Workforce expectations are shifting dramatically. With six in 10 remote workers preferring hybrid work models and 81% of global companies shifting to skills-based hiring, companies must rethink how they structure teams, hire talent, and develop skills to remain agile.

For small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs), limited budgets and smaller HR teams make it harder to manage distributed teams, ensure compliance in multiple locations, and fill critical skill gaps without overspending.

This guide is tailored for senior-level HR stakeholders seeking valuable insights on agile workforce planning for 2025. Inside, you’ll find practical ways to upskill employees, break down silos with cross-functional training, and implement adaptive workflows that keep your business ahead of change.

Why Workforce Agility Matters for SMBs in 2025

As economic conditions shift and global competition intensifies, SMBs must rethink how they structure their workforce to stay competitive. However, challenges such as limited resources, global competition, inflation, and employee turnover toughen the task. Workforce agility helps businesses surmount these difficulties by enabling them to redistribute tasks efficiently, preventing burnout while maintaining productivity. This is particularly important as PwC’s 2024 Global Workforce Survey notes that 45% of employees report heavier workloads. 

Agile strategies ensure SMBs can proactively adapt to industry shifts, making better use of their existing workforce without adding unnecessary costs. For distributed teams, agility fosters effective collaboration across locations by encouraging role flexibility and cross-functional teamwork.

But agile workforce planning for SMBs transcends remote work. One powerful approach is capability stacking, where teams leverage diverse skills and knowledge to solve problems more efficiently. Evie Graham, Founder of Waste Direct UK, highlights how her company trained recycling specialists to handle commercial pickups and unexpected cleanouts, “cutting response times by 40% with the same team size.” 

For SMBs facing understaffing, capability stacking provides a way to do more with less. It empowers them to meet operational demands, improve efficiency, and scale sustainably, even with limited resources.  

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Key Pillars of an Agile Plan

Deloitte’s Skills-Based Organization Survey reports that 85% of business executives suggest adopting agile work structures for quick response to market changes. The reason is clear; an agile workforce plan offers businesses:

Flexibility in Hiring and Workforce Structure

A flexible workforce strategy combines full-time employees for regular tasks and gig workers or contractors for short-term projects. It also incorporates flexible work arrangements like remote or hybrid models, enabling businesses to attract top talent, reduce operational costs, and improve employee engagement. 

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This pillar of an agile workforce plan allows companies to scale their workforce dynamically, hiring experts on demand while maintaining a lean, cost-efficient team. It also benefits global teams by distributing workloads across multiple time zones, ensuring continuous operations.

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Companies like Buffer have successfully experimented with alternative work models to enhance flexibility. In 2020, Buffer introduced a four-day workweek, proving that non-traditional schedules can improve productivity and retention.

Scalable Workforce Models

A scalable workforce model enables businesses to expand or contract their teams based on demand, ensuring efficiency without unnecessary overhead costs. Instead of employing only permanent or full-time staff, an agile workforce plan encourages companies to adjust team sizes or responsibilities as needed. This method provides a cost-effective way for budget-conscious businesses to remain productive during increased workloads without compromising quality or overworking employees. 

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For instance, in 2024, Amazon hired 250,000 temporary employees to handle customer fulfillment and transportation during the festive season. While SMBs don’t operate at this scale, they can apply the same principle—bringing in temporary workers during peak periods to maintain efficiency while controlling costs.

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In addition to flexible hiring, technology plays a critical role in workforce agility by automating time-consuming administrative tasks. With this, HR teams can streamline payroll processing, onboarding, and compliance management, freeing up resources for strategic decision-making. For example, Lean Technologies faced compliance challenges when onboarding international employees in Europe. Upon using RemotePass, the team hired compliantly and avoided the exhausting time and cost of local entity setup.

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Cross-Functional Teams and Transferable Skills

An agile workforce plan prioritizes flexibility and skills by leveraging transferable skills—such as problem-solving, communication, and adaptability—over rigid roles and hierarchy. Rather than confining employees to fixed departmental silos, this approach emphasizes collaboration and ongoing learning across departments. 

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To create such a dynamic environment, companies invest in targeted strategies like upskilling initiatives, structured mentorship programs, and cross-training opportunities. These efforts enable employees to broaden their expertise and transition seamlessly between roles, thereby adding value beyond their primary responsibilities. 

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For example, consider a tech company launching new features. Instead of keeping marketing and engineering strictly separate, the company forms a cross-functional team that includes both disciplines. Marketing experts contribute insights on customer messaging and market trends, while engineers ensure technical robustness.  The result is a multi-skilled workforce that exceeds their regular duties and assumes diverse roles to meet workplace demands with minimal disruption.

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Continuous Workforce Planning and Optimization

An agile workforce plan involves regularly reevaluating and updating strategies to align with market performance, industry trends, and changes within the workforce. This proactive approach helps businesses identify challenges, such as skill gaps and low employee engagement, and resolve them before they escalate into unproductivity or turnover. 

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More than that, it builds resilience among teams, enabling companies to absorb shocks (such as market downturns or sudden changes in demand) and turn them into opportunities for long-term growth. Continuous workforce planning helps HR leaders stay ahead of potential disruptions by focusing on effective strategies and eliminating ineffective ones.

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Practical HR Strategies for Workforce Agility

Clarify Business Objectives for 2025 

Start by identifying your company's key growth areas for the year, such as higher sales, product launches, or market expansions. Review past performance data, industry trends,  and market insights data to determine the talent, strategies, and resources required to achieve these objectives.

