Key takeaways

• Human performance — the mutually reinforcing cycle of business and human outcomes — shows that instead of prioritizing business issues at the expense of human outcomes, organizations should take a human sustainability approach to improve outcomes for workers, customers, and society more broadly. 
• Most leaders understand that focusing on human performance is key to building thriving organizations, but they need to close the gap between knowing that issues should be addressed and doing enough to make meaningful progress. 
• Organisations should evolve beyond outdated constructs for our boundaryless world. By leveraging different data sources and technology, they can find new ways to measure and enhance human performance, building human capabilities at scale to take advantage of technologies like Generative AI.  

Why this research matters

Deloitte’s annual “Global Human Capital Trends” report has its finger on the pulse of the most pressing issues for organizations, leaders and workers. The 2024 report, “Thriving Beyond Boundaries: Human Performance in a Boundaryless World,” identifies seven trends that showcase how a combination of business and human outcomes plays a role in organizational success. This year’s analysis reveals that organizations making meaningful progress on these key issues are nearly twice as likely to achieve desired business and human outcomes.

Survey methodology

Deloitte’s “2024 Global Human Capital Trends” survey polled 14,000 business and human resources leaders across many industries and sectors in 95 countries. In addition to the broad, global survey, Deloitte supplemented its research this year with worker- and executive-specific surveys to represent the workforce perspective and uncover where there may be gaps between leader perception and worker realities. The survey data is complemented by over a dozen interviews with executives from some of today’s leading organizations.