Market Insights Equilibrium in 2025: Innovation, Humanity, and Purpose

Kia ora and happy new year,

The past few years have been nothing short of a roller-coaster, from the post-COVID surge to the austerity of 2024. In the labour market, unemployment has risen to 4.8%, up from a low of 3.2%. Job ads are down 21% year-on-year, and applications per job ad continue to rise. The labour market is undoubtedly soft, and as a lagging indicator, it’s likely we haven’t seen the full extent of these trends. Meanwhile, insatiable media coverage around return-to-office mandates and divestment in diversity initiatives have sparked ongoing debate about how to meet the needs of all company stakeholders.  

2025 will continue to bring its challenges, but it’s also a year of opportunity. This year we can cement the lessons of the past and find an equilibrium, balancing innovation with stability, urgency with focus, and technology with humanity.

What did we all learn during COVID and 2024 that could help with 2025?

Last year, I wrote about how leading change is now a central responsibility of leadership. If you’re anything like me, keeping up with everything often oscillates between being overwhelmed and excited all in one day. Adapting to market dynamics, responding to changes in employee motivations, and embracing AI and emerging technologies dominate the landscape.

At Humankind, we’re framing 2025 around this equilibrium: mastering the fundamentals while investing in innovation to meet the evolving needs of our clients. For us, that means focusing on our performance partnership model for our clients and our team.  

Nailing the fundamentals

We base the fundamentals around our four key levers for organisational performance:

• Aligning to strategy – Unite people around our strategy, purpose, and values. We integrate these into all aspects of our work and team communications (our weekly huddles, Monthly Business Updates, Slack videos, celebrations, onboarding, performance, remuneration and so forth). Even when I think I’ve done this, I’m reminded to do it again. My role is to be the Pied Piper.  
  

• Cultivate leadership strength – Grow and support leaders to lead your business well and bring out the best in people. Anna, Charlotte, Sam and I regularly reflect on how well we’re operating as a “first team”. Only when there is alignment at the top, is there a shot at alignment throughout our team.  

• Shape your organisation – Design your structure, roles, policies, and frameworks to drive performance. We’ve recently updated our structure and ways of working to support our performance partnership strategy. Heading into another tough year for remuneration reviews, we’re supporting many clients to ensure their processes are fair, transparent, and the background is well-communicated. This matters a lot.  

• Embed better ways of working – Systematically enable people to work efficiently and effectively. Our operating system of meetings, comms, and rituals are deliberately designed to support our client needs, business focuses, and team’s experience. They evolve as our focuses do.    

One of the things I love most about my role is being deeply connected to the ecosystem. Through judging the Best Places to Work Awards and working with our diverse range of clients across Aotearoa, clear themes emerged among those who excelled last year. These organisations not only created exceptional workplaces but also achieved outstanding financial performance. While this was criteria of being named a Best Place to Work, it didn’t need to be. Companies that prioritised their people, consistently outperformed in their results. Across the board, we saw early adoption of technology, cohesive and people-focused leadership teams, and the seamless integration of people and performance into ways of working; practices that go well beyond one-off initiatives and drive lasting success.

AI: A People Shift as Much as a Technological One

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella called AI “the fastest diffusion of technology in our lifetime,” and 2025 presents an incredible opportunity to determine the most promising applications of this transformative technology.  

AI is not just a technological shift; it’s a fundamental people shift. The processes of redesigning work and business processes takes time, and evolves through phases: first, improving the efficiency of current roles, then automating tasks to increase scale, and eventually integrating processes to enhance productivity, such as deploying AI agents to handle multiple connected steps. These foundations pave the way for organisations to unlock autonomy and drive even greater impact over time.

I believe one of the most significant opportunities with AI lies in its potential to create an AI-enhanced workforce; employees who leverage AI every day to dramatically improve their performance, innovation, and ultimately, experience at work. The companies that embrace this shift ethically and strategically will position themselves as leaders in their industries. At the same time, the “human in the middle” concept will be critical, balancing exciting technological advancements with maintaining humanity.

Something I’m thinking about is skill development. As the world gets more “agentic” and many tasks early on the white-collar career ladder can largely be done by AI, how do we develop the leaders of tomorrow? The way we all choose to use technology is just as important as what the underlying technology can do.  

At Humankind, we’re focused on learning. We’re working with skilled partners to build our knowledge around safe and ethical use, not only to bring quality and efficiency to our clients but to support our team’s confidence and curiosity with these critical workforce skills. This year, we partnered with Raygun to develop a prototype AI agent that automates an internal process, demonstrating where AI can free people to focus on meaningful and impactful work.

Letting Our Purpose Guide Us

2025 presents us all an opportunity to take the best from the innovative practices of the post-COVID years and the back-to-basics approach of 2024 to find an equilibrium. Above all else, purpose remains the anchor that keeps us steady in uncertainty.  

I’m personally focused on staying connected and continuously hearing directly from our team and clients. Regardless of the environment or technology, great people have choices and maintaining authentic relationships can be the difference between success and failure. Our people need to hear from us, to be engaged and inspired by us.  

To our clients and broader community, thank you for your ongoing trust and partnership. I’m deeply proud of the exceptional team at Humankind, and we’re always here if you’d like to explore or discuss any of the ideas we’ve shared.

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