Episode 22: HR Trends for 2025: Part 2 Shifting Dynamics
Trina Sunday: This is the second of three episodes where I look at AIHR’s HR Trends Report for 2025. In this episode, part two, I’m exploring the shifting talent dynamics that create both challenges and opportunities to build a resilient and motivated workforce. I’m talking about the golden age of the silver worker, the women’s equity effect and looming organisational anxiety. Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trani, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started. AIHR’s HR Trends Report for 2025 is all about embracing disruption. Still, we’re embracing disruption. In this episode though, I’m talking about shifting talent dynamics. Economic uncertainties, demographic shifts and modern expectations around what people expect in the workplace are all having an impact here. And the changes have now reached a crossroads, with new expectations and work styles emerging across the workforce. Now, lots of people are attributing this to generational differences and a whole range of things, but it’s far more complex than that. We can’t just group everyone together in a homogenous way. People’s needs are different and women continue to push for true equity in the workplace. Women are pushing and the presence of older workers is growing.
So with these factors at play, organisations face both challenges and opportunities in building a resilient and motivated workforce. But the key from my perspective, is understanding why all roads have led us here and what’s going to help us in HR to adapt to the shifts. And more importantly, what’s going to help our companies to get ahead of these trends in 2025 and contribute more to our organization’s success in the years ahead. Right, so the first group that I just want to kind of call out, is this what AIHR are calling as the golden age of the Silver worker? And when you look into this like, workers age 75 and above comprise the fastest growing segment of the workforce in Australia. Baby boomers. In fact, workforce productivity improves when companies have a mix of Ages and experience levels, right? So employers hiring older workers say that they consistently match or exceed the performance of younger hires. Well, dlike if you’ve done something for 30 years and been exposed to lots of different things, you’ve probably got some wisdom, right? You’ve got some lived experience to bring to the table. And like it or not, our older workers are staying longer, either because they can’t afford to retire or they don’t want to. Retiree age employers are here to stay, man, and their presence in the workforce is only going to grow. Mature workers, though, are looking for purpose and recognition of their value. They don’t want to be treated like rubbish. They have purpose and value to add to our organisations and we’re not always meeting them where their needs are with that. So we need to recognise that, it’s a shift and a really strategic opportunity. And the reality is silver workers, for want of a better term, they can accomplish more, they can bring new levels of productivity because they can facilitate knowledge transfer and are known to enhance team dynamics.
There’s an example from Nike where they rehired Tom Petty and he’s like a veteran exec who had retired in 2020 and he’d been with the company for like 30 years or something, but their entire goal was restoring retail relationships and to turn their slumping sales around. And they did it by hiring someone with the lived experience and the connection to the company and the customer to be able to help them do that. One of the key takeaways here is harnessing the power of an ageing workforce for competitive advantage. We need to acknowledge that older workers play vital roles. So NAIC is just one example of how older workers offer invaluable expertise and leadership, right? Especially during periods of transformation. So we can implement mentoring programmes and knowledge sharing initiatives to encourage that intergenerational collaboration, bridge the skill gap and support that ongoing development of the capabilities that we talked about in the last episode as being a really widening gap. But we need to extend our policies now across the five generations that we’ve got in our workforce, right? Flexible work options, ergonomic office designs, accommodating those that are wanting to be unretired workers, to integrate back in, to be a part of the fabric of the business, like, what is it that we can do to meet people where they’re at? So we need to revisit our employer branding, really, to be age inclusive. This is a massive, massive issue in Australia right now, and I’m sure it is globally, but obviously we’re working mostly across apac, but we need to revisit the employer branding to be age inclusive so that we can reflect the values of older workers, make sure that we’ve got meaning and impact of their work to help combat ageism, to strengthen the generational diversity throughout our organisations. And I’ve got clients who are talking with me now, coaching clients who are say in their 50s, very experienced HR execs, senior HR leaders. They’re not getting interviews. And what’s been really interesting, we’ve taken some of the work history off, we’ve taken the date of their qualifications off and suddenly we’ve got some interviews turning around. Ageism is real and if we in HR are not seeing that for what it is, we might have some blinkers on to be honest. And so we have to remove barriers to work. Like we need to unlock the ageing workers potential by creating the inclusive workplace cultures that do value older employee contributions. And we need to offer benefits and perks, that address the diverse needs of that group which are different at every career stage. And I think about things with that, like health plans or health insurance massive in the us.
