Cutback Considerations: Are You Removing Roles or Removing Work?

Employers have been leaning into layoffs over the past year-plus, basing their actions on cost pressures and transformation driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 1.21 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025. An employment action tracking website logged more than 120,000 global layoffs in the tech industry alone last year, and 92,000 in the first four months of 2026.

But here’s the sharper question: Are employers and their HR functions redesigning work before they redesign roles, or are they moving straight to decisions without doing the middle work? The answer likely matters more than it ever has.

Some organizations are doing this well. They are stepping back, looking at how work is changing, and then redesigning roles before acting. But many others, under pressure, are moving faster.

That pressure isn’t accidental. AI is changing how work gets done. Investment is rising. Expectations are higher. The push is clear — do more, do it faster, do it with fewer people. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report estimated that nearly 40% of core job skills will change over the next few years, reinforcing the urgency to rethink how work itself is structured — not just how roles are counted.

And in that push, restructuring becomes the most immediate lever.

Mind the Gap

A deep breath and a deep analysis show what the process should look like:

AI → Understand work → Redesign roles → Job architecture → Job evaluation → Workforce decisions

This path is slower. It requires deconstructing roles into underlying work, defining job architecture, and calibrating scope, complexity and accountability before job decisions are made. It demands tight alignment across business, finance and HR, with disciplined role mapping and evaluation to ensure consistency, clarity and integrity at scale.

It also requires alignment beyond the top layer — across multiple levels where the work actually sits — to accurately understand how work is delivered, how it shifts and what truly needs to change.

The outputs of such a path can deliver important benefits:

• Decisions become more visible.
• Trade-offs are explicit.
• Alignment happens before action.
• People understand what is changing and why.
• There is space to respond, not just react.

Now compare that with what often occurs:

AI → Cost pressure → Restructuring

This path is faster. It is clear in terms of action. It shows movement. But it skips the middle design layer.

Decisions are often top secret, compressed and financially driven, with limited visibility into how work is structured. A small group dictates the course. The rest of the organization reacts. Without a structured understanding of work, bias can quietly enter the system — not because anyone intends it but because there is no framework holding the decision together.

The Harvard Business Review highlighted that organizations often move faster on structural decisions than on redesigning the underlying work itself, creating gaps that surface later in execution.

After the Dust Settles

What happens after the decision? This typically is where the difference becomes visible.

When the work is understood and roles are redesigned properly, transitions are likely cleaner. The organization adjusts with intent. There is less disruption, and people know where they fit.

When the work design layer is skipped — the part where roles are broken down into actual tasks and responsibilities — work often doesn’t disappear. It shifts. It moves upward to managers, spreads across teams and often comes back through external hiring. The work is still there, just no longer where it was designed to be. In India, where large-scale service and capability centers operate with role-heavy structures, even small shifts in how work is distributed can have outsized impact on teams and delivery.

Over time, the system adjusts in ways no one planned. Teams stretch. Decisions slow down. Hidden costs start showing up. Research on operating model transformations by advisory firm McKinsey & Company showed poorly sequenced restructuring efforts often lead to productivity dips, coordination overload and increased reliance on external talent within the following six to 12 months.

At the human level, the impact is often immediate. People typically don’t think about strategy — they think, “Am I next?” That question can change behaviour. Focus may shift from doing better work to staying safe. Visibility can start to matter more than value. The pressure doesn’t stay with those who leave — it carries across to those who stay.

The Role of Job Architecture and Evaluation

What often gets missed is this:

• Roles aren’t the same as work.
• Roles are containers.
• Work is what gets done.
• AI changes work, not just roles.

If the work inside a role isn’t broken down, it becomes difficult to know what can be automated, what needs redesign and what should remain. Decisions get made at the role level, but the impact plays out at the work level. That is where a mismatch can occur.

A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) noted AI is far more likely to transform jobs than eliminate them outright, which means work gets redistributed, reconfigured or augmented rather than simply removed.

And as the scale of restructuring increases, so does the risk. When similar roles are reduced across teams or regions without a clear understanding of the work, the impact multiplies. The work doesn’t disappear. It is redistributed in ways that are often unplanned.

A ‘Moving’ Problem

Organizations will continue to restructure. They likely need to, given all the change occurring in today’s business world. But when decisions move faster than understanding, the preponderance is high that the problem doesn’t go away — it just moves.

An organization can reduce roles and still feel heavier. Why? If the work hasn’t been understood, and the structure has not been thought through, complexity doesn’t leave with people — it stays behind. When it stays long enough, it stops looking like a restructuring problem and starts becoming a performance problem .

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics:

• Finance and Budgeting
• Organizational Performance
• Total Rewards