The top predictions for HR leaders in 2025

Tech disruptions and recruitment surges are just some of the predicted workplace trends that could hit HR leaders in 2025.

Gartner has recently released its top predictions for HR leaders as 2025 kicks off. Using the developments that occurred in 2024, the predictions address key challenges that they believe will arise for HR leaders throughout the year.

“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,” said Emily Rose McRae, senior director analyst, Gartner HR practice.

Several of the predictions are fixated on the continued integration of AI in the workplace. A topic that continues to offer some differing opinions from employees and employers. Some of the predictions are as follows:

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.”

“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.”

Organisations redesign to prepare for 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.”

Employees embrace bots over bosses in the pursuit of fairness: “An October 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees found that 87 per cent 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 per cent believe humans are more biased than AI when it comes to making compensation decisions.”

Organisations define fraud versus fair play when it comes to AI: “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.”

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.”

Loneliness becomes a business risk, not just a wellbeing challenge: “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.”