In Australia it’s more around some of our wellbeing and initiatives that go on top of the insurances and other things that people are covered for. But being more creative around part time roles, looking at project based work and really, really genuine phased retirement plans keep people connected but help them live their best lives. So in addition to continuous learning programmes, those are going to be the things that keep older workers staying competitive in the workforce. But really I feel like age is a big part of the missing piece in diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging strategies. To be honest, I feel like age is currently the missing piece of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging strategies. At the moment, in real time we’ve got a lot of areas to focus on. Right, so there is a big case for change having diversity across all groups. But only 8% of organisations, I think it is, include age as part of their DEIB strategy. Like that’s pretty small when we look at the ageism that’s happening across our organisations, like 8% have it as part of their diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging strategy. I find that a bit mind blowing. And so we need a new model for engagement. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, micro goal programmes where we can match retiree skills with short term projects or community initiatives so that we can keep them engaged and contributing as we go. The other trend that aihr Talk about, and this is very close to my heart, is the women’s equity effect. So closing the gender equity gap would increase global GDP by a staggering 20%. Yet we have these persistent issues like inflexible work practises, inadequate recognition of menstrual and menopausal health challenges, fewer, leadership opportunities and pay equity. Well, pay inequity should say we’re looking for the pay equity. Can you find it? Let me know if you found it. But all of these things are continuing to hinder our progress. And the thing that I just can’t. I’m kind of getting really tired of building the case, to be honest with you, the business case for this. Because if you have to convince execs every time and the data in terms of business performance is one way of doing it, at what point are we going to do things just because it’s the right thing, out of fairness? And so I get a bit riled up, right? But gender diversity pays.
So companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 39% more likely to financially outperform their competition. Like that requires measurable goals for gender diversity, especially within leadership, where women represent only 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 28% of management positions globally, not even a third. So the gender reality today, well, inflexible work practises and a lack of leadership opportunities remain critical issues like 95% of women believe that requesting flexible work will negatively affect their chance of promotion. 95% and 67% of women who experience menopausal symptoms report a negative impact on their work. We see our, older women, ageing women, mature women leaving our workplaces because they just can’t get some accommodations that would help them stay. And we’re talking about women who are, the most savvy, the most experienced and have the most return to give to your organisation. Like they are the most competitive if you compared them against the experience of their male counterparts. And yet there’s some challenges that just a few accommodations would do away with. So we need to, from a HR perspective, take a lead on championing women’s rights. But at the same time, this can’t be a HR issue and it can’t be a women’s issue. Like gender equity is not a women’s issue, it’s a collective consequence of the structures that we’ve built. But we do need to be really deliberate in our action, right? So we need to support women’s advancement, we need to build a gender diverse workforce and how we do that means that we’re going to need some ambitious and sustained investment. So if I have clients say to me, oh, I really believe in diversity, I’m, like, how big’s your budget? They’re like, what? How big’s your budget? I’ll tell you how committed you are to DEI when you tell me how much money you put into it. And so part of that, I don’t say it like that. It’s confrontational as that. But we have to create really targeted leadership development programmes, promotion frameworks to get women into leadership roles, but not around building confidence and assertiveness and how to network. We’re talking about cutting through. Around advancing women through building their business intelligence. And you would have heard me talk about this with Michelle Redfern. And by building that social equity, you know the stakes that they’ve got in organisations around social intelligence, emotional intelligence and business intelligence, as Michelle talks about them. But we need to be investing more in this and we need KPIs that are going to track the progress and to hold leadership accountable for gender diversity goals needs to be transparent.
We need to be able to show where things are at and we need to see a genuine commitment to gender equity. It’s not genuine in lots of spaces and I’m in lots of gender equity forums, again, passion. So I’m in lots of different spaces and there’s some people in there that I know are not advocates for this change, but they’re in there because it looks good and that’s really hard to see sometimes, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to bow out of it. So how do I influence it from the inside? So either you get in the race or you’re not going to win. But a big part in terms of what we as HR people can do about it and in house, right, it’s trying to remove the structural barriers. So how do we ensure that there’s flexible work arrangements and establish and normalise return to work programmes for women after caregiving breaks and men greater access to men removes structural barriers for women. So we need to offer other resources, though, like menstrual leave, menopausal leave, fertility assistance, while ensuring that women feel empowered to use them without fear of stigma or a belief that they’re going to be used against them in their career advancement. So we really need to confront some of the underlying perceptions that limit women, like unconscious bias and career penalties for caretaking. But. And I’ve called it the motherhood penalty. And I felt it myself, I felt it myself when I was trying to come back. And it’s hardcore. And if you haven’t had that lived experience, but any caregiving break, you might have been caring for a sick loved one, an ailing parent, a whole range of things that have taken you out of the workforce for a bit and you’ve tried to come back in and you’ve just got barrier after barrier. People make assumptions about what your time out of the workforce means you’ve missed out on. And the hard thing is we come back into the organisations and we feel like nothing’s changed. But apparently the people that are still in there with their blinkers on think that they’ve really advanced. So there’s a challenge in that. Right? But what we can do is foster equal opportunities.
