A deep dive into the future of work

Organizations are increasingly hiring interim leaders to help guide transformation efforts, including for multiple HR functions, according to a recent report by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.

Demand for interim leaders has increased 151% since 2021, Heidrick & Struggles said, citing proprietary client request data from North America and Europe. Chief financial officers accounted for more than half of interim leader requests, and the report found that human capital expertise jumped by 129% over the past year alone.

With respect to HR functions specifically, organizations most often requested interim leaders who could contribute skills such as financial controls, organizational design, workforce planning and compensation strategy, among others. “HR leaders are at the center of the work as organizations rethink leadership strategies, workforce models, and organizational effectiveness,” Heidrick & Struggles said.

The same report found that HR topped the list of business functions seeking support from interim leaders, a result that was unchanged compared to the previous year. Heidrick & Struggles said this need is driven in part both by HR’s internal needs as well as the function’s role in assisting with organization-wide talent management.

High-end interim talent can help employers maintain momentum as they seek to keep pace with growth and transformation demands, Heidrick & Struggles said. The firm noted that technology implementation and artificial intelligence skills were in especially high demand among clients, reflecting AI’s role in spurring organizational change.

“In a world where disruption is the baseline, independent talent are moving to the center of how critical work gets done,” Sunny Ackerman, global managing partner, on-demand talent, at Heidrick & Struggles, said in the report.

The findings may resonate with a recruiting industry that is broadly aiming to accelerate hiring in 2026 but struggling to break away from traditional frameworks as well as declining employee engagement, per a recent Atlas HXM report. Aside from interim talent, HR teams have also sought strategies to better utilize internal talent and reskilling, Careerminds said last year.

Traditional career development simply isn’t keeping up with today’s ever-evolving workforce needs, Julie Giulioni, who leads DesignArounds, a workplace training provider, told attendees during a SHRM Talent session. 

At risk are higher levels of employee disengagement and turnover — or not even getting workers in the door in the first place, she said. 

“The old rules simply don’t apply as they did before,” Giulioni said, emphasizing that HR professionals need to move on from encouraging workers to own their career development. 

“To expect people to be able to own in this whole world of unknowns sets them up for something less than success,” she said. “My proposal is that the new frontier is to move beyond this notion of ownership to the notion of agency, which may be more aligned with current conditions.”

Career agency, she said, means urging workers to embrace uncertainty, to experiment and to make data-informed choices as they navigate a market characterized by increasing skills volatility, technological advances and changing job roles. 

“With as fast as things are accelerating, imagine what’s [in] the future that’s not even on our radar screens yet,” Giulioni said. 

Career agency, however, is not “a solo job,” she said, and requires help from organizations and leaders.

To create a culture that supports career agency, organizations need to focus on awareness, access and action, Giulioni explained.

Awareness means giving workers more information and insight about what is going on in the organization and what the strategy, priorities and emerging skill needs are, she said.

“Leaders need to be really candid with feedback about performance and skill gaps, and individuals need to be a lot more reflective in understanding their strengths, their opportunities,” Giulioni said. “We need to dramatically elevate awareness if employees are going to be able to exercise agency.”

As for access, employers need to not only make career development opportunities available but also remove roadblocks, she said. 

Workers need “transparent systems for being able to access opportunities. They need to have less gatekeeping and more support for experimentation,” Giulioni said. 

To spur action, meanwhile, involves ensuring that employees understand that development now is about experimentation and iteration, she said. 

“They’ve got to be able to experiment, learn, iterate and experiment again, and that’s going to be the cadence of learning going forward,” Giulioni said. “Leaders need to be prepared with a cadence of check-ins and support to be able to encourage and allow for that kind of adaptation and adjustment.”

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By Remote

Every HR leader expanding internationally worries about the same things: too many countries, too much complexity, too many compliance unknowns.

They're worrying about the wrong thing.

