For years, increasing headcount was almost automatically seen as a sign of growth. I saw it in startup statistics, venture capital, company valuations - if the business was growing, the team was expected to grow with it. And then, obviously, came the layoffs.

Having restructured multiple companies around the world, I sadly have to say that many of the roles I came across should probably never have been hired in the first place. Not because the people weren’t good, but because companies hired based on growth that wasn’t sustainable, added people instead of fixing inefficient processes and made promises they ultimately couldn’t keep.

Of course, people paid the price for it. We’ve seen a massive shake in the employment market and, with it, a massive shake in trust.

Today, we can do this differently. And spoiler... this article is not about replacing people with AI.

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Your future hire won’t be an employee

There is an almost automated response inside organizations when more work appears: "We need to hire someone full-time."

But do we really need to do that?

For decades, we have built workforce planning around headcount. There is a gap, we create a position. There is more work, we add another person. A department is overwhelmed, we increase the department. And sometimes that is absolutely the right answer. But hiring another permanent employee should be one possible answer to a business need, not the default answer.

So, in my eyes we now need to move from headcount planning to capability planning.

Instead of asking “Who do we need to hire?”, start by asking “What are we actually trying to achieve?” Maybe you need another full-time employee. But... maybe you need a brilliant specialist for six months. Maybe you need ten hours a week from someone with expertise your internal team doesn’t have. Maybe the capability already exists somewhere else in the organization. Maybe a repetitive part of the work can be automated while the more complex part stays human. Or maybe the process itself is so unnecessarily complicated that adding another person would simply add another human being to the complication.

I'd like to recommend running a simple capability check before opening another position:

• What problem are we actually trying to solve?
• Is this capability permanently needed, or are we responding to a temporary increase in work?
• Does this knowledge need to sit inside the company?
• Could an independent specialist or fractional expert do this better than a permanent generalist?
• Which parts genuinely require human judgment, creativity or relationships?
• Which parts could be simplified, eliminated or automated?

Only after answering those questions should we ask: "Do we actually need another full-time employee?"

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The company of the future has a core, not an empire

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I don’t think the future company will have no employees. Actually, I think having the right core team will matter more than ever. These are the people who carry the business - they know it in & out, hold the key competencies and knowledge, build the most important relationships and are genuinely connected to where the company is going. They are the heart and soul of the organization, and there are very good reasons why you want them there permanently.

But at the same time, not everyone needs to be part of that core. Around it, you can build an amazings network of remote specialists, freelancers, fractional leaders, consultants and partners who bring in exactly the expertise you need at a particular moment. And this is where I think we need to change how we look at growth. Growing from 500 to 5,000 employees is not automatically a bigger success story. If another company can achieve the same or more with 500 great people, access to brilliant external talent and processes that actually work, I would argue that this is much smarter scaling.

Well, and such an approach also forces companies to become much more intentional about what they actually want to keep inside. Which knowledge is critical? Which relationships need continuity? Where do you need people who live and breathe the business every day, and where would you actually benefit from someone coming in with a completely different perspective? The point is not to make the core team as small as possible. It is to make sure that every role inside it has a real reason to be there.

Talent no longer has to belong to you

The way people want to work is changing. The gig economy and independent workforce have grown enormously, and there is a whole group of highly experienced people who simply don’t want one employer to define their entire professional life. They work with several companies, move between projects, build very specific expertise and increasingly value the freedom to decide where, how and with whom they work. Yet many companies still treat freelancers, independent specialists or fractional leaders as a temporary alternative to the “real” hire. I think that thinking is becoming seriously outdated.

In fact, some of the most interesting people I work with are so good precisely because they don’t work for just one organization. They have seen the same problem in five different companies, industries or countries. They know what worked somewhere else, what failed completely and what your internal team may simply not see because they have been looking at the same business from the inside for years. That kind of exposure creates an incredible amount of knowledge, and bringing it into the organization at the right moment can be much more valuable than hiring another permanent generalist simply because there is work to be done.

