Top HR Trends in 2025, According to Gartner 

Temps de lecture : 7 minutes

What trends will shape human resources in 2025? This is the topic Gartner’s latest study explores, and it brings in 1,400 HR managers in over 60 countries. Its aim: to analyze HR priorities for the coming year in order to identify the key points to integrate into their HR strategy. 

Thanks to this study, the institute has identified 5 HR trends for 2025: 

1. Leader and manager development
2. Organizational culture
3. Strategic workforce planning
4. Change management
5. HR technology

Where do all these priorities come from, and why are they important for your organization? How can you integrate them into your action plan? Here are the HR trends to remember to improve agility and resilience of human resources in 2025!

The 3 Challenges Facing Companies in 2025

Before summarizing the HR trends of 2025, it’s important to understand which challenges they address. 

1. Growth Challenges

Growth is at the top of CEOs’ priorities for 2025. To boost growth, companies can leverage digital technologies, resilience, agility, artificial intelligence, and ESG criteria (environmental, social, and governance). However, HR transformation remains the main growth lever forecast for 2025.

2. AI Challenges

It turns out that despite its potential, artificial intelligence (AI) is not so simple to implement in practice. Indeed, 47% of employees who use AI say they don’t know how to leverage it to increase their productivity. A full 77% even claim that AI tools have actually reduced their productivity and increased their workload!

In short, yes, AI can improve productivity in many situations, but only if it’s implemented properly and employees truly know how to use it and in which situations.

3. Talent Challenges

Talent shortages will continue to be a major issue for business leaders in 2025 and beyond. Indeed, according to Gartner estimates, over 85 million jobs are expected to remain unfilled by 2030! 

There are several reasons for this labor shortage, including:

• an aging population: by 2030, one in six people worldwide will be at least 60 years old
• a mismatch between skills employers expect and employees’ genuine actual skills
• candidates’ changing expectations: 62% of them only apply for jobs that meet the majority of their expectations

The 5 HR Trends of 2025

So, how can you continue to attract and retain your top talent, and all the while boost your company’s growth? Here we’re unveiling the five HR trends that are sure to help you overcome these challenges in 2025. 👇

1. Leader and manager development

Developing managers’ skills remains the #1 HR trend in 2025—just as it was for 2024. But here’s the rub: despite major investments in this area, the results aren’t really stellar… Here’s why:

• Managers are assuming more and more responsibilities—both managerial and operational—which in turn brings a heavier workload. This problem is clearly visible, since 75% of all HR managers believe that managers are overwhelmed by the growing complexity of their job requirements.
• Compared to top management, middle managers are not sufficiently trained. An observation shared by 71% of HR managers.
• Current training programs are largely ineffective: just 36% of all HR managers feel they’re preparing managers well for tomorrow’s challenges.

Today’s management training courses often have a top-down format that doesn’t allow interaction among participants.

On the flip side, training courses that include networking and team building can prove far more effective! These programs build bonds among peers, and encourage the sharing of best practices. 

Best Practice Takeaways

To foster your managerial skills in 2025, remember to: 

• split your training programs into several sessions and space them out over time

• alternate learning time with peer exchanges and application time

For an example, look at what London-based OCBC Bank’s training path looks like:

PS: if you don’t have in-house bandwidth, don’t hesitate to use an external service provider, such as Ignition Program.

2. Organizational Culture

One of the HR trends to watch in 2025 is, of course, organizational culture. According to Gartner, a company with a well-established culture can achieve: 

• +63% engagement
• +35% performance
• +25% retention

It is therefore essential that this culture is shared by all! However, disseminating it remains a major challenge for human resources, not least because: 

• an unclear vision: fewer than one in four employees understand their company’s values.
• and a lack of accountability on the part of managers: 53% of HR managers feel that their managers do not feel responsible for spreading the corporate culture.

Best Practice Takeaways

To create a strong corporate culture with which everyone is aligned, you need to: 

• Clarify what the company’s values are and how they translate into day-to-day behavior and working practices. Take Laurentian Bank of Canada, for example, which places autonomy at the heart of its corporate culture. To help its employees understand this value, the bank offers them the opportunity to co-create working methods that encourage greater autonomy. 