So we need cultural transformation. It’s essential, for women to be able to thrive at every level. But that means regularly reviewing the talent pipelines and looking at gender imbalances. Specifically we need to revise performance reviews and remove subjective criteria for what should be really objective standards. And a, ah, very interesting exercise is when you take gender and name off a performance review, there’s some really interesting stuff comes up team. And when you do some experience like that, and do some gender equity assessments before performance reviews and bonuses and all of those things are locked down pay rises, some really interesting data might come your way that gives you some insight. But as leaders we need to champion, gender blind and transparent recruitment, advancement and compensation, like all of it, make it blind and see what you’re going to learn. And there’s some interesting things in the space where we’ve got examples like Starbucks for example, AIHR talk about them as a wage parity pioneer and they demonstrate how they can reach gender equity. They got wage parity in the US market in 2018 and they continue to work on that goal worldwide wage parity. And then we talk about, or some people talk about the glass cliff. So for many women we’ve gone past the glass ceiling, right? We’ve moved on, we’re in another prism of glass here. But for many women promotion to leadership happens in a time of crisis. Covid, for example, any HR execs out there who got promoted during or post Covid but it can lead to a glass cliff with a shorter, more stressful and really heavily scrutinised tenure. So because women can be really good in a crisis, we have some women that really are catapulted into high stress positions with really critical delivery time frames and often they’ll excel super stressful. Short tenure and all eyes are on them. So any mistakes can be really brutal. Another trend that AIHR talk about is this looming organisational anxiety. So jittery CEOs are, eager to please Wall street and their boards and AIHR talk about them bringing kind of immense pressure and risk to the company in order to impress the board. There’s some silly decisions being made essentially, which leads to decreasing consumer confidence. We’ve got this ongoing economic uncertainty and we’ve got underperformance fears which are fueling really pervasive concerns that affect the business and their workforce. So the bottom line is in everybody I’m talking to is it’s like everyone is anxious. So we’ve got some really badly managed layoffs which are harming organisational performance. And we’ve got organisations who are extending work hours to inject like this sense of crisis into workers and increase productivity. And then you add to that a tight labour market and shrinking pay for people that are switching jobs and we see the great resignation that we saw a couple of years ago is now giving way to the big stay. No one’s leaving and that’s a problem. So if everyone’s anxious and everyone’s seeing a tight labour market, which we really are, it’s really odd in Australia, Western Australia, acutely where we’re based, but we’re talking with our counterparts globally and we’ve been testing what AIHR, are saying here in terms of the big state. And I think they’re right. Didn’t mean to doubt you, aihr. You’ve got a lot of research behind this. But the great resignation was, everyone was leaving in droves, right? They’d seen the light through Covid. Life’s too short, life’s too important. But the economic crisis, the labour market changes, cost of living and the real impact it’s having on people being able to survive and thrive and support their families. People aren’t leaving.
So we’ve switched back to it being an employer’s market, which again, if you put that lens of the ageism I was talking about, or some of the barriers for women trying to get back into the market. When it’s an employer’s market, there is less flexibility coming at you in terms of the employer employee relationship, like we’re kind of expecting it to continue to swing back in the favour of employers as these economic pressures and job market kind of uncertainties give organisations and companies more control. But obviously, the risk of that is long term employee disengagement. Like everyone hating on your Organisation, but not feeling like they can leave. Those people are not productive. They are very toxic for your morale and that’s going to impact your agility, your productivity, collaboration, any innovation. And so long term employee disengagement is going to mean that you’re going to fail to maintain meaningful connections with your workforce. So it’s a really tricky time, a really tricky time. But if you stay connected with your workforce and you understand more about how they’re feeling and what’s going on for them, you’ll be able to address that more readily and to prepare for it. But we have to balance the costs with employee support. So we need to implement people centric work policies. And everyone says, oh, this people centricity trainer. Everyone’s going on about it, banging on about human centric, approaches and human centred design. Well, yeah, we work in hr. People is kind of our core business. So we need to strike a balance between creating a lean, cost efficient workforce and preserving that employee morale and unique culture that we might have that might be really good at us, kind of defining what our success is. So we’re going to need to develop kind of approaches and people practises that are going to create more positive work conditions, fair wages, reasonable hours, job security.
