The last few years have been characterized by constant change, uncertainty, and upheaval. But 2024 marked the year when HR teams emerged from the storm more agile, adaptable, and prepared to face what lies ahead.
As we gaze into HR’s crystal ball for the coming year, we see some new challenges — and some familiar ones. Support, development, and innovation will be critical to navigating the year ahead as organizations begin to restabilize after years of disruption. But with the right strategies from our experts, HR teams can get the jump on what’s coming.
1. Growth will be central to engagement strategy in 2025.
As yet another turbulent year wraps, employees are still feeling the effects of living — and working — in a world where uncertainty and instability reign. Reigniting employees’ sense of purpose and agency is critical to keeping employee satisfaction and motivation high.
This is exactly why 2025’s employee engagement flavor is all about supporting employees through growth and development.
In our 2025 State of People Strategy Report, we asked HR professionals which strategies they could implement to increase employee engagement, aside from increasing compensation. Learning and development (L&D) initiatives topped HR’s list, with career pathing and setting clear performance expectations following suit. This shows that HR professionals recognize the need to prove the organization’s investment in their long-term employee retention.
Jessica Zwaan, chief operating officer of recruitment process outsourcing provider Talentful and author of Built for People, noted that HR leaders looking to leverage employee growth as part of their engagement strategy must focus on its impact across the hire-to-retire employee lifecycle.
“For current employees, well-defined career paths can reduce attrition by providing visibility into growth opportunities, and investing in these programs with demonstrations of ‘quick wins’ will be really important to make them work,” she said. “But organizations may struggle to leverage career development programs as an attractive alternative to higher compensation when competing for talent in an environment where so many people feel disillusioned about workplace security.”
In 2025, HR teams can support employee growth by:
- Providing ample development opportunities to upskill and reskill employees according to growth needs and career aspirations, including training programs, mentorship and reverse mentorship, and role rotation
- Boosting internal mobility as part of broader human resource management efforts to help employees explore new skills, career paths, and opportunities to grow across the organization
- Proactively identifying evolving development needs through continuous performance management processes, including one-on-ones, growth conversations, and performance reviews
2. AI implementation will get more practical and strategic.
We’re a few years into the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution — but despite a little experimentation here and there, HR teams are no further forward than they were in 2023. Globally speaking, AI adoption has stagnated between 2023 and 2024, with 38% of HR teams year over year still informally evaluating where the tech best fits into HR practices.
So, what’s causing this drop-off between assessment and implementation? It could be that HR teams still haven’t found the right use cases yet.
But our research did unearth a few clues as to what is working. The 15% of teams that have adopted generative AI are mostly using it in a task-based capacity, such as writing job descriptions, performance reviews, and employee handbooks. And most HR professionals reported that the outcomes met their expectations.
Yet teams that are implementing AI in an analytical capacity — like highlighting biases in decision-making or predicting opportunities for promotion — were the most likely to report it exceeded their expectations.
“The task-based approach is a great place to start collaborating with AI and lose the fear,” said Hernan Chiosso, HR innovation principal consultant at ProductizeHR and director of technology at the National Human Resources Association. “There are many HR activities that are repetitive and predictable — such as compensation reviews, some parts of the hiring process, and formal onboarding and offboarding processes. These are the best candidates to work on first. But you have to go beyond that to really get value.”
As pressure mounts from business leaders for HR to drive process efficiency and a return on investment, 2025 will be the year HR teams gain confidence in using the technology and identifying which use cases have the biggest impact.
Getting there requires an equal blend of the right skills and understanding, tech infrastructure, and HR strategy. HR teams will also need to move away from using AI to complete single tasks to a systems-based application, such as optimizing workforce planning by using predictive analytics to highlight upcoming job roles and skills gaps.
But the golden rule to leveraging AI successfully, said Chiosso, is mapping use cases to tools, rather than the other way around.
“Don’t think in tools, think in use cases,” he advised. “Consider the whole spectrum of AI implementation. Don’t just ‘do AI,’ understand the cost, the effort required to implement it, and put measures in place to understand whether you’re getting the intended ROI.”
Chiosso said HR teams can embed AI by:
- Mapping HR practices to identify where you can make quick wins with automation or augmentation — think high-volume, repetitive processes
- Integrating and validating sources of data used to power AI analytics, including data from your HRIS, people analytics, engagement, hiring, and performance management platforms
- Upskilling the HR team with fundamental AI-adjacent competencies, including critical thinking, basic statistics, and analysis generation, and using AI-enabled HR technology
- Setting best practices and governance to create ethical, safety, and fairness guidelines for how AI is used in HR processes
3. Manager support will be a leading indicator of organizational success.
Every organization’s success hinges on its managers. Engaged managers mean engaged employees — which ultimately means a high-performing team. The trouble is, managers are feeling overburdened and overstretched.
The reason? Constant change. According to our report, almost a third (30%) of managers feel overwhelmed, with 10% feeling that burnout is starting to catch. Burned-out managers cited shifting company priorities, change management for direct reports, and change fatigue as the main drivers behind their overwhelmed state.
The good news is that HR can have an impact here to support managers’ mental health and make sure they have the resources to extinguish the sparks of burnout. Our data found that when HR is able to meet all of their managers’ needs, it increases manager retention and team connection. Critically, managers are also more likely to feel fully engaged and energized, boosting not only their own performance and job satisfaction but that of their team, too.
