The modern workplace continues to evolve at a dizzying pace. HR leaders face mounting pressure to stay ahead of emerging trends while delivering measurable results. As companies navigate economic uncertainty, shifting employee expectations, and rapid technological change, the fundamentals of good people management and a great employee experience remain crucial.
The start of a new year brings the inevitable flood of predictions about what lies ahead. While scanning the horizon can feel overwhelming amid day-to-day demands, understanding key HR trends helps People teams focus their limited resources where they’ll have the most impact.
Predictions by their nature are unpredictable. But as I reflect on 2024 and think about what’s ahead, several themes emerge that will likely shape our priorities and programs in the coming year. These aren’t revolutionary changes but rather evolutionary shifts that build on developing patterns.
The HR trends I’m watching most closely center on how we structure work, support our people, deliver experiences, and harness technology. While every organization’s needs differ, these areas deserve careful attention as we plan for the year ahead.
HR trend #1: Accepting a diversity of work models as the norm
Whenever another large company issues a return-to-office (RTO) mandate, it hits the headlines and spurs more debate around what’s the best approach. I’m hoping we all settle into the reality that we have always had a diversity of work models — the distribution has just shifted for many of us.
Structured hybrid models, where employees follow set office schedules, now dominate at 43% of organizations — more than double the rate from early 2023. (Q4 Flex Index Report)
What that says to me is that companies continue to evolve and determine what works best for them. It’s always been good practice to have the talent strategy and employee value proposition that aligns with your mission and business goals. At times it seems we’ve lost perspective on this reality and reverted to a more binary view of the world — RTO vs. remote.
I hope that 2025 is the year we accept and remember that a diversity of work models is the norm. We need to get on with whatever the right approach is for our business and stop being distracted by headline-grabbing RTO mandates.
Let’s work from our own data and perhaps do our own A/B testing, as this HBR article suggests. What works for one company won’t necessarily be best for another. It’s the Goldilocks principle of finding what is “just right” for you.
Related: Prioritizing employee experience — no matter how or where employees work
HR trend #2: Embracing a wider definition of well-being
It’s debatable when well-being and wellness in the workplace first became a mainstream concept and practice. Was it the early shoots of occupational health many decades ago? Or the heightened attention from the ’90s onwards as healthcare costs spiralled, in the U.S. especially?
Or perhaps around the new millennium, as societal shifts, new technologies and other factors expanded our thinking. Whenever it was, well-being is now a central component of our ability to attract and retain talent and keep them engaged and productive.
For a while now, our definition has expanded beyond physical to social, emotional and career well-being. I think we’ll continue to widen the aperture of what constitutes holistic well-being in the workplace, such as financial well-being, and respond to areas that are becoming more important as wider trends march on.
Social well-being
Social well-being has taken on a different slant as the diversity of work models expands and evolves. Factors like loneliness are on the rise and at risk of becoming a more significant issue if we don’t tackle it.
We need to keep our attention on:
- Building and maintaining meaningful relationships and a sense of belonging
- Encouraging collaboration, team bonding and community engagement
- Reducing loneliness and fostering a strong culture of inclusion
Emotional well-being
The focus on emotional well-being will continue to rise, given the pressures and shifts of the modern workplace. We will need to keep traveling down many of the same tracks.
We’ll need to find creative and cost-effective ways to have a positive impact on things like:
- Developing resilience, self-awarenes and stress-management skills
- Addressing mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression or burnout
- Promoting mindfulness, work-life management, gratitude and psychological safety
Related: 5 strategies to curb employee stress and burnout
Career well-being
We know that career growth and development is a major driver of retention. That’s why I think we’ll pay increasing attention to career well-being.
Our intuition, experience and data tell us there is a link between professional growth, feeling valued and seeing career progress — all of which shapes how we feel. Professional development impacts our sense of worth, our sense of self, and therefore our well-being.