Let’s go back to basics, but do it in a more innovative way. We need to offer programmes that support physical, mental, financial health. We need to build resilience and help employees cope with the uncertainty and the change. And that doesn’t mean just throwing an EAP Employee Assistance Programme card at people. That’s not what this is, it’s more than that. And the more proactive we are, the more we will minimise the harm on employees as they kind of go through this anxiety, which is happening. And I think if you’re listening to this and rolling your eyes around it, I think you might want to have some chats to some people, test it out. But know that not everyone’s going to open up to you if you don’t have the connections in the first place. So other things we can look at is around rewarding performance, no surprise there. But if we’re not rewarding performance by using a really fair and transparent system to measure, we’ve lost the battle, right? Like we need to invest in high performing employees, but we need to be upskilling, reskilling. it’s all about mobility, it’s all about harnessing people’s passion projects as well. And I don’t mean create everything to bandy to the employee, but it’s like if we do not look at how we can upskill, reskill and become more mobile and reward people in their performance by giving them opportunity and advancement for things that they are good at and care more about, then we’re missing out on a massive opportunity. And for people to understand how to navigate that, we need to be really transparent in our communication, right? So we need to be really clear in our communication in a way where it’s accessible. I’ve talked before around the fact that we have some employees that do not access computers, they are not desk bound and we have really inaccessible communication channels for most people because we flick out an email, send everyone to the intranet online newsletter. We need open forums where employees can voice concerns and ask questions. Right. Without fear of repercussion. And that’s going to help us with our trust. Building trust, nurturing that trust. But it’s one of these things where it’s kind of not lost on me that we have this performance paradox. Like I’ve talked about implementing people centric work policies and rewarding performance and being transparent. But the performance paradox is really interesting aihr talk about it.
As you know from a stats perspective, they say that 79% of in office workers, so 79% in office and 88% of remote workers feel like they must use performance tactics to show they are working. Right now you would say, well yeah, you’ve got to prove what you’re delivering. And but I think some of it comes back to trust and I’m really interested to know what others think about this. But we spend so much time though in trying to prove that we’re working, that we’re not productive in doing the the work and therein lies the challenge. And so I am interested in kind of leaning into this thought that are we creating these spaces especially in different flexible work patterns and hybrid work and remote work where we’ve got people spending so much effort trying to defend themselves and their efforts so that they’re positioned well for performance that they’re probably not performing because they don’t have all the time to do it. And then we’ve got this other backdrop which is like the layoff landscape where we’ve got this fear of recession, high interest rates, companies are trying to be really cost efficient. And so we are seeing job cuts everywhere, especially in the tech sector. I think there was like we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the tech sector alone. And that’s going to continue in different industries. And I know in mining and resources there’s a lot of changes that are happening in Australia in that industry and we have high mobility of people then moving across to other organisations in that industry or struggling and now looking to pivot.
So as we wrap up this second part of our three part series on looking at AIHR’s HR Trends Report for 2025, let’s consider the shifting talent dynamics that are shaping the workforce and the workplace of tomorrow. Right, we’ve got economic uncertainties, demographic changes, and we’ve got these evolving expectations societally from different generations especially, that are bringing us to a really critical moment. And we’ve got women driving the push for true equity and we’ve got the contributions of older workers which are more significant than ever. And these changes present challenges but remarkable opportunities for HR to build a phenomenally resilient and engaged workforce. But the key lies in understanding how we got here and using these insights to shape what’s next. And for me, it’s about adapting to the shifts and leading the way really to a workplace where everyone thrives. And so as a HR leader, hwe can turn these challenges into opportunities and help build a future where equity, inclusion and innovation take centre stage. Imagine that before you go.
This episode’s the second of a three part series unpacking AIHR’s HR Trends for 2025 report. It’s all about embracing disruption just for something different, but tune into our next episode where I explore the tactics needed for organisations to thrive. See you soon. Game Changer. Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode as we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community. Reach out to us via our website @ reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care team.