Gartner HR Leaders Survey Reveals Top Two Priorities in 2024 are Leader and Manager Development and Organizational Culture

The Gartner survey of 520 HR leaders in July 2023 found the top five organizational priorities for HR leaders next year include:

• Leader and manager development
• Organizational culture
• HR technology
• Change management
• Career management and mobility

“In 2024, the HR function will be impacted by several key trends: an unsettled employee-employer relationship, persistent skills shortage, transformative technology innovations and pressure to achieve operational efficiencies,” said Mark Whittle, vice president of advisory in the Gartner HR practice.

To maximize talent and business outcomes, HR leaders must address the below imperatives in 2024:

Organizations typically address manager issues by providing more development. A February 2023 Gartner survey of 98 HR leaders revealed that 59% plan to increase how much they invest in manager development programs in the next two years.

“Providing managers with more training or more skills does not increase their effectiveness,” said Whittle. “Instead, organizations must focus on job manageability – making the manager job more manageable is five times more effective than skills proficiency in improving manager effectiveness.”

To make the manager job more manageable organizations need to lighten the load on managers by resetting role expectations and removing process hurdles. Simultaneously, HR needs to rebuild the manager pipeline while also helping their managers build new habits that lead to desired behaviors.

Organizational Culture

“Organizational culture is new to the top five priorities for HR leaders this year, largely because HR leaders believe they don’t measure culture effectively nor do they know how to truly drive culture change,” added Whittle.

Gartner research found that employees must be both aligned and connected to organizational culture for it to truly succeed. To ensure employees buy-in and live the desired culture, organizations must undertake two shifts:

• First, leaders must understand the organization’s values and what they are trying to achieve, i.e., employee longevity, innovation, customer-centricity. How an organization measures culture – and what processes, policies and budgets need to change – will depend on these answers.
• Second, with more organizations adopting hybrid work models, they can no longer rely on building employees’ connection to culture via osmosis and must be much more intentional.

HR Technology

The biggest challenge for HR leaders is not knowing how evolving technology trends, such as generative AI, will impact HR and talent.

To move forward, HR leaders can evaluate new technologies based on four key criteria to help determine the use cases and business value specific to their organization:

• Governance: Who will own, maintain and manage the technology?
• Workforce Readiness: How will this technology impact current versus future ways of working?
• Vendor Landscape: What are the vendor options? Should leaders wait or build their own solutions?
• Risks & Ethics: Do the associated risks meet their tolerance levels, and are there any mitigations and ethical considerations to navigate?

Change Management

Among 180 respondents to the Gartner July survey, 82% of HR leaders agreed that managers are not equipped to lead change, and 77% reported that their employees are fatigued from all the change.

“Change fatigue is cumulative, and it negatively impacts all talent outcomes,” said Whittle. “Change fatigue causes employees’ intent to stay with their employer to decline by as much as 42%, while employee performance can decline by as much as 27%.”

HR leaders can proactively manage change fatigue risk through three pillars:

1. Identify: Educate the workforce on fatigue drivers and equip managers to detect potential hotspots before major problems arise.
2. Prevent: Build psychological safety into teams and invite employees to co-create change strategies.
3. Fix: Facilitate candid change conversations with employees and demonstrate empathy.

Career Management & Mobility

Nearly 90% of 178 HR leaders who responded to the July Gartner survey reported that for many employees, career paths at their organization are unclear; two-thirds said that career paths at their organization are not compelling for many employees.

Progressive organizations are moving from a sole focus on traditional career pathing to designing agile career paths that reflect that roles and skills are constantly changing along with employees’ desires and realities.

“To retain top talent, today’s career paths should be designed to adapt to changing organizational and employee needs,” said Whittle. “Additionally, leading employers are rethinking the role of job descriptions and org charts and focusing more on employee skills and experiences.”