2025 Chief Human Resources Officer Priorities & Predictions

Today’s Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) plays a pivotal role in identifying and addressing organizational risk, enabling enterprise agility, and achieving sustainable high performance.

Insights and the priorities set by members of i4cp’s Chief Human Resources Officer Board illustrate that an organization that can sense and respond quickly to internal or external change requires an HR function that can do the same. Key anticipated challenges for HR in 2025 include:

• Ensuring the HR function can adapt to the changing needs of the business (70%)
• Delivering on top priorities with fewer resources (51%)
• Ensuring the HR function has the skills needed to deliver on its priorities (47%)

Budget projections for 2025 reveal that investment in the HR function for 2025 will largely remain stable, with nearly one-half (49%) expecting no budget changes. However, around a quarter of CHRO Board members anticipate moderate increases (26%) or decreases (25%). The following are the six areas that will see the greatest investment in 2025: 

1. Leadership development (61%)
2. HR technology (48%)
3. Workplace culture (39%)
4. Learning and development (34%)
5. Total rewards (32%)
6. Organization effectiveness (32%)

CHROs are also preparing to manage several external factors that add further complexity to the role, including demographic and economic shifts, tighter labor markets, and data privacy demands, all of which make agile and adaptable HR functions a priority for organizations.

Several external pressures were cited by Board members, such as:

• Changing workforce demographics and expectations (51%)
• Macroeconomic uncertainty (47%)
• Regulations and/or compliance specific to industry (44%)
• Available talent pool (40%)
• Data security and privacy (33%)
• Evolving consumer demographics and expectations (33%)

With a need to accomplish more with the same or fewer resources, to sense and respond swiftly to change, and strategically position and prepare the organization for the future, CHROs will be focused on the following priorities in 2025:

Priorities

Ensuring the HR strategy is agile enough to stay tightly aligned with changes to the enterprise strategy—HR strategy and programs must flex to address strategic business and market shifts and remain in tight alignment with organizational strategy. CHROs recognize that critical to this is greater capability within HR to anticipate and understand the needs of the business, and to interpret, design, articulate, and deliver insights and solutions that consistently enable better decision making and produce desired outcomes.

Also critical are the relationships HR fosters throughout the organization. Expect to see more HR leaders act on a prediction i4cp made in 2022 (“Experience outside of HR becomes a strategic professional building block”) as they seek to build more business-specific perspective and credibility in HR.

Building or maintaining a healthy organizational culture—a future-ready organization requires a future-ready culture. CHROs play a pivotal role in ensuring that culture will and does support any strategic shift to the business and related capability requirements. CHROs will continue to heed a prediction i4cp made about 2024 (“Culture measures—quantitative and qualitative—will now be expected”) by ensuring a continuous pulse of the organization’s culture health and regularly reporting out clear and comprehensive data—paired with corrective remediations as needed.

Ensuring strong pipelines for C-Suite succession—future-ready organizations require leaders (at all levels) who embrace and enable change, consistently model the organization’s values, and deliver superior results.

i4cp research has revealed that organizations that consistently achieve their goals are up to 7x more likely to have cultures that value how goals are achieved (not just the achievements themselves). Those who describe their organizations’ cultures as “very healthy” are 25x as likely to say that they have leaders whose behaviors align to the organization’s values vs. those who describe their organizational cultures as “toxic”.

CHROs realize that succession pipelines of executives who possess these traits are key to healthy and sustainable business outcomes.

Using AI to accelerate business strategy execution—a future-ready workforce benefits immensely from HR’s knowledge and confidence in how AI will shape that future. It is incumbent upon HR to strategize on AI’s impact across five core areas that correlate to i4cp’s five domains: the organization’s market, strategy, culture, leadership, and talent.

