Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #322

Linking HR results to the business outcomes they support, reinventing workforce planning, the state of AI report, global talent mobility, hybrid work, and more.

Author

Brian Heger
November 09, 2025

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Welcome to this issue of Talent Edge Weekly!

A shout-out to Zoe Winsey-Thomas, Head of Talent Management at bp, for referring new subscribers to Talent Edge Weekly. Thank you, Zoe, for your support of this newsletter!

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THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Below are links and descriptions of the topics covered in this issue. If you're interested in my deep dive, you can read the full newsletter.

Also, check out my job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer move of the week.

A special thank you to Allan Church, Ph.D, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Maestro Consulting and former SVP of Global Talent Management at PepsiCo, for leading an impactful 90-minute discussion on high-potential assessments and succession planning with my private community of internal HR practitioners, the Talent Edge Circle!

If you’re looking for consultation support from one of the top thought leaders in talent management, I highly recommend reaching out to Allan on LinkedIn to learn how he can help!

And if you are an internal HR practitioner who wants to go deeper with me and a curated community of internal HR practitioners focused on practical solutions to critical talent priorities, apply to be considered for the Talent Edge Circle.

 ⬇️ Let’s dive into this week's issue!

THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

HR’S BUSINESS IMPACT

An excerpt slide from my private Talent Edge Circle community that helps to link how year-end HR results contribute to various business outcomes.

As many HR leaders and their teams begin summarizing the outcomes they delivered this year, it is impactful to organize accomplishments by the business results they enabled rather than simply listing activities completed. One approach is to start with the business outcome of greatest importance and use a few reflection questions to surface the accomplishments that best demonstrate impact. For example, if Revenue Growth is a priority (e.g., increasing income through higher sales, customer acquisition, or market expansion), you might ask: How did our talent practices strengthen the capabilities of revenue-impacting teams? Where did workforce decisions (hiring, development, mobility) support growth priorities? How did we ensure the right people were in the right roles to enable expansion? These are simply starting points that you can adjust to your context. And while Revenue Growth is one example, the same approach can be applied to outcomes such as Profitability and Margin Improvement, Operational Efficiency, Customer Experience and Satisfaction, and Strategic Agility and Organizational Adaptability, to name a few. To make this easier to put into practice, I’m sharing an excerpt slide from my private Talent Edge Circle community—a one-pager you can copy, adapt, and use with your team, which shows a full example linked to all five business outcomes.

WORKFORCE PLANNING

A new series of five articles highlights five shifts that can help organizations make workforce planning more adaptable, dynamic, and effective in uncertain business environments.

In its new series on strategic workforce planning (SWP), Deloitte Insights presents five articles exploring how organizations can conduct SWP more effectively amid uncertainty. The series highlights five major shifts. For each shift, I’ve included a guiding question that each shift requires us to answer: 1) From planning one future → planning for multiple potential futures: How can we design a workforce planning approach that accounts for multiple possible futures, rather than relying on a single forecast or operating model? 2) From planning based on jobs → planning based on skills and work: How can we deconstruct work into tasks and outcomes—not just roles and job titles—and redesign it to combine human and AI capabilities in the most effective way? 3) From focusing on visible talent → unlocking hidden capability and capacity: Where do we have underutilized skills, adjacent capabilities, or trapped capacity that could be redeployed or developed to meet emerging work needs? 4) From static, manual planning → dynamic, AI-driven planning: How can we use AI and real-time workforce signals to continually sense, model, and adjust workforce plans—not just forecast them once a year? 5) From functional silos → horizontal and vertical collaboration: How do we make SWP a shared, data-enabled practice across HR, Finance, Strategy, Technology, and business leaders—rather than one owned by a single function? Each article dives deeper into these areas. As a bonus, I’m sharing one of my SWP scenario-planning cheat sheets to help determine how workforce plans may need to shift under different future scenarios.

AI IN THE WORKPLACE

A new 30-page report highlights current AI adoption trends and the practices that separate leading organizations, including the fundamental redesign of workflows.

This new report offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of AI adoption in organizations, noting that while nearly all companies are now utilizing AI in some capacity, most are still in the early experimentation or pilot phases and have yet to achieve an enterprise-level impact. It highlights growing interest in AI agents, differences in how high-performing organizations approach AI, and varying expectations for how AI may impact workforce size and skills. While the report includes many insights, one finding worth emphasizing is that workflow redesign is one of the strongest drivers of enterprise-level impact. Companies capturing meaningful value aren’t simply adding AI to existing work—they are re-architecting workflows, decision points, and task ownership. This requires breaking work down into tasks, determining which are best performed by AI versus humans, and reconstructing workflows accordingly, rather than layering AI on top of current processes. Organizations that see limited value often focus on reducing time and cost. In contrast, high-value organizations focus on changing how work is actually done, which means moving beyond starting with the AI tool and instead designing the workflow first. Also, as noted in Exhibit 14 (see image I used for this post), AI high performers are more likely to employ a range of practices to realize value from AI use, including incorporating the impact of AI on work into strategic workforce planning.

GLOBAL MOBILITY

A new 28-page benchmarking report highlights how organizations are modernizing global mobility to better support talent planning, development, and deployment.

