Among the major challenges HR will face in 2025 is the loss of skills as increasing numbers of older employees leave the workforce; the rise of worker loneliness, which will affect productivity; and the future of DEI. Here, business consultancy Gartner contributors present its predictions.
Gartner has predicted that this year companies will face an expertise gap as the largest ever proportion of the global workforce reaches retirement age. At the same time, employees will increasingly adopt AI to support fair performance management, and the loneliness epidemic will emerge as a critical business risk. In the UK, HR is taking centre stage as the Employment Rights Bill, set to be implemented in 2026, nears finalising.
Meanwhile, a recent survey by Gartner noted that 60% of employees feel they’re not getting enough hands-on training to do their jobs effectively.
To address this, businesses must adopt collective intelligence, and technology-supported capabilities to ensure that knowledge can easily flow between experts who have skills and novice employees who need skills.
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Emily Rose McRae, senior director analyst in the Gartner HR practice, said: “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.”
Gartner’s nine workplace predictions for HR to consider in 2025:
Expertise gap grows
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 needed to support their core job skills.
To address this urgent threat to the expertise pipeline, organisations will begin to ensure that knowledge can easily flow between experts who have skills and novice employees who need skills.
Preparation 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 lacklustre 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 structures.
‘Nudgetech’ could bridge the communication gap
The current and future workforce comes with a wide array of cultural norms, disability 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.
86% of employees think that algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers right now”
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.
Employees embrace bots over bosses
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 86% of employees think that algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers right now. And a June 2024 Gartner survey of a similar sample of 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.
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”
Guidelines on AI-generated work
AI companies are actively marketing their tools as a workplace competency filter – a way for employees to make their efforts appear highly productive 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.
Shift in DEI ambitions
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.
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.
AI: short-term vs long-term
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 centre and technology features second. 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.
Loneliness becomes a business risk
Loneliness has been classified as a public health crisis. Loneliness isn’t just a wellbeing 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.
Employee activism drives responsible AI
In the US and in some respects the UK, an absence of organisational, government or vendor action on AI means employees are stepping up to shape the norms of human-technology collaboration themselves. (The EU is implementing new laws on the use of AI.)
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.
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