What Comes After Workforce Reductions? Reimagining work, roles, and capacity for the organization you need next.
In this article:
Workforce reductions require redesigning the work, not simply redistributing it.
Institutions need to decide what work will continue, stop, or change.
Teams closest to the work should help reshape roles, workflows, and responsibilities.
Organizational review should become an ongoing leadership practice.
Across higher education, colleges and universities are making difficult staffing decisions. Financial pressures are leading some institutions to eliminate positions, close programs, leave vacancies unfilled, or consolidate units. In parallel, many institutions are pursuing new academic strategies that require them to redirect resources toward new priorities.
Once staffing decisions have been made and financial targets established, a critical new phase of work begins. The institution must determine how the remaining organization will deliver on its priorities and strategic goals with different capacity. This requires deliberate decisions about what work will continue, what will stop or change, how responsibilities will shift, and how roles and workflows will evolve. Without these changes, the financial savings may be difficult to sustain as workloads and operational gaps eventually create pressure to add staff back.
The reason is straightforward: the work does not disappear when a position disappears. Responsibilities previously carried by eliminated positions remain unless the institution deliberately changes or eliminates them. They often move informally to staff who remain, adding to existing portfolios without corresponding changes in priorities, processes, or expectations. Over time, this can contribute to role ambiguity, unsustainable workloads, frustration, turnover, and the gradual rebuilding of positions that were originally eliminated.
Making workforce reductions sustainable requires more than eliminating positions. Institutions need to determine what work matters most and how to do it, what work can be stopped or redesigned, and how roles and responsibilities need to be updated.
Start With Today’s Needs
A useful starting point is to ask: If the organization was being designed today, what are our most important priorities and goals? If we designed it from scratch what would we build to accomplish these priorities and goals? What work is essential to those outcomes? What capabilities are required? How should decisions be made? Which activities could be centralized or shared? What must remain decentralized?
This creates a clear picture of what the organization needs today, independent of the structure, roles, and responsibilities it has inherited. It also provides a basis for examining the work currently being done and determining how well it meets those needs.
Make Deliberate Choices About the Work
Higher education organizations accumulate work over time. New reports, processes, committees, approvals, and initiatives are added as needs change, while older activities often remain. As priorities, technology, and resources evolve, the value and necessity of that work can change as well.
When staffing is reduced, institutions need to examine this portfolio of work against their priorities and available capacity. That requires three kinds of decisions.
First, what work is most important to continue? Institutions need to protect the activities most critical to mission, strategy, students, faculty, revenue, and essential operations, including areas where additional capacity may be needed to advance new priorities.
Second, what work should stop? Some activities no longer justify the capacity they consume. Reports, meetings, processes, approvals, and legacy initiatives may need to be eliminated, reduced, or deprioritized. Making these choices explicitly creates capacity and prevents work from simply being transferred to fewer people.
Third, what work needs to be redesigned? Necessary work may still be performed in ways that reflect an earlier organization. Processes can be simplified, responsibilities consolidated, decisions delegated, services centralized, and technology used differently. Changes in how work gets done can reduce demands on staff while improving clarity and execution.
Together, these decisions focus finite organizational capacity on the work the institution most needs to accomplish. Making these decisions requires a detailed understanding of why the work has mattered in the past, how the work is actually done, where capacity is being used, and what will change when responsibilities shift.
Involve Those Closest to the Work
Changing the work requires a detailed understanding of how it actually gets done. Much of that operational knowledge resides with the managers and staff who do the work themselves.
They know where processes break down, which activities consume disproportionate amounts of time, where responsibilities overlap, which handoffs create problems, and which activities are essential despite being largely invisible to senior leaders. Following workforce reductions, they also see where work has shifted, where gaps have emerged, and where workloads have become unsustainable.
Their involvement should extend throughout the process. Managers and staff closest to the work can help determine what should continue, stop, or change; rethink how responsibilities are distributed; redesign workflows and roles; identify practical problems as new approaches are developed; and refine them as they are put into practice. This continuous involvement brings the operational knowledge needed to make sound decisions and helps ensure that the new organization works in practice.
Give Teams the Agency to Redefine the Work
Involvement alone is not enough. Teams need meaningful authority to shape both the work and the roles needed to accomplish it. Senior leaders should establish clear priorities, outcomes, constraints, and guardrails. Within those parameters, teams need latitude to determine how work should be organized, how responsibilities should be distributed, and how roles should operate.
This means giving teams the authority to do more than recommend changes or implement decisions made elsewhere. They need to be able to simplify processes, change handoffs, eliminate unnecessary steps, redefine responsibilities, clarify decision authority, and reshape roles as the work changes. As new ways of working are implemented, they also need sufficient authority to solve problems and make adjustments based on what they learn.
Clear guardrails, combined with meaningful agency, allow teams to apply their operational expertise while ensuring that changes support institutional priorities. They also create shared responsibility for building an organization that can operate effectively with its new capacity.
Rewrite Roles & Responsibilities
As the work changes, roles need to change with it. Position descriptions often evolve over many years and reflect the responsibilities, skills, and interests of the people who have occupied them. Following a restructuring, those inherited roles may no longer reflect the work the organization needs to accomplish.
The redesigned work provides a basis for formalizing the roles the organization now needs. Each role should have clear outcomes, responsibilities, decision authority, and required capabilities. Strategic HR can help translate these decisions into positions, position descriptions, staffing, and talent plans, including identifying where capabilities need to be built, shifted, or strengthened.
Vacancies provide a natural opportunity to put this approach into practice. Before reposting an existing position, institutions can determine whether the role, responsibilities, and required capabilities still reflect current needs. Consistently reviewing positions as vacancies occur allows the organization to evolve over time without relying exclusively on large-scale reorganizations.
Make New Ways of Working Explicit
Changes to roles, responsibilities, workflows, and decision-making need to be made explicit. Without clear documentation, people often fall back on previous practices or develop different interpretations of how the new organization should operate.
Practical tools such as team or unit handbooks, role and responsibility guides, decision matrices, process maps, and updated operating procedures can establish a shared understanding of the new ways of working. They can clarify who owns particular responsibilities, how work moves across teams, where decisions are made, and how key processes should operate. Used in day-to-day work and onboarding, these tools also provide a shared reference that can evolve as the organization learns and adjusts.
Make Organizational Review an Ongoing Leadership Practice
Workforce reductions make this work particularly urgent because they materially alter the institution's available capacity. But these same practices are valuable well beyond periods of restructuring. Vacancies, leadership transitions, new strategies, major technology investments, and shifts in financial circumstances all provide opportunities to revisit work, roles, and capacity.
For institutions navigating significant change, the central task is to ensure that the work, roles, structure, and available capacity support the institution's priorities. Doing so helps ensure that limited resources are directed toward the work that matters most and that the organization can continue to adapt as priorities change.
How ALG Can Help
Workforce reductions are often informed by an organizational assessment, but the work does not end when the new structure is announced. The organization that remains still needs to determine how it will operate effectively with different capacity, responsibilities, and priorities.
Academic Leadership Group helps institutions with this critical next phase. Through facilitated workshops and targeted organizational support, we bring leaders, managers, and staff together to examine the work in detail and make practical decisions about what should continue, stop, or change. We help teams redesign workflows and responsibilities, rethink roles, clarify decision authority, and establish new ways of working that reflect the capacity and priorities of the new organization. Let’s have a conversation and see how we can help.