Global mobility—the practice of deploying talent across borders through international assignments, relocations, remote cross-border work, or short-term project deployments—is an important component of many organizations’ talent strategies. However, several challenges continue to impede its effectiveness. A new 28-page benchmarking report by KPMG provides timely insights into how organizations are addressing these challenges. The report highlights how mobility programs are evolving, the shift from cost to value and employee experience, the increasing role of AI and automation, and the need to align mobility more closely with workforce and talent planning priorities. While there are many useful insights, two I want to highlight are: 1) organizations are revising mobility policies to support new ways of working—42% have conducted a policy review in the past year and 32% plan updates in the next 12–18 months. These shifts include expanding cross-border remote work options, increasing short-term and project-based deployments, offering more inclusive partner support (e.g., support for spouses/partners relocating together), and building more flexibility into policies upfront to minimize individual exceptions and ensure fairness and consistency; and 2) 60% of mobility teams now sit within talent management or talent acquisition, enabling closer alignment with workforce planning, leadership development, and strategic talent deployment, rather than functioning as a standalone operational support function. While the focus is on global mobility, I’m also resharing my one-page cheat sheet on common barriers to internal mobility, including examples of policies that may unintentionally limit movement and career growth within organizations.

CHIEF HR OFFICER

A 35-page slide deck presented by Nick Bloom highlights the stabilization of hybrid work, the rising influence of HR leadership, and the performance benefits of structured CEO succession planning.

These slides, presented by Stanford economist Nick Bloom at the recent October Heidrick & Struggles CPO Summit, provide insights into three areas relevant to Chief People Officers and HR leaders. First, the Work-From-Home vs. Return-To-Office discussion has reached a steady state: hybrid work is now the most common policy among managers and professionals in Fortune 500 firms, with 69% operating under a structured hybrid model. Most of these (57%) specify a minimum number of in-office days per week, while smaller shares set minimum percentages of time, specific in-office days, or both. Second, HR’s strategic influence continues to accelerate, as the share of S&P 500 firms where the CHRO is among the top-five highest-paid executives has grown significantly over the past three decades—highlighting HR’s increasing role in enterprise value creation. Third, large-scale evidence drawn from 150,000 proxy filings across nearly 19,000 companies shows that organizations with more intentional and well-defined CEO succession processes tend to experience smoother leadership transitions and stronger financial outcomes, including more stable stock performance during CEO changes. The succession planning analysis begins on page 25. As a related resource, I am resharing the July 2025 report CEO Succession: 10 Pitfalls Boards Must Avoid—and the CHRO Practices That Help (by HR Policy Association, now CHRO Association), which notes that one ongoing challenge is limited board visibility into internal CEO candidates—a gap CHROs can help close through structured board exposure and objective talent assessment practices.

MOST POPULAR FROM LAST WEEK

LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS

Explores seven hidden beliefs that can quietly hinder leadership effectiveness and offers a three-step framework to help leaders overcome them.

JOB CUTS AND LAYOFF TRACKER

Check out my tracker of announcements from a segment of organizations that have conducted job cuts and layoffs since the start of 2023.

Partial view of my job cuts tracker on brianheger.com

A few job cuts announced this past week:

  • AGL Energy (OTCMKTS: AGLXY). One of Australia’s largest electricity companies plans to cut up to 300 jobs across its coal-fired power stations, as well as hydro sites, as part of a major restructure to accelerate its transition to renewable energy.

  • Hormel Foods Corp (NYSE: HRL). The Spam and Planters maker announced plans to cut 250 corporate and sales positions as part of a restructuring effort.

  • IBM (NYSE: IBM). The tech giant announced plans to cut thousands of jobs in the fourth quarter of 2025 as part of a global restructuring focused on high-margin software and artificial intelligence services.

Click here to access my tracker, which includes all announcements.

CHIEF HR OFFICER MOVE OF THE WEEK

This past week, 11 new CHRO announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go, my subscription platform tracking movement in and out of the CHRO role.  

This week’s CHRO move of the week is:

  • Bath & Body Works, Inc. (COLUMBUS, OHIO) [NYSE: BBWI]—a global leader in personal care and home fragrance—announced strategic leadership appointments to deepen expertise and strengthen capabilities required to execute transformation. Samantha Charleston has been appointed Chief Human Resources Officer, effective Nov. 12. She joins Bath & Body Works from Americold, where she has served as Chief Human Resources Officer since January 2022. Charleston will join the Executive Leadership Team and report to Chief Executive Officer Daniel Heaf. 

‘Read Online’ if email cuts off ✂️

👉️ To access all detailed 11 CHRO announcements from this past week and over 4,500 archived announcements, join a monthly or yearly subscription to CHROs on the Go.

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FROM ME ON LINKEDIN

Catch up on what you may have missed from me on LinkedIn:

THE BEST OF OCTOBER 2025

SPONSORED BY

Did you miss the “Best of October ” issue of Talent Edge Weekly? If so, check out issue #321, which includes the most popular resources from the month.

Thank you to TechWolf, who sponsored the Best of October. Learn more about TechWolf’s Work Intelligence Index and how it is helping organizations understand the impact of AI on work tasks.

Want to get your brand, product, or service in front of our active 55,000+ Talent Edge Weekly subscribers? Learn how to become a potential sponsor.

Talent Edge Weekly is written by Brian Heger, a human resources practitioner. You can connect with Brian on LinkedIn and brianheger.com

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