Remote work makes this even more powerful because access to talent is no longer limited by geography either. Your core team can be distributed across several countries while a fractional leader works with you from another one, freelancers join for specific projects and external specialists come in when you need expertise that makes absolutely no sense to employ permanently. For me, this is one of the biggest shifts in how we should think about the future workforce: companies don’t need to own every piece of talent they benefit from. They need to become much better at finding great people, building strong relationships with them and bringing the right expertise into the business when it actually makes sense.

Relationships become more important when structures become looser

There is something that worries me about this model, though. The more distributed and flexible the workforce becomes, the easier it is to make work completely transactional. Employee number 472, freelancer number 19, vendor number 8. Someone joins a project, delivers something, disappears and another person takes their place. Technically, that may be incredibly efficient. Humanly, it can become pretty terrible. And I don’t believe you can build a great business in the long run if people constantly feel interchangeable, regardless of what kind of contract they have with you.

Actually, I think the opposite needs to happen. The less we can rely on traditional structures, the more we need to invest in relationships, trust and community. Someone doesn’t need to have the same employment contract, live in the same country or appear on the same organizational chart to feel genuinely connected to the people they work with. I have worked with external partners for years who understand businesses better than employees who have just joined them. I have seen remote teams build incredibly close relationships despite rarely meeting in person.

What creates that connection is not the legal form of the relationship.

It is being treated as someone whose opinion matters, being included in the right conversations, having a shared understanding of what you are trying to achieve and, quite simply, enjoying working with each other.

This is also why I think our obsession with “culture fit” will need to evolve. If the future workforce is made up of employees, freelancers, fractional experts, partners and people working across different countries and cultures, the goal can’t be to make everyone behave like they belong to one perfectly polished corporate identity. You actually want different perspectives and experiences coming into the business. The challenge is to create relationships strong enough that very different people can trust each other and do exceptional work together. In a much more flexible future of work, belonging may have much less to do with where someone sits on the organizational chart and much more to do with the quality of the relationship you build with them.

AI should help scale output, not organizational nonsense

Well, we need to talk about AI. But I am much less interested in the endless discussion about how many employees AI will replace. The question I find much more interesting is what AI and automation allow us to stop building in the first place. For years, companies responded to increasing complexity by adding people. More administration meant another administrator. More reporting meant another reporting role. More people meant more managers, more coordination and more meetings. Today, we have technology that gives us an opportunity to question that cycle rather than simply making it run faster.

This is where AI can make scaling much more sensible. Before opening another position, look at the work itself. What are people spending hours searching for, copying between systems, summarizing, coordinating, checking or reporting? What could be automated completely? Where could AI make someone significantly faster without taking away the human judgment that actually matters? And which processes are so unnecessary that they shouldn’t be automated at all, but simply removed? Putting AI on top of a terrible process doesn’t make it a good process. Sometimes it just helps you produce the same organizational nonsense faster.

Here's a mini surprise from me - a quick AI and automation check before adding more headcount:

• What work is actually creating the need for another person?
• Which parts are repetitive, administrative or highly standardized?
• Can we eliminate or simplify any of that work before automating it?
• Where could AI increase the capacity of the people we already have?
• Which decisions still require human judgment, accountability or relationships?
• Do we have the right data protection, governance and oversight before putting AI into this process?
• And after all of that - do we still need another employee?

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For me, this is really what the entire conversation comes down to. The future company isn’t about replacing employees with freelancers or replacing freelancers with AI. It is about becoming much more intentional about how we build organizations in the first place - keeping an incredible core team around the capabilities that genuinely belong inside the business, accessing brilliant external talent when it brings something different to the table, investing much more seriously in the relationships holding that ecosystem together, and using AI to remove unnecessary work rather than unnecessary humans. That is what sensible business growth should start looking like.

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