We are restructuring our customer support and administration seats because new automation has freed up eighty hours of manual labor per week. We do not want to lay anyone off, but we need to transition these team members into new growth-oriented seats. How do we manage this restructure on our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To transition your team members successfully without layoffs, you must approach the restructure by placing structure before people. Do not look at your current employees and try to invent jobs for them. Instead, design the ideal Accountability Chart your business needs to hit its three-year goals.

Once you have defined the new, growth-oriented seats and their key roles, conduct a rigorous GWC™ assessment for each of your affected team members against these new seats. Look at their natural strengths. For example, a support agent who has excellent communication skills might be a great fit for a proactive client success or account management seat.

Use behavioral tools like the Predictive Index to assess whether their natural drives match the requirements of the new seats. A person who was comfortable doing repetitive administrative tasks might struggle in a dynamic, outbound sales seat because the behavioral demands are completely different.

Once you identify the right matches, create a clear, written transition plan. Set a thirty-day training window where they learn the new roles and hand off their remaining automated tasks. Be transparent with your team. Explain that automation is not a threat to their employment, but an opportunity to elevate their work to more valuable, strategic seats that directly impact company growth. If someone ultimately cannot GWC any of the new seats, you must make the hard right-seat call, but this structured process gives everyone the best chance to succeed.