Thoughts by Brenan German, Founder and President of Bright Talent
October 9, 2025
READ ARTICLE: Top HR Focus Areas for 2025 and How to Excel in Them
HR Leaders -- At Bright Talent, we are in the unique position of partnering with HR leaders and their teams. This gives us an excellent view of a variety of different companies and their focus. In that context, I re-read this article published by Gartner in October 2024 and thought it would be a good time to review their recommendations and check-in on their relevance.
The article lists five core areas that are at work in most organizations (not in priority order):
Leader & manager development
Organization culture
Strategic workforce planning
Change management
HR technology
Nine months into the year, let's take a look at how these key areas of focus have manifested into actionable strategies.
HR technology is definitely trending toward the top for our clients. It has manifested in projects to help organizations optimize their existing software or select new software to support digital transformation.
Strategic workforce planning is also a top concern, and it has manifested into compensation projects to validate or restructure organizational philosophy and infrastructure.
Leadership development comes in close behind, with particular focus on relational skills training and institutional knowledge transfer to capture the technical competencies of senior technical employees before they retire.
Change management is inevitable with all of the above projects, as new practices are adopted into operations. We have helped create plans to launch, communicate and reinforce change management projects for our clients to ensure plans are adopted successfully.
Organization culture is another natural outcome of these programs. All of these key areas influence the employee value proposition and the employee experience, which, in turn, impacts employee engagement.
Based on our experience, Gartner was spot on in their article, as these key areas have remained at the top for most HR leaders in 2025. How do these resonate for you? What other areas have been a focus for you and your team?
#HR #CHRO #LeadershipDevelopment #WorkforcePlanning #ChangeManagement #HRTech #gartner