The past few years have underscored a stark reality: companies that lack a forward-looking vision and fail to invest in developing capabilities, organizational structures, and robust HR frameworks risk being left behind. Building workforce agility is not just about responding to immediate challenges but fostering an adaptable, future-ready workforce capable of sustaining long-term growth and competitiveness in a volatile business landscape.

As business and technological disruptions accelerate, workforce agility has emerged as a strategic imperative for CXOs across APAC. This concept extends beyond flexibility—it encapsulates an organization’s ability to rapidly reskill employees, realign resources, and pivot processes to meet evolving market demands.

To break down what agility means for a diverse region like APAC and map the structural changes needed to create a more agile workforce, we spoke with Heather Jerrehian VP, Product Management — Employee Workflows at ServiceNow.

With business success tied to workforce productivity, skills, engagement and retention, agility needs to be assessed closely on these parameters.

Focus on skills and continuous learning

Technology is going to be the biggest force of change across APAC in 2025. What HR leaders can do to mitigate threats and raise agility is to focus on how they skill their workforces for the future. Skill gaps and talent development remains the cornerstone of enhancing workforce agility and empowering employees to adapt quickly and effectively. It is also important in building leaders and ensuring they have the right digital and behavioural skills required to lead their companies.

For Heather, addressing skill gaps and empowering employees begins with a strong focus on skills intelligence. This dynamic approach that assesses current capabilities and close gap, while aligning with emerging opportunities provides HR the right foothold in a fast evolving ecosystem.

This also helps HR reorganise the workforce and allow cross-functional collaboration, which as Heather describes is all about allowing talent to flow where it's needed the most. Skills around digital and AI readiness need to be prioritised. Along with technical skills that allow employees to be more productive in an augmented workplace, skills like creativity need to be prioritised.

Finally, these initiatives need to be supported by a culture of continuous learning. Heather shares how companies can embed learning in the everyday work of employees and make it personalised will be key for companies to remain agile.

A 4-dimensional framework to be more agile

The challenge with workforce agility often is to anchor it through actionable strategies and frameworks. Research shows that factors like resistance to change, lack of internal knowledge on workforce capabilities, leadership buy-in hinder workforce agility. To overcome such challenges, it's necessary for HR leaders to take a structured approach to raising agility. In our conversation, Heather highlights a 4-dimensional framework that enables HR leaders to enhance agility.

1st dimension: Workplace titles

This is the dimension of names and job titles. There is no intelligence at this level, only the structure of the organisation

2nd dimension: Roles and skills

At this level, organisations have begun looking at their skills architecture. It's at this level that companies, according to Heather, by investing and create a robust skills intelligence network, HR leaders get a clear idea about  the complexities and skills levels that the organisation currently has. It is key to have the right insights into employee skills and interests that reflects their abilities holistically.

It is then necessary to use this knowledge to have the right people at the right roles and ensure companies are able to easily adapt

3rd Dimension: Strategy and vision

Building on the knowledge of previous dimensions, HR leaders now need to align the short term vision of the business. 'It's all about where you want to be in the next six, nine, twelve, and twenty four months and using workforce intelligence to build your strategy,'  adds Heather. By aligning right people, right role with business strategy and visions, HR enables workforce to be more productive and tuned to business expectations. This ensure short term business decisions reflect in how employees are skilled and in the roles they are assigned.

4th Dimension: Impacts of AI

This dimension is where HR looks at the impact of AI in their day-to-day work and where processes can be augmented or automated for better results. 'This is a new frontier of task intelligence where technologies like Agentic AI—where humans and AI agents are going to be in parallel— need to be actively considered,' adds Heather

With technologies like AI become increasingly relevant to workforce enagagement, and productivity, it is essential that leaders don't miss out on leveraging their strengths while they address the previous three dimensions

By integrating these different dimensions together, Heather adds, would be able to think through agility in a way that can be rooted in tangible action.

Catch the entire episode as we discuss the role of HR tech solutions, the new 'Build, Buy, Bot' strategy for talent and unpack the how job structures are going to evolve across APAC as companies become more agile.