6 Ways the Workplace Will Change in 2025

Nearly five years ago now, the pandemic upended the way millions of people worked seemingly overnight. Now, at the tail-end of 2024, the workplace is still undergoing a number of consequential changes – and in 2025, even more shifts are on the menu. This was a year marked by several watershed moments for work. One of the largest tech companies in the world, Amazon, announced a five-day return-to-office policy. Companies like Lowe’s, Ford, and Walmart rolled back their DEI efforts. And Donald Trump’s win sparked a flurry of questions about the future of immigrant labor, workplace regulations, and more. With the new year nearly upon us, here’s how experts expect that work and the workplace will change in 2025 – and how business owners can prepare to greet those evolutions with aplomb. 1. More talent searches will start inside. In 2024, the labor market continued its cooling trend, rappelling down from its heights around the Great Resignation. Now, with job openings generally slowing and quits well below rates of recent years, small businesses are finding it a bit easier to fill their open positions, according to recent data from National Federation of Independent Business. And yet, because many companies had engaged in labor hoarding in 2023 — holding tightly to their talent as the job market softened — many leaders were in an interesting pickle in 2024, says Jeanne MacDonald, CEO of recruitment process outsourcing at Korn Ferry, the global consulting firm. “They hired a ton of people, spent a lot of money, and then early 2024 was, ‘Well, wait a minute, what are we going to do with all this talent?'” MacDonald says. As a result, 2024 was the year where MacDonald saw “internal mobility or internal recruiting, more so than external, than we’ve ever seen,” she says. Companies were turning toward their current workforce, evaluating what skills already existed internally and discovering how to leverage them in a new way, she says. That approach is only going to become more popular in 2025, predicts Andrew McCaskill, a career expert at LinkedIn. Even if hiring opportunities do accelerate again, that’s still an expense, he says, and companies are figuring out that their “next best employee may be my current employee, just moved to another team,” he says. Thus, companies must also consider how to create internal systems or programs that facilitate this kind of mobility, McCaskill says, such as allowing team members to “raise their hand for stretch assignments” or take “tours of duty in other parts of the business,” he says. This way, company leaders are actively upskilling and preparing team members for internal movement. 2. Managers could get a burnout-busting tool. One story that didn’t change much over the past two years: managers are still being pushed to brink of burnout, experts say. In 2023, a Gartner survey found that the average manager had 51 percent more responsibilities than they could “effectively manage”; this year, a different Gartner survey found that three-quarters of HR leaders say their managers are “overwhelmed by the expansion of their responsibilities.” Since the pandemic, managers have been on the front lines of new hybrid and remote arrangements, responsible worker retention, and other key workplace changes, as Inc. has previously reported. And in 2024, managers were still asked to do “more with less” and still feeling limited by a lack of autonomy, says Emily Field, partner at McKinsey. But this year saw some changes that could make a meaningful difference for managers moving forward, Field says – namely, the use of generative AI. Indeed, by incorporating some of these tools into their managers’ workflows in 2025, leaders have an opportunity to “free up capacity for managers,” Field argues. Now, the onus is on teams to find exactly which tools would be most helpful in alleviating their managers’ specific pressures in 2025 — and Field says an “experimentation mindset” will serve companies well here. “Let’s test and learn,” she says, “and then let’s refine based on what serves us.” 3. Gen Z will move up the ranks. Generation Z is now firmly entrenched in the workforce. They represent nearly a fifth of the U.S. labor force and, as of the second quarter of 2024, now outnumber Baby Boomers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And in 2025, they’re projected to hit another milestone — next year, about one in 10 managers will be Gen Z, according to a recent report from Glassdoor. This stands to be an interesting transition, considering a few recent surveys suggesting that Gen Z’s entry into the workplace has been bumpy. Sixty percent of companies in one survey said they’d fired Gen Z employees who’d been hired earlier in 2024. In another, 57 percent of U.S. Gen Z workers surveyed said they were uninterested in becoming middle managers, a trend the report deemed “conscious unbossing.” And yet, Glassdoor lead economist Daniel Zhao believes that differences between Gen Z and other generations have been overstated. In fact, while Zhao believes that Gen Z’s management style may be different, he says this will have less to do with their generation and more with “what constitutes good leadership right now.” Namely, “there’s much more emphasis in the last five years on emotional intelligence for leaders and managers,” he says, as well as “much more discussion around employee well-being, setting boundaries, providing clarity.” With those factors at play, “Gen Z is being asked to raise the bar on good leadership,” Zhao adds. To help them do this, providing manager training will be critical, Zhao says. He also suggests finding ways to give these less experienced workers opportunities to flex their managerial muscles, such as overseeing a project: “That might be a way to give folks the opportunity to get their feet wet … before dropping them into the deep end.” 4. DEI programs will be put further in the crosshairs. In 2023, the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action spurred a wave of lawsuits aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and this year brought on an “escalation” of those legal attacks, says David Glasgow, the executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, a research center within New York University’s School of Law. Trump’s election only poured more “fuel on the fire of anti-DEI backlash,” Glasgow says — and in 2025, he expects to see even more attacks, including at the federal government level. That said, this