By Alvin Aloysius Goh, Chief Executive Officer, Singapore Human Resources Institute

I have been in enough rooms this year to know that most HR leaders are exhausted. The fatigue is cumulative: the weight of being pulled in four directions simultaneously, and being told that all four are urgent.

The CFO wants cost reduction now. The CEO wants transformation, ideally within the same budget. Employees want certainty in a job market that AI is visibly reshaping. And the government, well-intentioned as it is, keeps introducing policies that add obligations at the very moment budgets are tightening. The four tensions that define this year: agentic AI disruption, geopolitical fragmentation, the rift between business survival and long-term workforce transformation, and growing government intervention in employment, are the structural conditions of the decade.

Each of these demands is legitimate. All of them are here to stay. And that is precisely the problem with how many HR leaders and business leaders are approaching 2026. Many leaders are still trying to navigate this environment using a familiar lens. It is like trying to move through a dust storm with a pair of goggles, hoping visibility will return.

But the dust is not settling. Leaders can no longer rely on clarity before acting. They need to develop a different capability, something closer to a sensor than a lens. A sensor that detects signals, adapts in real time, and allows movement even when the environment is unclear. That is the shift HR leadership now requires.

How Agentic AI Is Reshaping the Workforce in 2026

In 2025, AI was still being discussed as a copilot, a tool that sat alongside human work and enhanced it. By early 2026, that conversation had moved on without many organisations noticing. Agentic AI, systems that plan, decide, and execute with minimal human oversight, is already managing procurement, routing customer queries, generating financial reports, and scheduling workforces. A single system, running around the clock, can now do what previously required a team.

The entry-level workforce crisis this creates is real and underappreciated. The junior roles that once formed the base of career development in Singapore and globally, where people learnt how organisations actually worked, built relationships, and made mistakes in low-stakes environments, are disappearing faster than we are designing replacements. We talk about reskilling, which is the right conversation. The harder question is what we are reskilling people into, and whether the career infrastructure that once supported early professional development will still exist when we need it.

Designing that transition deliberately is the work. Leaving it to chance is also a choice, and a costlier one.

What Effective HR Leadership Looks Like in a Disrupted Environment

The organisations managing this period well tend to share something in common. Their HR leaders have developed a particular capacity: the ability to hold competing priorities simultaneously and act with purpose across all of them, rather than waiting for a single clear direction to emerge.

This takes more than resilience. It takes a different kind of leadership orientation.

HR leaders and people managers navigating 2026 effectively are operating with clarity of values, making decisions in short 90-day cycles while keeping a longer horizon visible, and staying in active dialogue with the business rather than working in parallel to it. They are also using the disruption itself as an opportunity, moving quickly to redesign roles, access available SkillsFuture funding, and attract talent that competitors are letting go.

At SHRI, we have been developing a framework that tries to name and operationalise these qualities. We call it PiiVOT: Purposeful, Intensive, Interactive, Versatile, Opportunistic, Transient. It began in 2025 as a career navigation tool for individuals facing a disrupted job market. This year, we have expanded it into an HR leadership framework for organisations, because the qualities that help an individual navigate disruption are structurally similar to those that help a leader do the same.

The six principles work together as orientations. Purpose anchors decisions when data points in multiple directions. Intensity is the sustained, disciplined engagement that difficult conditions demand. Interactive is the commitment to remaining in dialogue across every divide, with the C-suite, with employees, with government, because connection is what holds organisations together when the external environment is fragmenting. Versatile is the ability to adapt workforce strategy while keeping organisational direction steady.

Opportunistic is the recognition that every disruption creates openings, and the leaders who spot them early gain ground. Transient is perhaps the most demanding: holding plans lightly enough to change them when conditions shift, while still executing with full commitment in the present.

Accessing Singapore's Workforce Support in 2026

Singapore's Budget 2026 offers up to 70% funding for job redesign through the SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant, and meaningful wage co-funding through the Progressive Wage Credit Scheme. Most Singapore organisations are only partially accessing these resources. The barrier is rarely eligibility. It is more often the administrative complexity landing on HR teams that are already stretched.

That is precisely where the Opportunistic principle applies. The support exists. The organisations that treat government funding as a strategic enabler will come out of this period with stronger workforces and lower transformation costs, and a meaningful advantage in the Singapore talent market.

Easy is no longer a useful benchmark for 2026. The more useful question is whether we are leading with enough purpose, enough agility, and enough willingness to act in the conditions we actually have.

If the future is shaped by constant collisions rather than neat resolutions, then our role is to lead through it with purpose.

The full PiiVOT research paper, including data, detailed strategies, and Singapore-specific policy references, is available here.

Are you ready to PiiVOT?