“It’s critical, and too often overlooked, to analyze the wellbeing and efficacy of frontline management in your organization,” said Ciara Lakhani, principal and chief people officer at Elevate People, an organization offering executive coaching and HR consulting. “Survey data can be a great start, in addition to analyzing data from your HRIS, such as managers’ spans of control, and the number of management layers in the company.
“But longer term, company programs that provide support will need to go beyond that to ensure that each manager has the appropriate resources, bandwidth, and truly owns their management responsibilities,” she explained. “Many managers feel under-supported and that they need to turn to others in the organization who are often not responsive enough or helpful enough. If the business arms managers with clarity about what they own, the software that gives them the data they need, and internal development and coaching from the people function, they can more fully assume true accountability to deliver effective leadership of a happy and healthy team.”
In 2025, HR teams can support managers by:
- Identifying evolving wellbeing needs and conditions needed to unlock high performance without burning out managers
- Leveraging AI effectively to lighten managers’ workload, including summarizing performance reviews, recording one-on-ones, and generating employee development plans
- Offering tailored coaching to help managers build soft skills and address day-to-day leadership and team needs more effectively
4. Employees will demand greater commitment to DEIB.
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) has been on organizations’ backburner for a while — but this year’s report saw it plummet even further.
In our 2025 State of People Strategy survey, only 15% of respondents said DEIB is a key priority. By comparison, European HR professionals were 2.8 times more likely to put it on their agenda than their US counterparts. And while DEIB goals might be out of sight (and out of budget) for many US organizations right now, it doesn’t mean they’re out of mind for employees.
It’s this uneasy tightrope that HR, alongside other teams across the organization, will need to walk to build trust among employees into 2025.
To get DEIB back on the agenda, efforts need to go beyond increasing workforce diversity and unconscious bias training, and embed throughout the entire employee experience. But it’s not on HR to go it alone — support from the broader people and talent teams will help teams make meaningful progress when budget and resources are limited.
“DEIB isn’t solely an HR or talent acquisition problem,” said Zwaan. “We are two forces which can operationalize some change, but we are really only able to effect the change that leadership gives us space, time, and resources to.
“That said, we have a critical opportunity to bridge the existing gap through concrete actions. Recruitment can serve as the front line of DEIB initiatives by implementing structured practices such as diverse candidate slate requirements, bias-reduced job descriptions, standardized interview processes, and diverse interview panels.” Zwaan continued, “HR can introduce and mechanize bias reduction throughout their systems, such as consistent performance calibration using standardized rating criteria and reminding managers of common biases.”
In 2025, the HR department can get DEIB back on the agenda by:
- Defining metrics across people and talent that highlight meaningful advancements on DEIB — like compensation equity and progression rates of marginalized employees — rather than focusing solely on north star metrics like workforce composition and pipeline diversity
- Increasing DEIB dataflow between core HR platforms and tools, and mapping processes or areas where your organization lacks adequate data
- Standardizing HR processes to improve equity, including hiring manager interview training, performance reviews, and promotion processes
5. Culture will become your organization’s biggest support mechanism.
The last few years might have been hard on organizations, but they’ve been equally tough on employees.
Layoffs are likely to continue into 2025, meaning financial stress and job loss anxiety are still running high. After years of flexible work arrangements, organizations facing tighter productivity and performance margins are increasingly walking back their remote work policies and mandating in-person attendance. Meanwhile, stressors outside of the work environment, including macroeconomic instability, the current political climate, and continuing social unrest only add fuel to the fire.
In this context, company culture isn’t just a warm and fuzzy abstract concept — it’s the foundation that helps organizations provide the support, empathy, and policies to meet their employees’ needs and help them thrive.
“There are a few specific things HR should be doing: Pushing for company policies that are more generous than the state or national minimums,” said Kim Rohrer, founder and principal at Patchwork Portfolio. “Consider your employees' wellbeing alongside product roadmaps and sales cycles — this may be a year when you want to pay extra attention to burnout that's caused by factors outside the workplace.
“What HR leaders have to look at are the tactical realities of their workplaces, and how the larger trends or policy changes will impact things like availability of funds, general movement in the talent market, and employees' mental and financial health,” Rohrer added. “Home in on what, specifically, you’re looking to keep, change, or protect.”
Rohrer said HR teams can boost employee support mechanisms in 2025 by:
- Regularly reviewing data from engagement surveys and performance reviews to understand how new stressors are impacting employee motivation
- Providing employees with an anonymized two-way feedback channel to voice concerns as they pop up
- Revisiting time off policies, as well as remote and hybrid working guidelines, to ensure they are inclusive, non-intrusive, and accommodating of diverse needs, including caregiving, mental wellbeing, and chronic illness
- Providing trauma-informed leadership and mental health first aid coaching to all leaders and managers
Building the Foundations for Success in 2025 and Beyond
As we reflect on the future of HR, we can see a lot of reasons for optimism ahead. A renewed investment in growth and culture will plant the seeds for long-term performance and engagement. AI adoption will start to take off, with HR teams building confidence in finding and embedding the use cases that deliver real value. And if HR is able to get DEIB back on the table, they can win back the long-term trust of their employees.
But the most impactful action HR can take in 2025 is working to strengthen the HR-manager relationship. This foundational pillar of organizational success is the one on which all others rest, governing employee retention, performance, and engagement day-to-day. By introducing more targeted, continuous support mechanisms that acknowledge and respond to managers’ needs, HR can support the rest of the organization to perform at its best.
Hungry for more ideas? Read our 2025 State of People Strategy Report to start planning your best year yet.
