Key HR trends for 2025

00:03 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Welcome to HR Disrupted with me, lucy Adams. Each episode will explore innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals and challenge the status quo with inspiring but practical people strategies. So if you’re looking for fresh ideas, tips and our take on the latest HR trends, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So, as it’s our last podcast of 2024, we thought it was a good idea to have a look at the key trends for HR for the coming year. And you know, of course, there are tons of areas where HR is progressing and the trends that work for you will depend on the nature of your business, the maturity of your leaders, the maturity of your HR function. But in today’s episode we’re going to look at the key trends that might shape your plans, and I am delighted to be joined by my co-founder and partner in shaking up outdated HR practices, karen Moran. Hi, karen.

01:07 – Karen Moran (Host)
Hi Lucy, I’m actually very excited about this one.

01:12 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Well, because you love change, don’t you? This is true. Yeah, this is somebody listeners who basically changes her room round just for fun. So anyway, yeah, so you’re looking forward to this one.

01:26 – Karen Moran (Host)
I am because and I really feel there’s a bit, there’s a sort of a step change coming um for HR teams, which I think is exciting scary, um, but exciting and I think that this 2025 is going to be the year that, uh, we can ditch the old ways and embrace the new.

01:47 – Lucy Adams (Host)
All right. Well, let’s have a look at some of these trends, and we’re going to start with the first one, which is that AI goes mainstream. All right, we’re going to start with AI, and it’s obviously been a hot topic for several years now, but don’t you think that 2025 is is the year that it kind of finally steps up in HR and becomes just so much more than just a time saver? Yeah, you know it’s about we’re starting to see HR really go beyond the basics and help HR teams and organizations, but HR teams in this context, get more creative and more impactful. Don’t you think that’s the case?

02:30 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I really do, because I think we’ve all obviously already seen the last few years, maybe longer, that it’s been taking over like those kind of admin tasks for us in HR so scheduling interviews or having chatbots that help our people find their policies or advice but I feel like it’s now becoming so much smarter that we can be much more creative with it and it’s almost like finally we’ve got our own personal assistant that can help us really make a difference, not just in the sort of the admin area. So I was thinking about Unilever. So, for example, they’ve been using it in recruitment marketing. So what they do is they use the AI to help them work out what kind of messaging works for different groups of people, so they can kind of really attract their ideal candidates. So I think that’s a really good example of how we can now become marketing experts and it can really help us really think about how we can really sell to, to to candidates.

03:40 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And I think this is where I got. When I first started interacting with AI and I know that you were much further ahead than I was I saw it as like Google, you know, I saw it as something where I would go to for information I would almost write Google type questions into it and and actually that kind of creativity, those idea generation, is something that we can use, and certainly for in the in the marketing world, they’ve been using AI for ages, haven’t they? I know companies like Coca-Cola. They’ve used AI to generate marketing copy. They’ve used it to generate visuals for campaigns. Their AI tools suggest like creative taglines, they optimize visuals for engagement and they even test ad performance before they go live. And you know, this kind of AI driven creativity could easily be applied to creating and drafting engaging internal communications or branding for HR initiatives.

04:48 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve been talking for years about HR needing to become more like marketeers, so finally we’ve got a tool that can help us do that. So I mean IBM. They’re using it now to predict employees that might be thinking of leaving. So their AI tool analyzes patterns like engagement surveys, the amount of job moves people have had, the external trends, and then they’re able to give managers these kind of early alerts so they can take action. So it might be, you know, prompt, have a little stay conversation with this person or think about offering them new opportunities or, you know, do we need to do something with their salary? So, of course, for them, it’s trying to get people before they leave and really holding on to their people. So I think AI is just so good for things like that.

05:42 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, and I think you know we’ve talked about AI sorry, we’ve talked about data in HR for so long and, of course, we’ve always had metrics that have typically been lag metrics. They’ve looked backwards, haven’t they? Whereas these kind of predictive metrics actually enable us to do something about it, and I love the way that you were saying that IBM actually uses them to prompt managers, nudge managers, to do things at a time when they might be actually able to rectify a situation or, you know, prevent someone becoming a flight risk, whereas too often we’ve kind of had to go well, someone’s leaving, let’s give them some extra money to try and persuade them to stay, as opposed to having the signs and indicators. So I think you know all of the examples that you’ve given I think are really help show how H AI is helping HR move from just getting things done to actually making a real difference.