After analyzing data across more than 9,500 companies managing global workforces on Remote's platform, one finding stands out — and it should change how mid-market HR teams think about risk. The strongest predictor of compliance exposure isn't how many countries you operate in. It isn't how fast you're growing. It's something far more structural, and far more in your control: whether your international workers are contractors or employees.

Companies that rely entirely on contractors face nearly 4× more compliance interventions than companies using employer of record (EOR) arrangements. Nearly half — 44% — have experienced at least one compliance issue. Among companies using EOR exclusively, that number is 13%.

Global risk isn't about scale. It's about structure.

Meet the permanent contractor

Picture your engineer in Berlin. Hired on a contractor basis two years ago — faster to onboard, no entity needed, seemed like the sensible call at the time. She's now core to two product teams. Her manager thinks of her as permanent. She probably does too.

But under German labor law, a contractor relationship of this length and dependency doesn't necessarily stay a contractor relationship. She may be entitled to statutory benefits that were never factored into her rate. The arrangement your legal team approved in 2023 may not survive scrutiny in 2025. And your HR team — stretched across fifteen other priorities — won't find out until something breaks.

This is the permanent contractor problem: the quiet transformation of a flexible arrangement into a long-term relationship that local labor law treats very differently than the parties intended.

It's more widespread than most HR leaders realize. Contractor tenure tends to cluster around the 12–18 month mark before compliance events surface. This means by the time the issue becomes visible, you're not just managing a legal question. You're potentially unwinding a hiring decision that shaped a team, a product, a roadmap.

The data makes this concrete. Among companies in this analysis where contractors make up 100% of the international workforce, 44% have experienced at least one compliance intervention. That's not a tail risk. That's nearly every other company.

Geography matters — but not how you'd expect

The conventional wisdom is that more countries means more risk. The data only partially agrees.

Payroll complexity does increase with geographic spread — but it only becomes a consistent, predictable challenge at around eight or more countries. Below that threshold, most companies in this analysis experienced zero payroll corrections, regardless of how many markets they operated in.

The practical implication for mid-market HR leaders: if you're operating in three or four countries, your international footprint probably isn't your biggest risk. How you're structuring your workforce within those markets almost certainly is.

What resilient HR teams are doing differently

The companies that navigate this well have made a few deliberate shifts — and none of them require a bigger team or a larger budget.

They've stopped treating the contractor-versus-EOR decision as a one-time cost comparison. They revisit it as roles mature: does this engagement model still fit the tenure, the market, and how strategically dependent we've become on this person? A short-term project hire looks different from someone who's been on the team for 18 months and knows more about the codebase than anyone else.

They've built contractor review into their operating rhythm — not as an exception, but as a scheduled process. Knowing that the 12–18 month window is when risk tends to crystallize, proactive review at month eleven is a small intervention that prevents far more complex problems downstream.

And they've started thinking about workforce structure as a talent strategy, not just an HR operations question. In many markets, the best candidates won't accept contractor arrangements — not because they're difficult, but because employment protections matter to them. Companies that can offer EOR employment in 15 countries don't just manage risk better. They access talent their competitors can't reach.

The infrastructure gap is real — and it's widening

The regulatory environment in most major hiring markets looks materially different than it did 18 months ago. Pay transparency requirements, evolving classification rules, new mandatory benefits frameworks — the pace of change is outrunning what mid-market HR teams can track without dedicated infrastructure.

The operating model that got you here: a patchwork of contractor agreements, point solutions, and manual compliance tracking, wasn't built for what global teams look like today.

The companies getting ahead of this aren't waiting for a compliance event to tell them they have a problem. They're asking harder questions now: Who owns contractor compliance across our markets? When did we last audit our engagement structures? What's our exposure if one of those relationships is reclassified?

Those are the questions that separate HR teams building for the future from those reacting to it.

Remote provides global HR infrastructure for distributed teams, including employer of record services, contractor management, and global payroll in 180+ countries.

