Gartner has revealed nine workplace predictions that HR leaders will need to take action on this year and beyond to ensure their organisation remains competitive, can attract and retain top talent, and achieve desired business outcomes.
“This year’s predictions address three key challenges executives must tackle in 2025: New demands for a future-ready workforce, the evolving role of managers and leaders and emerging talent risks to organisational strategy,” says Emily Rose McRae, senior director analyst in the Gartner HR practice.
The top nine predictions for HR leaders are:
New Demands for a Future-Ready Workforce
1 – Expertise Gap Intensifies as Retirements Surge and Tech Disrupts
In 2025, the largest ever proportion of the global workforce is reaching retirement age, draining organisations of their most experienced employees at an accelerated rate. Simultaneously, technology has upended the relationship between expert and novice employees across industries. Employees also report a lack of hands-on training; a May 2024 Gartner survey of 3,375 employees found that six in 10 said they aren’t getting the on-the-job coaching they need to support their core job skills.
To address this urgent threat to the expertise pipeline, organisations will begin to embrace collective intelligence: technology-supported capabilities to ensure that knowledge can easily flow between experts who have skills and novice employees who need skills.
2 – Organisations Redesign to Prepare for Technological Innovation
CEOs are focused on growth in 2025 with many citing technology, and AI specifically, as a significant facilitator. While generative AI solutions have not delivered on their promised productivity impact yet, the lackluster results have shown the inherent and intractable barriers of current organisational structures to the adoption of new technological innovation.
This year, executives will make substantive changes to how their organisations operate – creating flatter, less hierarchical organisations, centralising corporate functions to reduce duplicative work and create consistency, and investing in agile learning practices for fusion teams.
3 – Nudgetech Experiments Bridge the Widening Communication Gap
The current and future workforce comes with a wide array of cultural norms, disability accommodation needs, and increasingly varied expectations around communication, many of which are not compatible. Conflict among employees is escalating and, along with a growing professional communication gap, is preventing collaboration and innovation.
To restore effective collaboration and cohesion, leading companies will experiment with nudgetech, an emerging set of AI-powered tools, in 2025. For example, organisations can utilise AI to prompt employees to use email rather than text based on a particular client’s preferences, remind managers of their direct reports’ working styles, or generate custom communication tips.
“By offering hyper-personalised nudges with clear explanations for why the changes are recommended, nudgetech creates a double benefit of improved communication and increased behavior change,” said Kaelyn Lowmaster, Director in the Gartner HR practice.
Evolving Role of Leaders and Managers
4 – Employees Embrace Bots Over Bosses in the Pursuit of Fairness
The use of AI in performance management continues to be debated, but demand for AI in performance management is coming from an unexpected place – employees. An October 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees found that 87% of employees think that algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers right now. A June 2024 Gartner survey of more than 3,300 employees revealed that 57% believe humans are more biased than AI when it comes to making compensation decisions.
In addition to injecting increased objectivity into the workplace when done right, organisations that leverage automated technology can take some challenging tasks off managers’ plates. Managers will still finalise major decisions, as the human in the loop verifying and validating the bots’ recommendations. For more everyday activities such as in-the-moment performance feedback, bots are likely to take on an increasing share of managers’ tasks.
5 – Organisations Define Fraud vs Fair Play When It Comes To AI
AI companies are actively marketing their tools as a workplace competency filter – a way for employees to make their efforts appear highly productive and impactful to their managers and colleagues.
Organisations will need to determine new ways to define and reward high performance as it becomes harder to differentiate employees whose work quality stems from their own efforts from those who are reliant on AI. HR will need to develop clear guidelines on the AI-generated work that is and is not acceptable. They must train managers to recognise when employees are relying too much on AI and to intervene appropriately.
6 – Organisations Shift Focus to Inclusion and Belonging with Unexpected Benefits
Throughout 2024, DEI initiatives faced increasing politicisation and scrutiny, creating considerable anxiety for executives.
In 2025, most organisations will not drop their DEI ambitions. However, they will shift their investments towards fostering greater inclusion and belonging for all employees, rather than focusing primarily on representation and underrepresented talent.
Workforce diversity will become a key consequence of successful inclusion and belonging programs, rather than the center of attention. With this pivot, organisations will be able to maintain or enhance their workforce diversity while improving talent outcomes and innovation via increased inclusion and belonging.
Emerging Talent Risks to Organisational Strategy
7 – AI-First Organisations Will Destroy Productivity in Their Search for It
AI-first organisations are making organisational and strategic changes based on the short-term, next-quarter potential for GenAI while discounting long-term considerations. These neglected longer-term effects can include increased work friction, the need for new role design and workflows, barriers to adoption, and more.
This year, progressive organisations will take an employee-centric lens that puts people at the center and technology features second. Using this lens, HR leaders can help leaders prioritise AI deployments and execute implementations successfully based on what employees need to be more productive and innovative. When organisations take a human-first approach to AI, employees are 1.5 times more likely to be high performers and 2.3 times more likely to be highly engaged.
8 – Loneliness Becomes a Business Risk Not Just a Well-being Challenge
Loneliness has been classified as a public health crisis. Loneliness isn’t just a well-being risk, it’s an acute business risk – when employees are lonely their engagement levels lag and their performance suffers.
Organisations will take steps in 2025 to mitigate loneliness as they would any other business risk, starting with targeting interactions within the workforce by identifying key collaboration needs and reinforcing a new, more human-centric set of collaboration norms. The push to mitigate the business impacts of loneliness can also extend to when employees are off the clock.
9 – Employee Activism Drives Adoption and Norms for Responsible AI
In the absence of organisational, government or vendor action, employees are stepping up to shape the norms of human-technology collaboration themselves.
This year, organisations will see continued employee activism driving the adoption of Responsible AI principles. Progressive organisations will embrace this, co-creating their AI strategy and values with employees, including crowdsourcing AI use cases directly from employees before deciding which capabilities to pilot and incorporating multiple avenues for collecting and evaluating employee feedback.