06:45
And you know, if you’re listening to this and you haven’t started using AI yet, you should definitely want to start now. Where? How do kind of people even start with AI? You know, is it just sort of having a play? What would you say is the way of getting them to begin experimenting and just get comfortable and confident with it?

07:06 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I think I would say you know, we’ve nearly all now got AI as part of our kind of smartphones, so being able to kind of use it in your own personal life is a great start.

07:18
And I think it’s about just getting more confident and being able to add in the right prompts that give you what you need, because I think sometimes we can have a bad example where we’ll type something in, it will give us something back and we’ll think, well, that’s not true, or that’s not me, or whatever. And it’s about how you keep training it to prompt, to have your tone of voice, to think about these things a bit more deeply. So I think it is just playing with it. So, using your own um iphone, whether you’re on you know, whether you use google or whether you use microsoft or whether you use the chat GPT, find your little app, download it and just start playing around in your home life and then you can start seeing the impact that can have. And also, if you’re on LinkedIn there are so many brilliant people on LinkedIn that I follow that just give me these tips where I think, oh, I’ve never thought of doing it or trying that, so just listening to the experts really.

08:17 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, those cheat sheets are really good, aren’t they, with all the prompts on there. Shall we move on to the second trend then that we’re predicting? That it’s it’s a slightly more vague one here, but it’s all about. I think the second trend is around human centric interactions. I think the second trend is around human-centric interactions. Now, the pandemic obviously completely disrupted how we work, and while sort of hybrid and flexibility were the buzzwords for the last few years, we’re really going to see things being taken to a new level, and it’s kind of gone way beyond just hybrid working now, hasn’t it?

08:54 – Karen Moran (Host)
yeah, I mean, for some organizations they’ve. They haven’t even got to hybrid, have they all. They’ve gone backwards, more than because we’re talking about trends and the and the organizations that have embraced it. So, yeah, I think the this kind of human-centric interaction takes it much deeper and you know, in simple terms, it’s about how do we tailor the entire employee experience, how do we recognize every single person is individual, with unique needs, so from benefits to their career, to their well-being, whatever it might be, but it’s, um, it’s, it’s really getting down to the unique needs of each person.

09:36 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And I think this is increasingly becoming not an optional extra. I think increasingly we’re seeing that employees expect the same kind of personalisation that they get from, say, streaming services or online shopping, but they’re expecting to get that at work. You know, they want to feel that their career development and the benefits are relevant and designed for them rather than just being a kind of one-size-fits-all offering.

10:04 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, and I think again, it’s sort of where ai can help us, because it doesn’t mean as a hr team we’ve got to put on all of these different choices for people. You know we can, we can get employees to own it for themselves. So PwC have got what they call their my Plus program so the employee themselves can design their entire work experience. So it might be booking extra time off, they might need help with a student loan. They can choose how, where when they work. They can choose how, where when they work, they can choose their own different career paths that perhaps align with their own personal goals. So PwC is very much putting it into the power of the employee to decide what works for them.

10:46 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And that’s such a smart move. And personalisation is not just about flexibility, is it? It’s about empowering people, giving employees that level of control. It sends such a powerful message, which is you know, we see you and we value what matters to you. You know there are so many kind of creative ways that HR can develop and design a hyper personalized experience. You know, if you think about that. You know what the new york times does it uses ai to create personalized newsletters based on what readers engage with most, and there’s no reason why hr can’t use similar tools to send employees tailored updates on their benefits, their development opportunities, even their well-being tips yeah, I think it’s the future and we’ve just got to move away from this one size fits all.

11:41
It just doesn’t work, if it ever did I don’t think it ever did, but, um, it’s easier, isn’t it? It’s easier to scale if it’s one size fits all. It’s easier to monitor. It’s uh, and instead it’s actually about, you know, providing those choices. So, instead of seeing our people as one big homogenous lump, it’s about recognizing them as individuals. So I think that human-centric design definitely is going to continue to be a major trend in 2025. So let’s move on to the third trend, and there’s you know, tech is involved in this one as well, but it’s bigger than just technology. It’s really about how organizations are kind of unlocking the potential of their workforce. Not just about filling roles, but it’s about helping employees grow, reskill, find their next challenge. You and I talk about this a lot, but have you got?

12:43 – Karen Moran (Host)
any recent standout examples of this? Yeah, I’ll call out Novartis. So they’ve partnered with a company provider called gloat and they now have this kind of ai powered talent marketplace. So it’s like a like a personal career concierge, and what I love again is that they’re very word, concierge.

