When your company’s meal ticket disappears overnight

It’s a frightening scenario for a business — a key product or service is undermined almost overnight by a technological development, throwing the organization’s bottom line into uncertainty, along with its workforce. 

However, HR leaders can respond to disruptive changes in the market by defining capabilities precisely, building change readiness, and making people more agile by moving them through adjacent opportunities quickly, according to Krista Pell, Chief People Officer at Trimac Transportation in Calgary. 

“For us, it's really about reframing that workforce — how do we redeploy, how do we teach, and where do we stay in advance of technology in order to deliver those products?” she says.

Drop in value and market share

Cloud-based user interface and user experience design company Figma’s shares fell sharply in January 2026 — 31 per cent that month and nearly 80 per cent from its high of $142.92 shortly after the company went public in the summer of 2025 — as investors worried that AI could disrupt its business by making it easy to substitute for the web design in which Figma specializes. By late March, the company’s share price dipped to less than $21. 

Cellphone company Nokia is a case study in how quickly a dominant product can be displaced. A leader in the cellphone market for years in the early 2000s, the company’s market share fell from nearly half of the market in 2007 — when Apple introduced the iPhone — to three per cent by 2013, reported BBC News at the time. 

BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) had a similar arc to Nokia. The company was an early developer of the smartphone but, like Nokia, suffered from iPhone and Google Android taking over the market. According to Investopedia, BlackBerry had more than 41 million subscribers worldwide and a stock price of $147 in 2010. Now, the company focuses on enterprise software and had a stock price of about $3.40 as of February 2026. 

A fast drop in value and market share for a company’s signature product due to a shock to its key market can quickly become a people issue — giving HR leaders a challenge as uncertainty takes over a workforce. 

Start with the real work, not legacy job titles 

A morale risk during disruption is that employees feel their work is being redefined without being understood, according to Pell. She says the first step is to name the work based on what people do and what the business needs, focusing on skills not job titles. She points to how the role of truck driver is handled at Trimec.

“Our drivers are not just drivers, they’re truly bulk logistics handling experts,” she says. “Every single time our drivers move product, they're not just leaving a trailer behind, they’re putting product in, moving product, and taking product out, so if you think about advances in technology and the enhancements in safety, that role has changed dramatically.” 

Pell says technology shifts can change roles in ways that require new technical comfort, which can show up as staffing challenges if job definitions don’t keep pace. “It’s not just pull up, attach a tube and off you go — it’s really about critical capabilities that are required, and so therefore our drivers have to move with the shift in technology.”  

In disruption, that clarity can support morale by making change specific: what’s different, what skills matter, and what support will be offered, according to Pell. 

Build foresight into operations, then translate it into workforce plans 

When market swings are driven by fears like those faced by Figma investors, leaders may not control the narrative but they can control preparation. Pell describes building structured ways to see emerging change through clients and technology. 

“We need to stop looking at those defined roles in the organization and start looking at capabilities in the organization, and how do we move those capabilities ahead," she says.

Pell looks at it as moving from “preserve to prepare” — not getting attached to legacy roles and making sure people are ready for things that are coming. 

“One of the things that we host for our clients that helps give us the look ahead for our operations is what we call an Innovation Summit,” says Pell. “Where we bring in emerging technology that may be appropriate for bulk transportation and get an understanding of how our clients are looking at it, which then helps us to prepare our workforce and our operations — so if they're talking about a change in their technology, the expectation is that, in whatever time frame it is, our workforce is going to need to match that.” 

Pell’s organization also attends client conferences to understand what they’re doing and looking ahead to, she adds. 

Change readiness a daily capability 

A proactive culture of preparation can provide earlier signals for skills planning and help reduce last-minute retraining when a sudden shift in the marketplace upends an organization’s key product line, says Pell. 

Nokia’s initial success led to an “era of complacency” that left it exposed to sudden upheaval, according to BBC News. Pell says readiness has to be built intentionally so employees expect evolution and can absorb it. “We’ve prioritized change readiness across our entire organization,” she says. “Not just, ‘We're going to be change managers,’ but really, what is it you need to do and how do you observe that something's going to change?” she says. 

For HR leaders, this can reduce morale shocks by normalizing adaptation before a crisis, adds Pell. 

It’s about the role, not the person 

When core work is undermined, HR has to balance honesty about role changes with pathways for people to stay employed, says Pell, adding that job architecture can ground those conversations. “In the last year, we’ve gotten very crisp on what we call our job architecture, and it’s about the role, not the person, full stop,” she says. “It’s about the capabilities required in the role.” 

In disruption, that framing can support morale by clarifying that decisions are tied to role needs and capability requirements, and this clarity can also make the message about legacy roles disappearing more direct, she says. 

“We need to determine the skills, capabilities, and experiences required by role, and that allows us to have some individual conversations about ‘This role no longer exists, these are the skills and capabilities required in this role,’” says Pell. “You can align culturally about improving capabilities so that people can be successful, but it also means that, in some cases, we've had to move people within the organization back to a role that they have the capabilities for.” 

Promoting agility by addressing skills gaps, adjacent skills 

Pell says that approach has allowed her team to prioritize the development priorities for the organization and identify skill gaps and where the workforce needs to become more agile in the face of change. 

“How we look at that is, what are the adjacent skills where we can move people, and then what are the redeployable opportunities for those individuals?” says Pell. “Adjacent may not be a perfect fit, but that's where you get a really good cross-environment experience.” 

When a company takes a hit to a key revenue stream or product, it may be difficult to recover. The best thing HR can do is ensure the workforce is as agile and skills-focused as possible before it happens, says Pell. “There’s a famous quote that says, ‘If you aren't evolving, you're dying’, and we’re constantly innovating,” she says. “The minute something is created, it's old, and there's always someone ahead of you in creation, so it's incumbent on HR practitioners and leaders to be aware of what’s happening within their industry so that they’re constantly evolving.”