More than half (54%) of i4cp’s CHRO Board members believe that AI will be “important” or “very important” to their function’s ability to deliver on its priorities in 2025. And these HR leaders are looking beyond AI’s ability to drive efficiencies; they are 9x (64% vs. 7%) more likely (than those that view it as “somewhat” or “not important” to their function’s ability to deliver on its priorities) to indicate they aim to use AI to accelerate business strategy execution and/or growth.

Upskilling the workforce—longitudinal i4cp research from 2021–2024 has found that 70% of organizations report continuing to struggle with equipping their workforces with the skills the organization needs for the future. Coincidentally, 70% of CHROs surveyed this year also believe their organizations are only “somewhat” prepared for an AI-enabled future of work—a mere 5% described their organizations as “very prepared.”

Given the implications of talent availability and the demographic population shifts happening globally, coupled with the rapid pace of technological advancements, CHROs realize they need to advance on their workforces' continuous (and urgent) learning needs.

Chief Human Resources Officer Predictions

• The utilization of AI and capability built (and brought into) HR will further increase the function’s strategic contribution to the business—from strategy formulation, adaptation, and execution to workforce readiness for the future, HR functions will be able to deliver faster and more precisely. These strategic HR functions will be viewed as change agents that assume more leadership in enterprise transformation efforts. All this elevates HR’s skills in data analytics, technology management, consulting, change leadership, and strong business acumen from nice-to-have to must have.
• The evolution to strategic work planning and nimble organization design will distinguish ready-for-the-future organizations—what does workforce (and leader) capacity and capability mean in this new era of work? How will the work that delivers distinct value for the business evolve in the future, and what is the organization doing to prepare for this shift? Redesigning work (e.g., the responsibilities, jobs, and tasks that are performed) and reimagining organization design to support the evolving nature of work at the organization will be key. This, coupled with increased HR capability, will provide greater foresight, allowing for more targeted and effective workforce up/reskilling efforts.
• Organizations court older workers—due to an aging population and declining birth rates, older individuals represent not only a valuable, experienced segment of the workforce, but a necessary one. The participation of workers aged 65 and older in the U.S. labor force is increasing yearly, with BLS predicting that this group will grow by 45% by 2030. At the same time, the labor force of people in the 16-24 age group is expected to decrease by approximately 7.5%. Changing demographics is a global concern; the European Union projects that the number of workers aged 55-64 will increase significantly in the next decade, as do several APAC countries. While talent shortages worldwide will likely force companies to reconsider the average age of their workforce, companies will recognize there are numerous benefits to leveraging older workers.
• Emphasis on AI and data, and increases in distributed work will require more human-centric work environments and experiences—as work, work teams, and decision making become more distributed and augmented by AI and data, organizations shouldn’t underestimate the enduring value of human judgment, creativity, interpersonal skills, and connection.

HR must not allow itself to become distanced from the everyday realities of the workforce. Staying highly attuned to employee sentiment, organizational culture, and employee experience will ensure its strategic endeavors are grounded in the needs and realities of the those whose skills, perspectives, and relationships position the business for sustainable success.

“As we look ahead to 2025, the bar continues to rise for CHROs and HR professionals with the increasing expectation to deliver on strategic innovation and cultural evolution. We know that employees rely on their workplace to provide a fulfilling employee experience and a purposeful life outside of their work. The workforce's well-being is not just about wellness anymore; it is about ensuring that your company’s programs and benefits address all employee needs—physical health, mental health, financial health, community, and career growth.

Trust and inclusivity remain paramount to successful leadership, meaning that learning and development organizations must deliver gamechanging programs and toolkits that leaders can practice quickly and effectively. Speed to execution for both leaders and individual contributors is a necessity, and HR professionals need to develop an employee ecosystem based on reskilling and upskilling. Finally, we must use AI and People Analytics in all our HR processes to make more informed decisions and drive organizational success.

Our seat at the table is getting bigger all the time, and I’m excited about where we are headed as an HR industry." 

Judy Carter, CHRO, BNSF

To read the rest of the predictions from i4cp's other boards, download i4cp's 2025 Priorities & Predictions.