The decisions HR leaders are making now about roles, team structures, and investments in AI will shape the workforce for the next decade.
Here’s the problem. Much of the data that informs the biggest decisions of today’s employees is already outdated. Traditional HR data sources such as self-report surveys, static HRIS records, and managers’ intuition primarily capture perceptions of work rather than actual work patterns. Surveys provide a snapshot of dates depending on how the questions are structured. HRIS records represent the skeleton of an organization. their title. A manager’s intuition provides important context that should not be lost, but biases must be removed. Managers naturally notice which employees are the loudest, most visible, and most adept at managing.
With the explosive adoption of AI, work is changing faster than most organizations can measure.
See also: How to take control of your future and make disruption your HR superpower
The scale of the blind spots in working data is staggering. The 2026 CHRO Survey Report found that 47% of CHROs have not established clear productivity measurements for AI, even though 91% have listed AI as a top priority this year. HR leaders are aware of the parts when making decisions that matter to employees, but lack an integrated view to connect actions to results. Which teams can collaborate effectively? How does attention span affect productivity? Which processes create friction? Often, important patterns remain invisible to the leaders who need to act on them.
This is where behavioral data presents an opportunity. Behavioral work data is the digital trace that work leaves behind. This is a pattern that shows how employees spend their time across applications, websites, and tools. When and how your team collaborates. If you have trouble concentrating or staying focused. Capacity available or overstretched.
Behavioral job data reveals gaps between job description and work. For example, data shows that strategic leaders spend 60% of their time on manual, repeatable tasks, not because they want to, but because the business demands it. It may not show up in job descriptions or performance reviews, but it shows up clearly in behavioral data. Data can pinpoint where AI could help free a person to fulfill a strategic role.
7 steps to close the visibility gap before your next workforce redesign
- Be honest with yourself and your colleagues about what you know and what you assume. Most organizations rely on assumptions more than they realize. Identify what is based on reproducible, observable facts and what is not.
- Build a basic understanding of your work flow before redesigning. Enable cross-functional visibility between HR, operations, and people analytics teams, allowing everyone to actively participate in the design and decision-making process.
- Make your results measurable, not aspirational. This means defining clear signals of whether new AI-powered ways of working are here to stay, such as adoption rates, changes in time allocation, changes in employee capabilities, and friction metrics. Organizations that are most effectively closing the AI measurement gap tend to have one thing in common: That meant asking more pointed questions before the redesign began.
- Resist the urge to treat AI adoption as a technology issue. It is a human opportunity enabled by technology. Gartner’s 2026 HR Trends report highlights this point. When change is built into the natural flow of work, efforts are three times more likely to result in healthy change implementation.
- Designed for employee experience, not just efficiency: Organizations that successfully navigate the era of human-AI work are not just about efficiency, but are thoughtful and intentional about the AI experience for their employees. they are asking: “What is it like to work in a new way?” What happens to a person’s sense of purpose when roles change? It is central to whether people are thriving or functioning.
- Remember that readiness varies across your workforce by role, function, tenure, and individual. Leaders who build real capabilities will deploy AI based on reason and meeting people where they are.
- Understand that to use behavioral data meaningfully, employees need to trust that the data will be used to help them. Trust must be earned through transparency: what is being measured and how decisions are, or are not, made from it. HR leaders who skip that step will face resistance that can undermine the entire initiative. Involve your employees in the conversation early on and demonstrate through your actions that your goal is to help them thrive.
Two word challenge for HR leaders
Persistent confusion can destabilize critical thinking. Leaders who consistently challenge assumptions and perceptions build resilience and support into the process. When advising HR leaders on how to navigate change, I offer a simple two-word challenge. It’s “Please prove it.”
When a leader comes to me and says, “My employees are dissatisfied,” I gently ask follow-up questions. Where and how do they say it? How long has this been going on and do their actions reflect that? This approach requires leaders to provide evidence. Many organizations will find that they don’t have that. However, a lack of quantitative data is no reason to ignore employee feedback. Rather, feedback should be a signal to identify and track data toward a solution.
Employees need to be able to use behavioral data to transform their work. Employees may feel burnt out or disengaged as AI-enabled work increases output, while managers may find themselves working less and having less time to be active. When managers use outdated metrics like hours worked or results produced by their direct reports, they can increase the risk of burnout and demotivation. Encouraging employees to track metrics like attention span (continuous, uninterrupted work to produce meaningful results) creates a foundation for a two-way conversation in which managers and employees can work together to diagnose problems and design solutions.
Organizations that succeed in the age of humans and AI are not necessarily the most technologically advanced. They have the clearest eyes. They understand what they know, measure what matters, and build trust with the people they work with. Clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It starts with HR leaders asking better questions and demanding better answers.
