Human Capital Trends Report 2025
TURNING TENSIONS INTO TRIUMPHS
Helping leaders transform uncertainty into opportunity
- Our 2024 Human Capital Trends report, Human Performance in A Boundaryless World, set the stage and introduced the need for organizations to focus on human and business outcomes.
- Our 2025 report evolves this thinking by focusing on the complex tensions and choices leaders need to navigate in order to unleash human performance.
A Bit About The Report
- 13,000+ survey respondents, including 2,000+ executives across 93 countries
Do you want to know more and interact with experts and peers on this year’s trends? Then join us on June 12th in Rotterdam!
Click the link below to register. There are only limited spots for an exciting program including:
- Deloitte subject matter experts elaborating on four selected trends:
- When work gets in the way of work
- AI is revolutionizing work
- New tech. New work
- Reinventing performance management processes won’t unlock human performance
- A client speaking on their reflections of the HC trends 2025
- Break-outs in which you can interact and align with Subject Matter Experts and peers related to each trend
This year we offer a special reason to join us on the 12th of June.
We will award to one of the visitors a free-of-charge assessment of their people strategy based on the Human Capital Trends 2025, including a report-out workshop.
If you want to be in for a chance, register now!
Overview
To achieve human performance, leaders must navigate a multitude of tensions. Navigating these tensions isn’t about picking a side. It’s about finding a balance, recognizing sometimes both can be achieved at the same time.
- Augmentation vs. Automation
- Personalization vs. Standardization
- Agility vs. Stability
- Outcome vs. Output
- Empowerment vs. Control
- Potential vs. Predictability
The vital role of leaders in this year’s trends:
- Given these tensions and organizations and workers facing constant change, leaders must continue to evolve. The key is embracing the idea that human performance isn’t a zero-sum equation between human and business outcomes.
- Leading only for business outcomes isn’t leadership: it’s an algorithm. Leading only for human outcomes isn’t leadership either: it’s conservatorship.
This year’s report aims to help leaders gain traction amidst the tensions across three key dimensions:
- WORK | How things get done
How do I ensure the right work is being done, and in an optimal way? - WORKFORCE | Who’s doing the work and how we support them
How do I access, develop, and motivate the necessary workforce? - ORG & CULTURE | The structure and practices that unlock performance
Do I have the right organization and culture to enable performance?
Four most relevant trends for the Netherlands
Trend 1: When work gets in the way of work
Reclaiming organizational capacity
Overview
- How do I unlock worker capacity, and how should it be used? There’s little doubt that “busy” is an accurate description of what workers are currently feeling. New tools meant to increase productivity and efficiency often add new layers of complexity as well. As current efforts to rethink unnecessary or nonessential work appear to be falling flat, how can leaders and workers come together to reclaim organizational capacity for net new work, improved well-being, and improved responsiveness to market changes and challenges?
Key Statistics
Trend 2: AI is revolutionizing work
You need a human value proposition for the age of AI
Overview
- Do I need to update our employee value proposition for an AI-powered world, and if so, how? Organizations will need to think through the ways they can help their people thrive in a world where AI is reshaping work and how we do it. An organization’s employee value proposition (EVP)crystallizes the reasons people come to an organization and stay with it. Revising the EVP for a new, AI world of work will likely be essential to realizing both human and business outcomes. An updated EVP for the world of human and machine collaboration can account for those changes and support a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship between organizations and their workers.
Key Statistics
Trend 3: New tech. New work
Your old value case isn’t enough
Overview
How do I get more value out of work and workforce technology? Deciding whether to invest in technology and which technologies to choose used to be a relatively straightforward process for organizations. Today, however, many new technologies promise to augment human capabilities—offering potential that may outweigh the predictability delivered by previous generations of tech. In the face of a changing tech and work landscape with a myriad of new work and workforce technologies emerging daily, leaders likely need a new calculus to identify the metrics, approaches, and governance needed to create a value case that will realize human and business outcomes. In short, they need a new value case for tech.
Key Statistics
Trend 4: Reinventing performance management processes
Reinventing performance management processes won’t unlock human performance. Here’s what will
Overview
- Why doesn’t performance management work? For years, headlines have made clear how much workers and their leaders dislike performance management, largely because they think it is ineffective. The real issue is that we are expecting too much from the performance management process. We look at it as the primary driver of human performance. However, many things must happen to drive human and business outcomes in today’s complex world of work, more than a single human resources process can achieve. Relying on a single process to drive human performance is just unrealistic.
Key Statistics