For example, if your company plans to release new products in time for Black Friday and past data shows a surge in demand during the last season, use this insight to plan for temporary hires to manage the increased customer orders. This foresight allows your company to respond quickly to contingencies and make timely decisions to meet your goals. Set 

Key Metrics for Success    

Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as customer lifetime value, employee productivity, cost efficiency, and retention rate, offer clear benchmarks to measure and track progress. When setting KPIs, ensure they’re quantifiable and directly aligned with your company’s objectives. Next, analyze the data to identify workforce strategies to implement, strengthen, or discard based on performance. 

Say your company’s attrition rate rises from 20% to 30% instead of reducing. Your team can review employee feedback, exit interviews, and engagement surveys to pinpoint the root causes. These could include low pay, burnout, or limited growth opportunities. Based on the data, you can then take measures, such as increasing salaries or offering training programs and time off to retain talent, depending on what the data reveals.

A notable example is IKEA, which faced significant voluntary turnover with 62,000 employees leaving yearly. After analyzing its workforce metrics and conducting surveys, IKEA addressed the problem by:

• increasing compensation,
• offering flexible schedules,
• providing structured onboarding and training,
• and adopting new technologies to simplify employees' tasks.

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Conduct a Skills Audit

For effective skills audits, gather real-time assessments through immediate feedback from peers, managers, and subordinates to help employees better understand expectations and accelerate their improvement. Track performance metrics like work quality, sales numbers, and task completion rate to spot knowledge gaps, missed opportunities, and talent redundancies. Evaluating skills enables HR teams to forecast hiring needs and determine whether to recruit new talent or upskill existing employees. 

Conducting this analysis before hiring ensures that recruitment aligns with workforce and broader business objectives. Otherwise, you may realize new hires need additional upskilling to thrive. SHRM’s 2024 Talent Trends corroborates this, noting that one in four organizations found new full-time hires required additional skills in the past year due to growth and changing technology. 

Wendy Makinson, HR Manager at Joloda Hydraroll, recommends skills-based hiring to bridge this knowledge gap. Michael Franco, Founder of Quokka Hub, adds that the switch from rigid job descriptions to a skill-based approach allows “employees to shift dynamically across projects and priorities.” 

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Evaluate Workforce Composition

To optimize workforce performance, evaluate your employees' skills, roles, and responsibilities by assessing workload distribution and employee types (e.g., full-time, part-time, contractors). Measure the ratio of full- and part-time employees to contractors and gig workers to determine cost efficiency and productivity. This analysis helps your organization strike the right staffing balance while avoiding overspending. 

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Additionally, analyze team responsibilities and daily tasks to review their workloads. Use project management tools like Trello and Asana to track time-bound progress and identify task inefficiencies. For example, check for overburdened teams, late deliveries, or full-time employees performing tasks better suited for freelancers. Adopting this hybrid approach comprising permanent and temporary staff ensures stability for long-term goals and success with short-term projects. 

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Furthermore, create teams with overlapping skill sets within your organization where employees have different yet interconnected skills and expertise. For example, during product launches, let content marketers work in customer success or have software engineers contribute to quality assurance. Derek Pankaew, Founder of Listening.com, suggests starting by having a "marketing team member work with the sales lead once a month." 

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Leverage Workforce Analytics

Data analytics provide HR teams with objective insights and evidence-based information from analyzing historical trends to support decision-making. Examples include labor market data (such as supply and demand trends), performance metrics (like employee productivity), and recruitment analytics (such as time-to-hire and quality of hire). These insights help companies make informed decisions on hiring, training requirements, or predicting workforce needs, such as retention, productivity, and resource allocation. 

Create Feedback Loops

To build a truly agile workforce plan for 2025, establishing continuous feedback loops is critical. These loops involve regularly gathering, analyzing, and acting upon feedback to make data-driven decisions that enhance workforce strategies, improve employee engagement, and ensure alignment with business objectives. They include:

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• Performance Reviews: Performance reviews should be part of a regular cadence of feedback, including one-on-one meetings, weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, and quarterly reviews. These meetings allow managers to provide timely updates on employee performance, discuss challenges, and adjust goals. Frequent performance feedback ensures employees understand their progress, feel supported, and can quickly adapt to changes in their roles or responsibilities. 
• Employee Surveys: Regular surveys can uncover pain points such as burnout, communication breakdowns, or skills gaps, allowing HR teams to pivot workforce strategies in real time. For an agile workforce plan, using surveys to gather actionable insights is key to fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Customer Reviews: While customer feedback is typically associated with product and service quality, it also plays a crucial role in shaping workforce planning. Customer reviews reflect the overall customer experience, which can directly influence staffing decisions. For instance, if feedback shows a growing demand for customer support or new service features, your workforce planning can quickly respond by reallocating resources, training staff, or even hiring to meet these emerging needs. An agile workforce is one that can respond to customer feedback as quickly as it responds to internal changes, ensuring alignment with customer expectations and business goals.

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Experience an Agile Future with RemotePass

Agility isn’t a luxury but a necessity for SMBs. It keeps companies competitive, nimble, and adaptable. New trends, market fluctuations, and global competition may pose challenges. However, with an efficient workforce, your company can quickly adapt to these uncertainties and thrive.

Tools like RemotePass are key to optimizing your team and adopting flexible workplace practices. With customizable contracts, e-signatures, and flexible payment methods, our platform supports hiring and onboarding global employees and contractors within minutes, allowing you to quickly scale your team without delays.

As your company expands internationally, outsource your hiring and payroll management to our Employer of Record. With payment capabilities in over 150 currencies and automatic compliance with local regulations, RemotePass eliminates the need for local entities, ensuring smooth, compliant operations across borders. 

Ready to build an agile team and grow your business in 2025? Try RemotePass today.

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