13:03 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, it makes you feel so looked after, doesn’t it?

13:06 – Karen Moran (Host)
and so posh but not dry cleaning services, like it was back in the day. What I love most about their approach, though, is that they again are putting employees in the driver’s driving seat, so they want their people to feel that they’re able to take control of their own career, to take control of developing their own skills. You know, I think this has massive changes for our traditional L&D functions, in the sense that employees can now do it themselves. So they have this, this kind of function where they have this app where people can go, and I say, for example, employees is passionate about sustainability. They can go in and say you know, I’m really interested in sustainability, and the system will pop up with oh, did you know I’m really interested in sustainability? And the system will pop up with oh, did you know? There’s a project going on over there, um, with green initiatives. So, again, it’s hr is kind of providing the the environment, but employees are kind of doing it for themselves and drive their own careers, because you and I have talked about this a lot.

14:13 – Lucy Adams (Host)
It’s like, yeah, nobody cares about your career as much as you do, and yet still there’s this reliance on your line manager to tap you on the shoulder and tell you about a training program or to have a sense of what your career path might be. But increasingly that in you know, employee owned, employee driven career development is where it’s at. It’s’s absolutely going to be key in this coming year. So how have Novartis ensured that people are able to own their careers linked to the skills that they need?

14:47 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. What they’ve done is they’ve gone for skills and by focusing on skills instead of the traditional rigid job descriptions that we’ve had, people are. There is easier for people to see what skills they’ve got, what skills they might need for other roles, so that they can think about how they can get those skills better and how they can work in different teams or explore new opportunities or get a mentor or whatever it might be.

15:19 – Lucy Adams (Host)
So for them, it’s very much around skills rather than traditional job descriptions, and I think also what I find exciting about this is that this approach isn’t just for large corporations with big budgets, is it? You know smaller organizations, smaller companies or companies that just you know, even if they’re large but just don’t have those kind of budgets, they can adopt similar principles using the tools that they’ve already got, so things like slack and microsoft teams and trello, they can create these internal gig boards. It always used to be that you had to either be applying for a job or you might find out that there was a secondment. It was a possibility of a secondment, but actually you don’t always want that. You know you don’t want people tied up with secondments for years at a time.

16:09
The ability to tap into a project or a short gig and having the facility to make those available and for people to be able to choose those for themselves, I think it’s just an exciting way forward. So, you know, people can use chat, gpt. They can act as personal career coaches, helping employees identify the skills gaps. They can suggest projects to build those, school those skills, even help you draft your own development plan. Yeah, so it’s all about impact. You know how can we in HR empower and enable employees to take charge of their own growth, rather than it being um, rather than relying on your line manager to put it all out for you.

16:56 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I love those ideas and I think your point about using tools that the company’s already using. So I think it’s really hard for us when we’re at work and we’re already busy to have to go to a new learning management system or somewhere else, whereas actually we’ve got these comms platforms. We’re all using things like ms teams, where we can use that as a, as a place where we can kind of advertise and sell um, we don’t need to buy expensive technology necessarily, you know. It’s more about how in hr can we create a culture where people feel that they can see and explore opportunities to learn and grow.

17:37 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, and I think we’re seeing, aren’t we that kind of growth mindset, that sense of? We don’t want to be what is it? Microsoft? We don’t want to be a know-it-all organization, we want to be a learn-it-all organization, or I can’t remember the company, but they just had that sort of tagline of what will you learn today? Might be Schneider Electric. You know, what will you learn today? It’s not something that you go on a training program to do. It becomes part, and part of the culture of the organization is that we expect people to be curious and we expect them to seek out and own and drive their own development.

18:13
You and I talked a lot about the benefits of pop-up mentoring as well. It doesn’t have to be something with lots of policies and procedures to get a mentor, just actually putting it out there that anyone anywhere in the company can reach out to anyone else in the company to be their mentor. So that kind of I think paramount do that, to be their mentor. So that kind of I think paramount do that. So we’re seeing that putting it in the hands of employees doesn’t have to be tech, can be tech driven, but it doesn’t have to be. Okay, let’s move on to the final trend and I think one of my favorites for 2025, is the rise of agile HR. You know, this is a total rethink of how HR operates. It’s about moving away from rigid structures to something much more dynamic and much more adaptive.

