2025 Global Human Capital Trends Report | Deloitte Insights

Here’s a summary of the key ideas:

1. Navigating Tensions

• Leaders are facing fundamental tensions and are often stuck in a wait-and-see cycle, unsure how to balance business and human outcomes.
• It’s important to find the right balance between both sides of these tensions, understanding that choices will differ across organizations and evolve over time.
• Navigating these tensions requires courage to make choices without certainty of outcomes.

2. The Vital Role of Leaders

• Leaders need to make choices and balance short-term financial results with long-term gains, while also building trust and preparing teams to work with AI.
• Great leaders recognize the importance of shared business and human outcomes and should challenge themselves to take a longer view, embracing that human performance isn’t a zero-sum equation.
• Decision-making should be placed at the right levels, involving people with the right experience, especially when integrating AI into business processes.

3. Key Questions and Decisions for Leaders

• Leaders need to make tough choices across multiple dimensions, setting a clear vision that balances business and human outcomes.
• Organizations that address these challenges effectively tend to outperform others.

4. The Work: How Things Get Done

• Providing Stability and Agility: Balancing the need for worker stability with the agility required for the business to thrive is essential.
• Unlocking Worker Capacity: Organizations should implement a new mindset about valuing slack time and streamline unnecessary tasks to focus on essential work.

5. The Workforce: Who’s Doing the Work and How We Support Them

• Updating the Employee Value Proposition (EVP): Revising the EVP for an AI-powered world is essential to support a healthy relationship between organizations and their workers.
• Addressing the Experience Gap: Organizations need to address the gap between employer demands and worker skills by reconsidering experience requirements and exploring new approaches.
• Getting Value from Technology: Leaders need a new approach to identify the right technology and create a value case that realizes human and business outcomes.

6. Organization and Culture: The Structure and Practices That Unlock Performance

• Motivating People: Understanding what drives people to act can boost performance and innovation, requiring a focus on individual-level motivations.
• Rethinking Performance Management: Organizations need to expand beyond traditional performance management processes to drive human performance, incorporating culture, design, and technology.

7. Stability: Creating Stability for Workers

• Workers are seeking greater stability, while business leaders are feeling pressure to adapt and evolve.
• Organizations need to provide new anchors for workers to create stability while enabling agility, focusing on the who, how, and where of work.

8. Reclaiming Organizational Capacity:

• Organizations need to address issues like meeting overload and outdated processes to reclaim worker capacity for essential work.
• Leaders and workers should come together to rethink unnecessary work, creating a new mindset about valuing slack time.

9. The AI Revolution and the Human Value Proposition

• Organizations need to rethink their employee value proposition to thrive in a world reshaped by AI, focusing on collaboration between humans and machines.
• It’s important to share the wealth created by AI with workers and consider how AI efficiencies can support work-life balance.

10. Motivation at the Unit of One

• Understanding and tapping into individual motivations can unleash the potential of people and generate value for the business.
• Organizations need to balance standardization and personalization, as well as control and empowerment, to achieve motivation at the unit of one.

11. The Importance of Human Capabilities

• Prioritizing human capabilities such as curiosity and emotional intelligence is essential in workforce practices.
• Organizations need to expand their definition of experience to include the ability for workers to apply skills, knowledge, and human capabilities in context.

12. The New Value Case for Technology

• Organizations need to adapt how they think about technology investments, focusing on augmenting people’s capabilities and aligning technology with desired outcomes.
• Failing to invest in technology can undermine outcomes across multiple dimensions, including human performance and innovation.

In summary, the study emphasizes the importance of balancing business and human outcomes by addressing key tensions, leveraging technology, understanding individual motivations, and fostering a supportive organizational culture.

The focus is on creating an environment where both the organization and its workers can thrive in a rapidly changing world.