Why Workforce Strategy Cannot Be Built After the Business Strategy — Larita Howard, Howard Workforce Strategies

Larita Howard has spent more than two decades working across the functional breadth of HR, from talent and development through to organisational change and integration. That exposure has led her repeatedly to the same conclusion: workforce strategy and business strategy are one conversation, not two. Her experience of transformation and restructuring, including being personally affected by it, has sharpened a view of change as a human transition rather than a design exercise. 

Organisations, she argues, spend considerable time designing a future state and consistently underestimate what it takes to move people into it. Alongside her advisory work through Howard Workforce Strategies, LLC, she runs leadership development sessions for executives, including work on resilience and sustainable leadership, and remains an active participant in peer conversations about the future of work.

Why can workforce strategy not be separated from business strategy?

Larita Howard explains what happens when growth decisions are made without anyone in the room asking what the workforce will need to deliver them.

“Of all the experiences I have had in my career, you really cannot separate workforce strategy from business strategy. The two have to work together, and that has been the missing piece in how organisations grow.

Organisations are challenged with this especially when they are thinking through new strategies, and HR is not brought to the table. If a business says it is going to expand, but nobody is asking what capabilities we need, whether we have the right talent, what roles and leader capabilities are required, and what risks this puts on the workforce, that simply becomes a business strategy risk. You are ready to grow, but you have not looked at what it takes to get there. In any industry, those two things have to be together when the decisions are being made.”

What does it look like when HR shapes the business rather than supports it?

The distinction, Larita Howard argues, begins with commercial literacy and ends with the willingness to speak up.

“Workforce strategy is not something HR develops after the business strategy has been decided. First you have to understand the business. Many people who come into HR understand HR, but they do not understand the industry they are in.

Once you understand the overall strategy, how the business makes money and how it grows, you can integrate that into the strategic work you do and make sure you have a workforce that is viable to support that growth. Whether it is tech, healthcare or manufacturing, if you do not understand how the work impacts the bottom line, you will not be able to foresee where the gaps are or plan for what the organisation needs. It also means being bold enough to speak up about employee experience and say this is the environment we need to create to have a viable future.”

If AI is not a workforce strategy, where should the redesign begin?

Rather than asking where AI can be inserted, Larita Howard starts with the task and works outwards.

“AI should be looked at as a tool. The bigger question is how it changes the work we do. Instead of asking where I can put AI, leaders should start with the tasks we are doing right now, what AI could augment or automate, and how that changes the role and the workflow.

If you have a bad process in place, you have not transformed anything by using AI. You may have just automated a bad process. I like to look at the task first, then the role, then the workflow, then the organisation. AI can research, provide analytic data, draft communications and help prepare for meetings, but it cannot take away empathy, and it does not remove the fact that as a leader I still have to have difficult conversations. You cannot go to court and say the reason you had a conversation with an employee was that AI said that was the best way to say it.

I would never claim it will not eliminate certain roles, but it can also redesign them. Where work is automated, we have the opportunity to redesign jobs so that people spend more time on judgement, relationships, problem solving and creativity. Those are the things that matter to the bottom line, because how you make your people feel translates directly to how your customers feel.”

What is the biggest misconception leaders hold about workforce strategy?

Employee experience, Larita Howard says, is treated as a perk when it is actually the accumulation of everything an employee encounters.

“The biggest misconception is employee experience. Leaders may feel that if they add another perk or another programme, that will fix the overall workforce strategy. But employee experience is a culmination of things. It starts the day the recruiter contacts you, and runs through onboarding, the relationship you have with your leader, how easy it is to get your work done, whether you have career mobility and opportunities to be developed, and whether you feel you are being heard.

You can have wonderful programmes, but if you have a poor relationship with leadership or there is no real path for you to grow, the perks will mean nothing and your culture will suffer. People do not just leave leaders; they leave cultures too. Most organisations have four, possibly five generations working for them, so you have to meet people where they are rather than offering one traditional benefits package. You can have an amazing pension, but if someone walks in saying they do not plan on working for you long enough to retire, you are paying for something that will not matter.”

What do people need most from a leader during uncertainty?

Having worked with leaders through restructuring and major organisational change, Larita Howard points to a need that is rarely named out loud.

“Leaders need support with their own well-being, and that is usually something that is not talked about. We can show them how to grow the business, but taking care of themselves is something we assume they already know how to do. What is missing is giving them permission to do it.

When I talk about filling your cup, I do not mean bubble baths and two weeks in the south of France. I mean asking what it takes for me to lead in a sustainable way. You have to schedule time to reset and rest, because if you do not, your health will force you to, and it will do it at a time that is not convenient for you. Show me a burnt-out leader, and I will show you a burnt-out department, because it is coming right behind it.

Your staff see how you treat others and how you treat yourself, and that determines whether they want to stay. If I have a leader who never takes time off because they feel too busy, I am not sure I am going to take time off either. Work will take what you give it. If you give it your best, it will take that. If you give it your life, it will take that too. Neither is personal, so I would rather give it my best.”

Join the Conversation: The Ortus Club’s Executive Network

As Larita Howard has shown, the questions facing people leaders right now are rarely answered inside a single organisation. Capability gaps, AI-driven job redesign, and the cost of turnover in a cooling market are all problems that look different depending on who you ask, and better once you have asked several people.

Her closing challenge to senior leaders is a question rather than a framework: how are you going to lead people through the transitions ahead? People may not like every decision, but clarity, dignity and the way leaders show up during change leave a lasting impression, and that impression outlasts the market conditions that produced it.

At The Ortus Club, we host curated executive roundtables that bring together senior leaders facing exactly these challenges. Step away from the programmes-and-perks conversation and into the kind of candid peer dialogue that connects workforce strategy to business outcomes.

FAQs Section

Q: Why should HR be involved at the business strategy stage?

A: Because growth plans carry workforce assumptions. Without HR at the table, questions about required capabilities, talent gaps, new roles and leadership readiness go unasked, which turns a workforce risk into a business strategy risk.

Q: Is AI a workforce strategy?

A: No. AI is a tool that changes how work is done. The strategic work is deciding which tasks should be augmented or automated, and how roles and workflows are redesigned as a result. Automating a flawed process transforms nothing.

Q: What actually makes up employee experience?

A: It is cumulative: the recruiter’s first contact, onboarding, the relationship with a direct leader, how easily work gets done, access to development and internal mobility, and whether an employee feels heard. Perks sit on top of that foundation and cannot replace it.

Q: How should organisations think about the cost of turnover?

A: As cost avoidance. Recruiting and retraining a replacement typically costs more than retaining the person, and the shortfall reappears elsewhere: in overtime, in further attrition, or in services the organisation can no longer staff and therefore cannot deliver.

Q: Why does leader well-being belong in a workforce strategy?

A: Because it is visible. Teams take their cues from how a leader treats themselves, and a leader running on empty produces a department running on empty. Sustainable leadership is a taught skill, not an innate one.