I see the need for greater investment in helping our people in areas such as:
- Finding fulfillment and purpose in their work
- Having opportunities for growth, recognition and skills development
- Ensuring a healthy work-life sustainability and equitable workload distribution
- Engaging in continuous learning and personal growth.
Terms like work-life balance, work-life harmony, or work-life integration have always seemed like misnomers to me. The reality is that we need to find sustainable options and paths for our people. If it’s sustainable, then we will find balance and harmony. We will feel like we can juggle our work with our life, and vice-versa, in a way that’s sustainable for us.
Related: Next-gen employee recognition: The modern talent retention playbook
HR trend #3: Continuation of the DEX-pansion
The integration of technology in every area of our lives continues at an unrelenting pace. With this comes the expansion of digital workplace experiences. I wrote recently about the need to bring a human-centric approach to the great DEX-pansion.
Yet despite all our technology, we struggle to deliver on our digital employee experience. The weaknesses include:
- Lack of awareness and communication: SHRM reported that 58% of employees were unaware of the full extent of benefits offered to them, and 57% feel their HR communications aren’t clear.
- Relevance and personalization: Programs are often perceived as generic and not tailored to individual needs. Employees are more likely to value something that is personalized to them.
- Complexity and overload: Employees report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of information, and managers even more so. This HBR article highlights the need to reduce information overload, which sucks hours a week from our already busy schedules. Communication is too often duplicative, irrelevant, effort intensive and inconsistent. We need to upgrade how we communicate.
- Accessibility issues: Around 70-80% of the world’s jobs are deskless, yet we often underserve these workers and underestimate how disconnected they feel. Even when people have access to tools at work, Simpplr research shows that 41% of employees struggle to navigate the company’s intranet and cite frustrations in finding information.
More than half of deskless workers say that they are burned out, and 43% are either actively or passively looking for a new job. (BCG)
As we work toward expanding our DEX capabilities, we must ensure that we’re not just adding more tools but also creating a truly unified and digital employee experience.
Related: Next in EX: Unifying employee experience technology
HR trend #4: AI in HR: practical applications over the hype
The hype around AI has been huge. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big believer in the potential of AI. In the years before AI went mainstream — arguably in 2023 when generative AI tools like ChatGPT launched — many people forecasted that robots would come for our jobs and the three-day workweek would soon be a reality.
I’m with the more moderate voices like the World Economic Forum. According to its Future of Jobs Report 2020, an estimated 85 million jobs will be displaced, while 97 million new jobs will be created by 2025. We’ll know soon how accurate their forecast is!
The reality is that we can never perfectly predict the future, but we can look to the past. We can be certain this oncoming technology wave will bring new opportunities, change old practices, and require the need for new skills. We can be certain the march of progress will continue and pick up pace as it does.
Whether we consider AI a friend or foe is influenced by how much we’ve used it. According to BCG, 49% of regular AI users believe their job may disappear in the next 10 years, compared to only 24% of employees who don’t use it.
This rings true to our past experiences with change. The anticipation is often worse than the reality.
There’s no doubt that practical applications of AI will increase at a healthy pace. Many of us have started using generative AI to kick-start our writing (yes, I did!), take notes at our meetings, and more.
3 practical steps to leverage AI
As we progress through 2025, we should also focus on practical steps to make the most of AI:
- Scrutinize our software applications for how they leverage AI today and ask our vendors whether innovation is embedded in their roadmap.
- Pay attention to ethical and responsible practices when utilizing all forms of AI. In software selection conversations, I now ask whether vendors have signed up with the Responsible AI Institute or similar organizations.
- Encourage employees to experiment responsibly, learn and grow, as well as embrace the changes AI will effect. We need to be less worried about AI taking over our jobs and more concerned about being replaced by someone with better AI skills.
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” but one thing we can be certain of is that history is a great teacher. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535-475 BCE) is credited with the idea that the only constant in life is change — he was right all that time ago!
So let’s embrace what’s next, stay flexible, keep evolving, and try new things, and we’ll step into futures of our own making.
How Simpplr can support your HR priorities in 2025
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