19:07 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I think we’ve still operate in these kind of silos, don’t we in HR, we have these centres, centers of excellence, which are are always often different, so recruitment’s very separate from learning, from talent management, from internal comms, and we know that having these silos is create so much inefficiency, bottlenecks, and also we’re not back to what we were talking about in terms of joining up the employee experience. It doesn’t help us develop skills. Think about internal movement, all of the things that we should be thinking about as one team.

19:48 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Completely and breaking down those silos and adopting a more skills-based approach just feels like a no-brainer. You know, instead of locking HR talent into these static roles, it’s about creating a dynamic HR marketplace where people can easily move between teams and projects based on their skills and interests. So have we seen much examples of agile in HR to work in slightly different ways. So a company like ING. They’ve adopted agile ways of working across their entire organisation, including HR. The HR teams operate in these cross-functional squads and they collaborate on end-to-end employee experiences rather than working in isolated functions. Listeners might have caught up with the previous episode we did with Catherine from NatWest came out a couple of weeks ago. Similar thing there, that kind of owning the end-to-end process, and so really it’s just like you know, it’s much better for HR skills and it’s also better for the end product. It’s faster, it’s more collaborative and it’s much more aligned to the needs of the business.

21:24 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I think as well. We’re seeing this more experimenting rather than just. You know, we had a kind of a tendency, don’t we, we in HR, to kind of wait until our, our initiatives or our products are perfect, um, before we roll them out, and then there’s no going back, is there? If someone criticizes it, it’s like well, we’re doing.

21:46 – Lucy Adams (Host)
I remember doing that. You know we did that pay and grading project, didn’t we? And it took about nine months and then, by the time we went live with it, it had to succeed because we’d spent all this time on it, you know, rather than going. Is this working? No, it’s not okay, let’s stop yeah and I know that um.

22:03 – Karen Moran (Host)
So Spotify, for example, they tend to kind of pilot in a small group, um, and then they get feedback and they tweak it before they kind of roll it out everywhere else. So I think for us in HR we’ve got to be more comfortable, that this is not about perfection, um, it’s about progress, which I know is hard, because we we often get uh, you know, we get a hard time, don’t we uh? So I think we need to really hard time recently.

22:30 – Lucy Adams (Host)
I’ve seen so many articles and you know we’re used to being the butt of the joke in a television drama. You know, the HR person in every television drama I’ve ever seen has never been the bright, intelligent, caring one. You know, they’ve either been a complete wet blanket or they’ve been this evil personified. So we’re kind of used to it, but it does feel it’s gone up a notch recently. Five so we’re kind of used to it, but it does feel it’s gone up a notch recently. So maybe we predict that.

23:00
You know, 2025 is actually the year when that stops and, uh, people start saying some great stuff about HR. It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? And, and, of course, to shift the dial, to change the narrative. There we go. There’s two cliched expressions for you. If we’re able to do that, it’s going to be a result of working in these new ways, working in very, very different ways, and so, you know, I think it’s really exciting to think about how much more impactful we can be if we embraced agile, if we embraced AI, if we embraced all of the trends that we’re talking about. And, of course, we’re already seeing some HR teams doing it, you know. But even if you’re not ready to embrace these new trends. I do think we’ve seen a step change this year, haven’t we?

23:45
You know, and I think it’s worth reflecting on the amazing progress that so many of you have made this year. It could be that you know you’ve overhauled your performance management, you’ve got rid of your annual processes and your ratings. It could be that you’ve reviewed your employment policies and you’ve brought in greater levels of trust and judgment. It could be that you’ve changed the way you’ve developing your leaders and managing talent. Or it could be that you’re adopting this agile design and delivery. You know, karen and I just we love it when we get to hear about the changes that you’re making. So if there’s something that you’ve done and you’re proud of, do, let us know. You can find out how to contact us in the in the show notes yeah, I think so.

24:30 – Karen Moran (Host)
I think sometimes for us it feels like it’s very easy for us to sort of spout from above, but you know, actually doing it in it’s complicated, it’s tricky, it’s really tough.

24:42 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, um so well done. Yeah, exactly exactly, and here’s to a fantastic 2025. Yeah, I think that’s a wrap on the hr trends, that that that we think will shape the year. Thank you for joining me in the last podcast of 2024. And let’s hope that you know, here’s to a year of bold moves, big changes for us and a bit of fun. You know, and don’t forget, if you want practical tools and resources to help you disrupt HR, you can check out the website or you can join our Disruptive HR Club and we’ll see you in 2025. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.