Decisions that echo
Amid eroding trust and accelerating technology, board decisions reverberate beyond the organization. The question is whether those decisions will strengthen society—or strain it.
We are living in a moment when confidence in institutions—public and private—is eroding at an unprecedented pace.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that 61% of people globally now feel a moderate or high sense of belief that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests. Only 36% believe the next generation will be better off.1 Inside organizations, trust is faltering as well: According to HP’s 2025 Work Relationship Index, which surveyed workers across 14 countries, only 16% of knowledge workers trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for their people—a double-digit drop in one year.2
Even foundational narratives are cracking: A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows that 70% of Americans believe that the “American Dream”—the idea that hard work reliably leads to upward mobility—was never real at all.3
These statistics are signals that the relationship between people, institutions, and work is under strain. They may also hint at something more profound: that the decisions of leaders, organizations, and boards now reverberate far beyond corporate walls. The boundaries between business decisions and societal consequences are becoming more porous, and major decisions now land not just on balance sheets, but also on communities, institutions, families, and the fabric of civic trust.
At a time when confidence is slipping and norms are shifting, leaders and boards are faced with an important question: What future are they building—by design or by default—for the people their organizations affect?
The expanding mandate of the board
In the introduction to the 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, we described the shift organizations are experiencing from navigating tensions in the worker-organization relationship (which we explored in our 2025 report) to confronting tipping points—moments at which inaction is no longer an option.
The statistics cited above are evidence that leaders and boards are quickly reaching that tipping point. Those that look beyond traditional governance and bottom-line oversight to consider their broader impacts can transform their organizations and also the ecosystems around them. But those that ignore wider implications risk more than reputational damage. They risk real legal, financial, and strategic consequences—and more importantly, they risk doing harm.
This is why human sustainability—the degree to which an organization creates value for people as human beings—matters so deeply now. Human sustainability is not simply about worker well-being or productivity, but whether individuals leave their work with stronger skills and employability, better health, and a deeper sense of belonging and purpose. It is about whether the organization contributes to human flourishing.
Traditionally, boards have focused on strategy and vision, leadership and talent, financial performance, risk and compliance, governance and legal oversight, and stakeholder engagement. These responsibilities remain essential. Historically, board decisions have been oriented toward protecting the interests of the organization and its financial stakeholders. But boards should have a heightened awareness that any decision they make can have an impact on broader societal outcomes, such as:
- Health and well-being: The mental, physical, and social health of people, including happiness, sense of purpose, and meaningful work; whether work enriches their lives or erodes it; and whether communities gain meaning and connection or experience stress and isolation
- Labor market health: The ability of the workforce to grow and adapt—or to fragment into those with the right capabilities and those without—as obstacles arise to deploying skills and trustworthy employment practices, all influenced by whether technology bridges opportunity gaps or widens them
- Truth and trust: The degree of transparency organizations maintain, the integrity of their data and the workforce’s access to it, and the public’s ability to believe in what both leaders and algorithms communicate
- General economic health: The overall state and performance of the economy and whether business contributes to sustainable economic growth through broad prosperity and financial security
Each of this year’s human capital trends identifies the tipping points where leaders have the opportunity to influence organizational outcomes. Here, we turn to a different question: How might those choices influence broader societal outcomes, and how can those outcomes in turn impact the business? The impacts can be subtle or profound. Below, we explore the questions each trend raises that can shape whether organizational choices strengthen or strain the societies around them.
The decisions ahead: How today’s choices shape the future
Across this year’s trends, boards face decisions that can ripple beyond the walls of their organizations. Choices made now—large and small—can accumulate into vastly different futures. For each trend, we’ve identified an immediate question that most boards tend to ask now regarding their business, and a longer-term question that considers potentially outsized impacts both within and beyond their organization.
Getting human and machine relationships right
Today’s question:
How do we realize the returns on our AI investments?
Long-term considerations:
Without positive, intentional design of human and machine interactions, organizations can hollow out empathy, nuance, and contextual judgment. But when organizations design healthy human and machine relationships, it can become a force multiplier, deepening innovation and preserving the dignity of human experience in the work.
Fact or fabrication? AI is blurring the line when it comes to people and work
Today’s question:
How do we protect our data and prevent intrusions into our systems?
Long-term considerations:
Synthetic data and algorithmic manipulation can drive flawed strategy, alienate top talent, and erode stakeholder confidence. At scale, these fractures can extend to markets and institutions, fueling a crisis in which truth becomes contested. Strong data governance driving transparency, accuracy, and accountability can preserve institutional legitimacy, market efficiency, and the ability of both human and algorithmic decision-makers to operate from a shared foundation of truth.
AI and the future of human decision-making
Today’s question:
Do we clearly define accountability for AI decisions?
Long-term considerations:
Unchecked decision-making by machines amplifies already imperfect decision-making and can threaten trust. Yet, with deliberate governance and ethical oversight, AI can extend human capability, enabling faster, more consistent, and data-rich decisions without surrendering human agency.