Organizations and employees are looking for more ways to build their artificial intelligence skills sets and demonstrate the value of those skills in the workplace, according to new research from AI skills management platform Skillsoft.

The company’s platform saw a 994% year-over-year increase in AI-related skills benchmark completions, which evaluate workers’ ability to apply their understanding of AI and allow companies to gauge how ready employees are to use those skills in the workplace.

In addition, the research showed a 261% increase in AI content completions as well as a 222% increase in AI learning journeys and a 241% increase in the number of AI achievement badges issued to learners.

The sharp rise in measurable, practice-based AI learning and skills validation suggests that workers “are increasingly focused on demonstrating AI proficiency,” per the report. This comes as organizations look to justify their investments in AI and show quantifiable business gains. 

“As organizations accelerate AI adoption, determining which skills humans should develop versus those handled by AI has become paramount,” Michael Rochelle, chief strategy officer and principal analyst at research firm Brandon Hall Group, said in a statement. “Organizations also need clearer ways to identify talent who can apply AI in real business scenarios. That makes alignment across learning, assessment, and skills data essential to talent readiness and execution.”

Organizations have begun to transition from experimenting with AI to depending on it for daily tasks, the report added. As a result, the issue is no longer whether employees are learning to use AI, but whether they can consistently apply their AI skills and create value for their companies.

“As AI becomes part of how work gets done, the cost of low-quality output and misapplied tools is becoming more visible,” Bernard Barbour, chief technology and product officer at Skillsoft, said in a statement.

However, hiring employees with existing, practical AI skills isn’t easy. Recent research from Pearson and Amazon Web Services found that 53% of employers said their top challenge was finding graduates with the right AI skills. In addition, that report found that only 28% of employers said universities were keeping up with AI‑driven change, and only 14% of current graduates said their AI skills were proficient enough to be applied in a professional setting.

Another recent report, from ManpowerGroup, found that AI-related skills are now the most difficult for employers to find and have surpassed traditional IT and engineering in that regard. ManpowerGroup said the shift underscored “a new era in the persistent global talent crisis.”

While employment law and compliance remains the fastest-growing skillset in the HR profession, artificial intelligence literacy followed directly after in the second spot, according to LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report.

LinkedIn measured year-over-year growth of skills through skill acquisition — the growth of a skill being added to LinkedIn profiles — and hiring success, described as growth of a skill possessed by LinkedIn members who have been hired in the past year.

In other words, AI literacy was both sought by HR professionals in a training capacity and was a key skill possessed by those that were hired this year.

Other skills that made the HR-specific list include client prospecting — reflecting a growth of self-employed, consultant HR professionals — operational efficiency, data analytics and organizational change management. 

Much of the HR profession remains human-oriented, the list showed. “Implementing AI, restructuring teams, shifting how work gets done — none of it works without bringing people along,” Teuila Hanson, chief people officer at LinkedIn, wrote in a post about the list. “Change management is what separates transformation that sticks from initiatives that lose steam six months later.”

Adaption to ongoing market shifts is key for HR professionals, according to a recent Isolved report — but just under half of HR leaders surveyed said that they are facing a self-inflicted talent crisis due to a lack of necessary agility.

On the broader “skills on the rise” list, AI engineering and implementation took the No. 1 spot. AI business strategy took the third spot. Despite the rising need for AI-related skills, however, soft skills also remain in high demand, other reports have shown; 60% of employers surveyed by TestGorilla last year said soft skills were more important today than five years ago.

Notably, executive and shareholder communications was fourty on LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise list, while leadership and people management skills was sixth.

While change management is considered the most valuable communication skill among HR teams, 61% of the more than 1,300 communications and HR professionals surveyed by Gallagher said their companies have “no formal approach” to change communication, according to a report.

As pressure rises at work, companies are counterproductively overwhelming employees with messages, prompting trust and burnout risks; 83% of respondents said information overload is “a growing problem.”

Close to 7 in 10 firms surveyed had six or fewer people in a communications role, regardless of if the company “has 500 employees or 50,000,” Gallagher said.

