: Find the biggest threats to stability, such as high turnover or job displacement due to AI.

• Develop multiple scenarios: Map out best-case, worst-case, and unexpected-case workforce models to understand potential impacts.

• Stress test HR strategies: Simulate crises(such as sudden layoffs or compliance changes)to identify gaps in key areas, such as policies or succession planning.

• Prepare crisis response plans: Document action plans for each scenario so leaders can act quickly when disruption occurs.

✅ Adopt agile HR practices to keep hiring, training, and engagement practices flexible and ready to evolve with changing needs. 

• Move from annual performance conversations to a continuous loop that delivers real-time feedback.

• Offer flexible learning opportunities, such as microlearning or self-paced classes, that employees will be more likely to utilize.

Step 2: Build Dynamic Talent Strategies

A workforce that thrives in uncertainty needs strong leadership, adaptability, and a culture that fosters innovation. 

Operations must be able to be rapidly adapted and scaled, and employees must feel supported enough to implement these changes and continue to experiment.

✅ Invest in upskilling and reskilling to help build a future-proof, resilient workforce. Focus on skills that will help employees adapt and succeed through a variety of challenges and changes. 

In the era of AI, McKinsey identified four high-level upskilling goals for organizations to focus on:

• Lead and drive value: Emphasize skills that will add value and reach generative AI’s full potential. Ensure leaders model behaviors to encourage innovation and experimentation.

• Build and deploy models: Prioritize skills to design, develop, test, and deploy AI models for different use cases, focusing on risk management and collaboration.

• Enable value in specific domains: Focus on skills that will identify and fill gaps with AI assistance, such as better outcomes, workflows, and new processes in different functional areas.

• Augment the day-to-day: Prioritize skills that responsibly integrate AI into daily operations, and balance these integrations with human-centric skills that AI can’t replicate, like empathy and critical thinking.

✅ Build psychological safety and trust through recognition programs, mentorship, and transparency.

Below are three ways to build a psychologically safe and trusting workplace:

• Flatten hierarchies within teams to put everyone on equal footing and make lower-level employees more likely to share ideas and opinions

• Frame work as experiments and adopt a “Fail Fast” mindset to give employees room to fail without fear of repercussions

• Reward open communication, whether positive or negative, to create an open and transparent environment where anyone can share their ideas

Step 3: Execute and Iterate with Agility

The best HR strategies fail without execution and iteration—and in a volatile environment, doing so in real-time is essential to keeping a competitive advantage. 

✅ Monitor & adjust: Track key metrics (engagement, retention, agility) and use data to optimize practices. Implement agile methodologies to scale strategies efficiently based on real-time feedback.

✅ Smart change management: Focus on small, experimental changes rather than major overhauls. Maintain clear communication and leadership transparency to help teams adapt smoothly.

Here’s how lean change management works:

1. Insights: Gather employee feedback and workforce sentiment before making changes.

2. Options: Develop multiple change experiments.

3. Experiments: Implement small pilots, test, and adjust based on real-time feedback.

4. Review & adapt: Evaluate what’s working and iterate.

Understanding these strategies is one thing—but seeing them in action is another. Continue reading to learn how Zoom turned volatility into an opportunity to innovate and expand…

SUCCESS STORY
HOW ZOOM THRIVED IN VOLATILITY

Read on to learn how you can turn unprecedented disruption & volatility into sustainable growth

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, workforces around the world shifted from face-to-face communication, ushering in a new era of widespread remote work. Zoom faced an unprecedented challenge: a sudden, global shift to remote work that caused its daily users to skyrocket from 10 million to 300 million almost overnight. For many companies, this level of disruption could have led to system failures, security concerns, and an inability to meet market demand.

But instead of letting volatility derail them, Zoom turned uncertainty into an opportunity. By scaling infrastructure, reinforcing security, and rapidly adapting to new market needs, Zoom solidified itself as the go-to platform for virtual collaboration.

Strategic Planning: Scaling to Meet Explosive Demand

The massive surge in users meant Zoom had to scale its platform at an unprecedented pace while ensuring their clients—businesses, schools, and governments worldwide—could seamlessly transition to remote work.

A large part of scaling to meet demand is giving your teams the agility and decentralized decision-making ability they need. 

That way, instead of waiting for executive approval on every decision, teams have clear authority to make specific choices within defined boundaries.

Employees who are close to the problem = better insights and stronger implementation.

We recommend using the Decision Rights Matrix to define levels of decision-making autonomy within your teams.

Make it clear at which level your team can operate for key decisions, up to which amount they can approve expenses, and empower your teams to operate with the agility your organization needs in the face of volatility.

Leadership Commitment: Prioritizing Security and Trust

With rapid adoption came new risks—privacy and security concerns (like “Zoombombing”) threatened user trust. Instead of downplaying these challenges, Zoom’s leadership responded with transparency and immediate action. 

Zoom implemented safeguards such as end-to-end encryption and stricter authentication requirements. In addition, the CEO made a public statement that detailed how the company would correct its actions to create a safer user experience.

By owning its mistakes and prioritizing security, Zoom was able to rebuild trust and maintain long-term user confidence.

💡 HR Tip: Embrace trust and transparency to drive employee and customer loyalty. A radical transparency approach—which embraces fully open communication that lets employees know exactly what’s going on with the business—has been proven to foster a more resilient, engaged workforce. This is your signal to implement a monthly "Ask Me Anything" with leadership.

Employee Engagement: Simultaneously Expanding Market Reach and Workplace Well-Being

Zoom didn’t just survive volatility—it expanded its market by adapting to new workplace realities, introducing education and healthcare-specific features and focusing on employee well-being.

Zoom also invested in its workforce, doubling its size to support customer service and product innovation. By aligning its business model with evolving market and employee needs, Zoom ensured long-term stability, even post-pandemic.

💡 HR tip: Support employees and build up organizational resilience by conducting quarterly pulse surveys. Track key metrics related to BANI, such as psychological safety, employee stress, job role flexibility, and burnout risk.

📈 The Results?

Zoom proved that volatility isn’t a setback—it’s a chance to innovate, scale, and redefine an industry. 

🔹 30x increase in daily meeting participants, solidifying Zoom as the market leader in virtual collaboration.
🔹 325% revenue surge YOY, reaching $2.6 billion in 2020.
🔹 500% stock price increase, making Zoom one of the fastest-growing tech companies of the decade.
🔹 Successful expansion into AI-driven meeting tools and enterprise collaboration.

As you develop your own strategy for managing volatility, staying current with market shifts and policy changes is crucial. Below you wil find the latest developments that could impact your approach...

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🗞️ IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

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(Download below) evaluate your organization's readiness to handle workforce volatility with our comprehensive assessment tool 🎁

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DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCE: WORKFORCE STRATEGY ALIGNMENT SELF-ASSESSMENT

In times of volatility, aligning your workforce strategy with larger goals and values is crucial.

This self-assessment tool explores key areas of alignment—such as technology adoption and change resistance—to help you pinpoint and overcome key challenges.

📥 Download your copy now

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