2025 Global Human Capital Trends

What happens when the world is changing so fast that the decision not to decide puts us at a disadvantage? It's a struggle many leaders face as they make complex choices and decisions to move their organizations forward.Our 2025 Human Capital Trends report aims to help leaders gain traction amidst tensions, exploring key questions about which leaders will likely be expected to make important choices, including:

• How do I ensure the right work is being done, and in an optimal way?
• How do I access, develop, and motivate the necessary workforce?
• Do I have the right organization and culture to enable performance?

How leaders answer these questions—and work to find balance in the tensions they inevitably create— may be the key to an organization's ability to stop waiting and start thriving in today's fast-paced and constantly changing work environment.

As disruption becomes the norm, the traditional sources of stability for workers—static job descriptions, long-term employment, traditional bosses, defined teams, and linear career paths, to name a few—are rapidly falling away. Workers are left without an organizational home from which to act with confidence, creativity, and a dynamic capability to respond and evolve. How can leaders find the right balance between the stability that workers crave and the agility that organizations need?

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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?

Organizations struggle to find talent with the experience they need—just as workers struggle to find early-career roles where they can gain it. This is growing even more challenging as AI takes on entry-level work, apprenticeship models erode in the face of remote work, and organizations seek more varied types of experience. How can we bridge the experience gap?

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping work and the worker-employer value proposition. As workers increasingly collaborate with AI, it is changing the very nature of the workforce experience—often creating silent, unintended impacts such as burnout, loneliness, and increased workloads. How can organizations create a compelling value proposition that supports a mutually beneficial relationship between organizations and workers in an AI-powered world?

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It used to be relatively easy for organizations to decide whether to invest in technology and which technologies to choose. But that's no longer the case. In the face of a changing tech and work landscape with a myriad of new work and workforce technologies emerging daily, leaders need a new calculus to identify the metrics, approaches, and governance needed to create a value case that will realize both human and business outcomes.

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Despite decades of reinvention, most organizations still don't like performance management. While organizations can continue to improve it, the real issue is that we are expecting too much from a single process, looking at it as primary driver of human performance. But unlocking human performance requires moving to a broader, long-term effort to engineer human performance in the flow of everyday work.

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What is the last mile of realizing human performance?

Understanding and capitalizing on what makes the people in your organization tick—at an individual level. Technologies have long been used to influence consumer behavior by tapping into motivations. But most organizations have yet to use similar approaches to understand and tap into motivations of individual workers—the unit of one—to boost performance, innovation, and change.

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For a role under distinct pressure, unlocking value won't come with eliminating the role—or ignoring the need for change. There's a third path: reinvention. As organizations reinvent managers to focus on what matters most—developing people, redesigning work, reallocating resources to drive human performance, and catalyzing agility and strategic problem-solving—AI can help.

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