Communications are a key part of the employee value proposition, Gallagher’s report noted, and employers have trouble truly embedding EVP into the day-to-day routine. This is particularly true for workforces with employees that are not primarily at desks, the report said.

“Without a structured approach, internal teams are increasing their volume, but if every message carries a sense of urgency, employees begin to tune out rather than listen closer,” William Ziebell, global CEO of Gallagher's benefits & HR consulting division, said in a statement.

Employee feedback is key to communications, but HR teams have reported they are too stressed to handle action on that feedback, a Perceptyx report from last year noted. Without action, however, employees may lose trust and become less engaged, that report said.

“The value of the human insights cannot be underestimated when seeking to improve engagement,” Ziebell said. “Employees want to know their feedback is being heard and in-person events and townhalls are the best venue for this.”

Change management, more broadly, remains a weakness for many organizations. Only 25% of employees surveyed in August last year told Eagle Hill Consulting that their company effectively manages major change. To accept change, employees said they wanted to understand why it was made and have effective communication throughout the process, according to Eagle Hill’s report.

Data and artificial intelligence literacy skills are no longer considered specialized, a new report concluded, and instead have “crossed a critical threshold” as something widely expected in the workplace. 

Nearly 9 in 10 leaders surveyed rated basic data literacy skills as either important or very important, and a similar percentage said the same of a worker’s ability to write, according to the 2026 State of Data & AI Literacy Report from DataCamp, a platform for data and AI skill building. 

“Data and AI skills are now as fundamental to modern work as the ability to write,” per the report. “We don’t treat writing as optional; we expect it from everyone. We practice it constantly, because it’s simply built into how we work.”

AI skills are widely considered the most important in the workplace, the report found. Yet, of the more than 500 U.S. and U.K. business leaders surveyed, about half reported “significant” skills gaps within their company. 

AI-related skills, for the first time, are the most challenging for employers to find globally, passing traditional IT and engineering skills, a February report by Manpower Group found. 

“This historic shift highlights a new era in the persistent global talent crisis,” ManpowerGroup said.

The need for AI skills doesn’t exclude HR either. A February LinkedIn report found that AI literacy was the second fast-growing skillset for the profession. 

In some cases, skill needs are evolving too quickly for companies’ training cycles, according to a February report by Info-Tech, a research and advisory firm. For example, IT workers’ core responsibilities change about every 18 months, but training is only “periodic” and treated “as a benefit instead of a business discipline,” the organization said.

About 52% of employees feel hopeful about the future of work, yet more than a third feel depressed, according to a report from the O.C. Tanner Institute.

Notably, when employees feel a strong sense of hope, they are five times more likely to innovate, eight times more likely to produce great work and seven times more likely to be engaged, the report found.

“In the face of economic uncertainty, changing market expectations and rapidly advancing technologies, employees everywhere are struggling to feel good about the trajectory of their careers,” the report found.

“At a time when organizations are pushing to innovate in a changing business landscape, having a workforce that’s inspired and empowered to meet challenges is more important than ever,” the report said. “Hopelessness and even passive hope aren’t just inconvenient — they work against needed outcomes.”

In a survey, employees who were part of teams that aren’t inclusive were 218% more likely to have feelings of anxiety and 513% more likely to report feelings of burnout, the report found.

In addition, transparency about work and performance were seven times more powerful from an employee’s immediate manager than from a senior leader or HR team perspective.

Beyond that, highly supported employees had lower odds of probable depression, anxiety and burnout, the report found. However, only a third of employees had levels of support high enough to match the expectations of their workplace, the report found.

Notably, employees say they seek hope and trust from workplace leaders, according to a Gallup report. Without it, workers lose engagement, confidence and resilience, Gallup said.

Additionally, about 1 in 5 workers feel their career is out of their control, according to a study from the University of Phoenix Career Institute. Most workers reported burnout and said they’re relying on hope to get through this year.