Top HR Focus Areas for 2025 and How to Excel in Them
Strengthen leadership, embed culture and leverage technology to enhance business performance.
HR focus areas for 2025, according to 1,400+ of your peers
From shaping strong leadership to embracing new technology, understand the prioritization of HR initiatives of over 1,400 HR leaders across 60+ countries and all major industries.
Economic shifts, workforce uncertainty and evolving business needs are driving HR’s focus for 2025. Concerns about AI productivity and talent shortages add to the urgency, making leadership development, culture alignment and technology optimization critical areas of focus for the future.
Economic shifts, workforce uncertainty and evolving business needs are driving HR’s focus for 2025. Concerns about AI productivity and talent shortages add to the urgency, making leadership development, culture alignment and technology optimization critical areas of focus for the future.
Key HR Focus Areas
As businesses prepare for the future, HR leaders must redefine their focus to address strategic priorities in 2025 and beyond. Key areas include developing managers, embedding organizational culture, strategic workforce planning, managing change and optimizing HR technology.
1. Leader and manager development
A top HR focus in 2025 is developing leaders equipped to handle growing responsibilities. According to Gartner’s survey, 75% of HR leaders believe managers are overwhelmed, while 70% report their current leadership programs are not preparing managers for the future.
Strategy: Adopt a continuous development model that emphasizes practical learning through real-world challenges. Moving beyond traditional leadership seminars to foster peer connections and embed learning opportunities into daily work allows managers to build stronger leadership skills and prepare for future demands.
2. Organizational culture
Most HR leaders recognize the importance of culture — but aligning the vision with reality remains an HR challenge. Gartner research finds that 57% of HR leaders believe managers do not enforce the company’s culture, while 53% say leaders don’t feel accountable for demonstrating cultural values.
Strategy: To activate cultural values throughout the employee experience, HR leaders must clearly communicate the behaviors that support the desired culture and hold all levels of leadership accountable for demonstrating these values.
3. Strategic workforce planning
Although the labor market has undergone significant shifts, most organizations still rely on headcount-based planning, which limits their ability to anticipate future talent needs. In fact, only 15% of companies engage in strategic workforce planning, leaving a significant gap in HR’s ability to align talent with long-term business goals.
Strategy: Implement a phased, capability-focused approach to workforce planning. By looking beyond headcount, HR can identify the critical skills required to meet future demands and develop strategies to build, buy or borrow talent as needed.
4. Change management
With employees and leaders facing rapid transformations — from shifting work models to new technologies — 73% of HR leaders say their employees are experiencing change fatigue. Additionally, 74% agree that managers are not adequately equipped to lead change, further complicating transformation efforts.
Strategy: Building change management skills among leaders. Identifying internal change influencers can help ease the burden of transformation. Instead of enforcing top-down mandates, empower employees to take ownership of changes to boost engagement and ensure more sustainable outcomes.
5. HR technology
Optimizing HR technology is a growing HR focus as organizations seek to streamline operations and enhance productivity. Yet 55% of HR leaders report their current technologies don’t meet evolving business needs, and 51% cannot measure the ROI of their technology investments.
Strategy: Rather than focusing solely on short-term efficiency gains, invest in technologies that offer long-term value and innovation. Emerging solutions, such as generative AI, have the potential to transform HR operations by streamlining processes, improving decision making and enhancing the employee experience. Implementing user-friendly tools will also increase adoption rates among employees and maximize the return on HR technology investments.
The top HR focus areas for 2025 include developing leaders and managers, embedding organizational culture, strategic workforce planning, managing change fatigue and optimizing HR technology. These priorities reflect the challenges of a shifting workforce landscape and the need for HR leaders to adapt to evolving business needs, implement innovative solutions and prepare for future talent demands. Addressing these challenges will prove critical for organizations seeking to stay competitive and drive long-term business success.
To elevate leadership development, HR leaders should adopt continuous learning models, foster peer connections and provide real-world leadership opportunities. Moving beyond traditional seminars and integrating practical applications into leadership development will help managers build the skills they need to navigate complex business environments.
HR technology is a top HR challenge because many organizations struggle to leverage it for long-term business impact. Fifty-five percent of HR leaders report their HR technology doesn't meet current and future business needs, and many tools are underutilized. To overcome this, HR leaders must adopt technology that enhances efficiency and enables innovation. Generative AI, which can transform HR processes and improve decision making, is one such technology.