Dealing with AI’s cultural debt
Today’s question:
Do we have the right culture for our organization to thrive?
Long-term considerations:
AI will influence our culture whether or not we are intentional about it. A culture mediated by technology without intention becomes hollow—undermining belonging, creativity, and well-being. Over time, disengagement and social isolation can corrode collaboration, trust, and even civic cohesion. However, when intentionally guided, AI and digital tools can be harnessed to enhance connection and inclusion, strengthening the social fabric of organizations and communities.
The orchestration advantage
Today’s question:
Are we confident that the organization has the necessary talent, infrastructure, and operational capacity to achieve our strategic objectives?
Long-term considerations:
Organizations that fail to align capabilities with meaningful strategic advantage risk becoming fast followers—moving quickly but without purpose. Talent disengages and feels untethered, inequities widen, and speed replaces substance. But when speed is intentionally combined with purpose, trust, and strong human capability, organizations build resilience and prosperity is shared rather than extracted.
Have organizational functions outlived their function?
Today’s question:
Are our functions designed to meet the needs and pace of the business, while delivering at a lower cost?
Long-term considerations:
If corporate functions blur and roles evolve haphazardly, organizations risk creating bureaucratic confusion and losing the very expertise that sustains quality and trust. By contrast, deliberate evolution enables professions to unlock new opportunities while still remaining credible stewards of their domain expertise, ensuring that progress continues to be guided by wisdom, integrity, and public trust.
Staying relevant in a world that won’t sit still
Today’s question:
Do we possess the leadership, talent, and workforce capabilities to compete and adapt in an environment of accelerated change?
Long-term considerations:
If the workforce fails to evolve as conditions change, organizations may face widening skill gaps and stagnant productivity, while workers face mounting social and economic exclusion. Workers left behind risk long-term employability challenges, deepening divisions between the digitally fluent and those excluded from opportunity. Organizations that commit to continuous reskilling and curiosity build more creative, resilient teams—capable of growing with technology rather than being displaced by it.
Near-term actions for long-term impact
Underscoring the long-term questions in each of this year’s trends are two foundational questions that will likely shape the future of work for many years to come.
- How will value and opportunity be distributed among individuals and organizations?
- What is our human advantage? What remains uniquely human and how will we preserve and elevate these qualities?
Answering these questions will take time. But boards can begin laying the groundwork now, revisiting structures, expectations, and practices to help ensure decisions made today align with the future they hope to create.
In addition, boards can make commitments that help bridge the gap between the future they hope to see and the decisions they make today—commitments that anchor governance in human sustainability and responsible progress.
- Ensure executive teams have what they need to act on the immediate questions raised in each trend. This means going beyond simply surfacing issues and empowering leaders to address them by providing clarity, resources, decision rights, and cross-functional support.
- Actively engage with the long-term considerations, using them as a lens for all decisions. Make conversations about human advantage, accountability, trust, and societal impact a recurring feature of board deliberations, ensuring that long-term implications are considered alongside short-term results.
- Extend influence beyond organizational boundaries through consortia, community partnerships, educational alliances, and public-sector collaboration. The ripple effects of organizational decisions are unavoidable; collaboration helps ensure those ripples move society forward.
Stewarding a more human future
Technologies like AI will continue to evolve, but they are only part of the story. The future will likely be defined not by the technology we adopt, but by the judgment, values, and courage we bring to the decisions ahead. As boards increasingly find themselves in roles of greater influence, now is the time to ask difficult questions, widen the lens, and make choices that serve both organizational performance and human sustainability.
The human advantage remains real and irreplaceable. The question now is whether leaders will use that advantage to shape a future that elevates people, strengthens institutions, and rebuilds trust. And that work begins with the choices we make today.
Methodology
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends worked in collaboration with Oxford Economics to survey more than 9,000 business and human resources leaders across many industries and sectors in 89 countries. In addition to the broad, global survey that provides the foundational data for the Global Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte supplemented its research with worker-, manager-, and executive-specific surveys to uncover where there may be gaps between leader and manager perception and worker realities. The survey data is complemented by more than 50 interviews with executives and subject matter experts from some of today's leading organizations. These insights helped shape the trends in this report.
by
Julie Duda
Sue Cantrell
Yves Van Durme
Brad Kreit
Corrie Commisso
The authors would like to recognize the expertise of the following team members who contributed their insights and perspectives: Jennifer Steinman, Elizabeth Faber, Emma Codd, and Bec Worthington.
Special thanks to Catherine Gergen for her heavy involvement in the development of this chapter.
Editorial: Corrie Commisso, Hannah Bachman, Pubali Dey, Cintia Cheong, Anu Augustine, and Stacy Wagner-Kinnear
Design: Molly Piersol, Alexis Werbeck, Govindh Raj, Guido Agüero Gonzalez, and Sylvia Chang
Audience development: Atira Anderson and Maria Martin Cirujano
Knowledge Services: Vanapalli Viswa Teja