• Align your work processes with your corporate culture. Every process should have a clear purpose and be as simple as possible. If it isn’t, it doesn’t have to be. For example, here’s the model Pharmavite uses to streamline its business processes: 

• Give your managers concrete tools to help them spread the corporate culture within their teams. For example, the multinational CMI has created a “culture app” offering examples of behavior to adopt in different situations. 

3. Strategic workforce planning

For the first time, strategic workforce planning is included in the top 5 HR trends of 2025. Today, only 15% of organizations are able to identify the skills they’ll need in more than two years’ time, and build a strategy to reach these goals.

And with good reason: 61% of HR managers say they only plan the headcount they need for the coming year, because: 

• they don’t know how to demonstrate the ROI of their approach (66%)
• they don’t know what skills they need in the long term (58%)
• their managers are not involved in the process (46%)
• they have difficulty using the data available to them (51%)

Best Practice Takeaways

So, how do you anchor workforce planning in a long-term strategy? Follow these tips to find out: 

• Segment the project into stages. Identify which deliverables to achieve, which data to use, which resources you need, and which strategies to activate at each stage, in order to demonstrate optimal ROI.

• Test the approach in a specific department before implementing it throughout the organization.

• Prioritize projects according to their strategic relevance and your ability to complete them successfully.

• Establish shared responsibility by clarifying the objective, resources, and minimum expected results for each project.

4. Change Management

The number of changes taking place within companies has risen sharply in recent years. As a result, 73% of HR managers report change fatigue among their staff.

The warier employees grow with change, the less engaged they become, the less secure they feel at work, the less inclined they are to stay with the company…

The problem here is that managers don’t consider this fatigue often enough, and they’re not sufficiently equipped to lead change with their teams. This explains why 70% of change management projects fail.

Best Practice Takeaways

So how can human resources effectively lead change in 2025? Here are three best practices to keep in mind: 

1. Prioritize changes with three key criteria:
   • the change’s potential impact
   • the value it’ll bring to the company and your stakeholders
   • team resistance to change

2. Encourage managers to develop their team’s resilience and involve them in the initiatives put in place.

3. Rely on a network of ambassadors capable of raising awareness and accelerating the adoption of change. 

Also read: How to Measure the Success of Change Management

5. HR Technology

Although down on last year, HR technologies are still among the HR trends of 2025. Even today, HR often neglects or under-exploits these tools: 

• 55% of HR managers find that the tools they use don’t help them meet their current and future needs.
• 51% are unable to measure any added value from them.
• 47% struggle to take full advantage of their tools due to poor implementation.

The main reason for this is that the majority of companies seek to implement tools before they have even defined their objectives. 

Best Practice Takeaways 

To successfully implement a new HR software, you need to: 

1. Define your objectives and desired results before looking for a new tool. Be careful, however, not to focus solely on the solution’s operational efficiency! 

79% of HR managers believe that the main role of HR tools is to free up teams’ time. This, however, is far from their only role. HR tools can also have an impact on other strategic goals like growth, innovation, agility, productivity, employee experience, and more.

2. Invest in the technologies that can bring you the greatest added value such as tools that can: 

• define roles, responsibilities, and goals throughout your organization (Talkspirit is perfect for this),
• automate redundant, time-consuming tasks with generative AI,
• identify employees’ work preferences.

3. Maximize the added value of your tools by creating trusted partnerships with your software publishers.

A Final Word

This year, your company’s growth will be driven primarily by HR transformation projects focusing on skills development, corporate culture, strategic workforce planning and the implementation of new technologies. To prioritize the HR trends to follow in 2025, you can rely on 3 key criteria: their strategic relevance, their impact and your ability to implement them. 

And make sure you start off on the right foot! Driving change can be very complicated if your organization has a rigid hierarchical structure. So, to make a success of your HR transformations, start by reinventing your organizational model! In other words, rethink the way work is organized, authority is distributed and employees are managed.

Download our white paper to explore alternatives to the hierarchical model, and find out how to put them in place: 👇

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