flurry of legal activity “doesn’t necessarily mean that the lawsuits are going to be successful,” Glasgow says. Indeed, the Meltzer Center is tracking more than 100 cases, and numerous have been settled or dropped. Overall, though, the state of DEI remains “uncertain” and “complicated,” says Tory Clarke, co-founder and partner at the New York City-based executive search firm Bridge Partners. Companies who weren’t “fully committed” to DEI work are backing out, she says, while others are worried about being attacked next. In a survey published earlier this year, Bridge Partners found that 66 percent of companies had increased their DEI investments in the past year, an 11-point drop compared to 2023. But that doesn’t mean companies are giving up: In fact, almost three-quarters of those surveyed with a DEI program already in place said they planned to “increase their commitment to DEI within the next two years” – evidence of companies “going underground” with their commitments to wait out the backlash, Clarke told Inc. at the time. In the meantime, Clarke says she’s seeing companies move DEI efforts under other areas within their organizations, such as human resources, or changing the language related to those programs. Indeed, more than 50 percent of senior executives in a Conference Board survey this year said they’d made changes to DEI terminology. In 2025, Clarke expects that corporate DEI work will continue, even if the “players may get rearranged” or the work “may go under the radar.” And, ultimately, companies may need to “reintroduce” their DEI efforts to cut through the noise and backlash, says Arthur Woods, chief business officer at Bridge Partners. “It will likely need to be embedded and democratized a lot more,” he says. 5. The 4-day workweek will still be a distant dream. This year, there’s been plenty of hubbub about working arrangements. But it’s clear that workers continue to value flexible arrangements – and many companies are still offering flexibility in various forms. One buzzy option hasn’t caught on widely quite yet, though: the four-day workweek. In March, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) propelled conversation about the four-day workweek to the forefront when he introduced legislation aimed reducing the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours over four years. This came after the United Auto Workers union’s unsuccessful 2023 bargaining for a 32-hour workweek, which sparked further conversations about the four-day workweek this year, says Dale Whelehan, CEO of the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global. But overall, Whelehan senses that adoption of four-day workweeks has slowed. In September 2023, 4 Day Week Global conducted a pilot program in Germany, successfully recruiting 41 organizations to participate; now, it’s launching a pilot in France with only 10 companies on board, he says. “I think local economies and local politics is playing an influential role in whether businesses perceive they can take a risk on something like this at this moment in time,” Whelehan says. Broader feelings of uncertainty, including leading up to the presidential election, also played a role in American companies sticking to the status quo, Whelehan believes. “There has been a lot of ongoing discussion, but not necessarily action happening at the state level in the U.S.,” he says. And yet, many U.S. workers are hopeful this could change — even if it takes a while. In a survey from the job site Monster earlier this year, 46 percent of workers surveyed believed that four-day workweeks would catch on over the next 30 years. Next year in particular, Whelehan says, pro-flexible work sentiments could grow. As larger companies like Amazon enforce return-to-office mandates, he expects that negative consequences of those pushes will emerge — in retention, burnout, or even climate change concerns, he says — bringing flexibility back to the forefront of conversations about the future of work. “For no rational reason can I see how the older models of work will win out in 2025,” Whelehan says. 6. AI will make more inroads. This was the year that AI at work got “real,” according to a report from Microsoft and LinkedIn in May. According to the report, in the prior six months the use of generative AI among global knowledge workers had nearly doubled. About three-quarters are now using it, citing benefits like saved time, increased creativity, and more. Younger workers and leaders are particularly eager to bring these tools into work, according to multiple reports this year. In fact, beyond boosting their efficiency, younger managers (and wannabe managers) believe AI can help them become better leaders, enhancing their “communication to improve problem solving and facilitate better relationships,” according to a report from Google Workspace. And AI is poised to play a “big role in 2025,” McCaskill says. “I think that we’re gonna see more and more companies that are hiring for…artificial intelligence understanding and solutions.” At LinkedIn, for instance, participation in AI courses on its learning platform have increased “fivefold year-over-year,” he says. Still, companies will be thinking about what parts of AI to implement, as well as the “change management structure” associated with those changes, McCaskill adds, setting the stage for a “pace of change” in the workplace that’s “only going to get faster and deeper” next year. In the face of this rapid change, it’s important that companies be careful about how they approach incorporating AI, says Jessica Burkland, an assistant professor of practice in organizational behavior at Babson College. She recommends making sure that managers as well as employees truly understand the technology. If they don’t, their teams could be “utilizing technology in a way that’s disrupting workflows as opposed to augmenting the workflows,” she says. AI isn’t the only technology making progress in workplaces. Virtual reality, for instance, has made headway in corporate training programs this year, says Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. According to Bailenson, VR has demonstrated strong capabilities to simulate “really intense and special situations that give you a teachable moment,” like an active shooter drill. As technologies like AI and VR continue to evolve and permeate workplaces next year, how that’s managed will set companies apart, Burkland says: “These technologies are only as good as their implementation.” BY SARAH LYNCH