- Workforce tensions aren’t going away; they’re becoming the new normal. Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends report reveals that today’s most urgent workforce challenges are not problems to solve, but paradoxes to navigate. Organizations must build the muscle to flex between competing priorities, not pick sides.
- Workforce agility is the throughline that helps balance these tensions. This blog shows how skills-based planning, adaptive leadership, and responsive learning ecosystems help organizations shift between stability and speed, control and empowerment, technology and human connection.
- Cornerstone and Deloitte offer a combined path forward with both insight and execution. You’ll see how Cornerstone brings Deloitte’s trends to life through practical solutions, real-world examples, and cutting-edge innovation built for today’s evolving workforce.
In 2025, tension defines the workforce, but it doesn’t have to derail it. Control or empowerment? Stability or agility? Automation or augmentation? These aren’t either-or choices; they’re realities that every organization must learn to balance.
That’s the central message of the 2025 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report, which calls for a new kind of leadership that can balance competing demands and activate the full potential of the workforce. As the report notes, “the challenge is no longer about choosing a side, but finding a balance.” Organizations that embrace these opposing forces, and empower their workforce to do the same, will be best positioned to thrive. And Cornerstone is proud to partner together with Deloitte to help make that vision real.
At Cornerstone, we believe that balance starts with workforce agility. Skills, learning, and talent intelligence don’t just help you respond to change, they help you lead through it. Here’s how key trends identified by Deloitte come to life through the lens of workforce agility.
Deloitte’s insight:
Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends report calls for a meaningful shift: distributing decision-making closer to the work. The idea isn’t to eliminate control, but to rebalance it, maintaining the structure and guardrails that support consistency, while trusting the people doing the work to make decisions in real time. Agility improves when authority is shared with intent, not withheld by habit.
Talent shift:
But that shift doesn’t happen by simply changing the org chart or pushing accountability downward. As employees at every level take on more responsibility, the need for stronger decision-making skills grows. When customer-facing or operational roles become more influential, organizations must ensure those individuals are ready to lead in their context. Empowerment without enablement is risky. And that’s the real challenge leaders must solve.
What this means for your people strategy
You need to build confidence, capability, and clarity at the front lines, not just authority. That requires a rethinking of how you develop talent, structure roles, and support learning.
How Cornerstone supports it
- Skill visibility and role clarity, so you know who’s ready for what
- Personalized learning journeys, focused on real-time decision-making skills
- Continuous development in the flow of work, not static programs
- Manager enablement tools for coaching, feedback, and behavioral support
- Immersive learning, including VR-based scenario training, for frontline readiness
Deloitte’s insight:
One of the most resonant insights from Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends report is the need to balance two seemingly opposing forces: stability and agility. Deloitte calls this tension “stagility”, defined as the challenge of creating a workplace that moves at the pace of change while giving employees the clarity, support, and structure to thrive within it.
Talent shift:
In dynamic environments, priorities shift fast, and employees need to see how their work contributes, how their goals connect to outcomes, and how they can adjust when the target moves. “Stagility” means supporting people through uncertainty, building both their tolerance for change and their ability to act within it.
What this means for your people strategy:
Organizations must treat agility as an individual competency, developing it through continuous learning, skills-based growth, and real-time feedback. But agility also requires structural support both at the individual level, through adaptable learning plans and objectives that shift with priorities, and at the organizational level, through real-time workforce planning and skills-based deployment that make shifts visible, intentional, and aligned to business needs.
How Cornerstone supports it
- Goal alignment and performance tools that adjust as business needs change
- Real-time feedback and coaching that turn change into opportunity, not anxiety
- Learning experiences tied to business needs, ensuring growth is always connected to strategy
- Skills-based growth paths that empower individuals to pivot, stretch, or step up
- Dynamic role architecture that adapts as business needs shift
- Workforce planning tools that allow for real-time resourcing and redeployment
Deloitte’s insight
Deloitte’s third trend calls out a defining shift in how organizations view technology. The era of tech as a cost-saver is giving way to something deeper: a demand for technology that delivers human outcomes: developing people, creating purpose, and enhancing experience. Efficiency still matters. But it’s not enough.
Talent shift
Employees now expect technology to do more than speed things up. They want it to help them grow and tackle problems in all new ways, while at the same time, creating bandwidth to focus on the ‘human work’ that matters most.
What this means for your people strategy
You need systems that not only streamline processes but also elevate people. That means deploying AI in ways that personalize development, free up HR, and empower better decisions across the workforce. It’s not about choosing between productivity and purpose. It’s about designing systems where one fuels the other.
How Cornerstone supports it
At Cornerstone, this belief is foundational. Through Cornerstone Galaxy, we’ve built an AI-powered platform designed to do both: streamline work and elevate human potential.
AI that personalizes, empowers, and adapts:
- Recommends learning content based on skills, goals, and context
- Personalizes development for every role, level, and function
- Surfaces insights that help employees, managers, and HR act with clarity and confidence
AI that gives HR time to be more human:
When AI handles repetitive tasks, like assigning compliance training, managing recertifications, or curating content, HR teams get time back. That time is reinvested into:
- Supporting people through change
- Coaching leaders
- Designing experiences that build culture and connection
This is what Deloitte describes as technology that amplifies humanity. And we couldn’t agree more.
Deloitte’s insight
Leaders and employees are often operating with two very different realities. According to Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report, only 33% of workers strongly believe their organizations and managers understand their motivations, even though 78% say they themselves have clarity about what drives them. Deloitte highlights a widening perception gap, particularly around well-being, development, and support, that can quietly erode trust, engagement, and performance if left unaddressed.
Talent shift
Employees today expect to feel seen, heard, and valued in real time, not just in annual surveys or review cycles. As hybrid and distributed work continue to evolve, consistent feedback, clear growth paths, and authentic check-ins matter more than ever. This has a strong connection to trend #3, where technology should be used to amplify humanity, rather than replace meaningful dialogue.
What this means for your people strategy
You need systems that support real-time conversations, surface insights, and bring transparency to development and career growth. More importantly, you need a culture that uses those systems to build trust and connection, not replace it.
How Cornerstone supports it
Cornerstone helps leaders and teams stay aligned and connected by:
- Enabling regular check-ins and performance conversations that are structured, trackable, and tailored to each person’s context
- Providing career pathing and internal mobility tools so employees can see what’s next and how to get there
- Delivering real-time skills data and development histories that give managers visibility into employee progress and support needs
We don’t replace human connections, but we help make the right conversations happen with the right insight at the right time.
Deloitte’s insight
Deloitte calls on organizations to move away from heroic leadership models and instead build leadership as a distributed capability. Leadership today is not just about titles or roles. It’s about how people show up across teams, functions, and levels in moments that matter, using empathy, influence, and adaptability.
Talent shift
Leadership is happening everywhere, on the front lines, within project teams, and in cross-functional collaboration. But many employees aren’t being developed for it. The leadership pipeline is stretched, and organizations need to identify, grow, and support leaders in real time, not just once they hit a certain level.
What this means for your people strategy
You need to embed leadership development across the employee lifecycle. That means designing experiences that are timely, contextual, and inclusive so everyone, from emerging leaders to experienced managers, can grow the skills needed to lead through change.
How Cornerstone supports it
Cornerstone helps organizations scale leadership as a capability by:
- Delivering personalized leadership journeys based on role, experience level, and growth goals
- Embedding on-the-job development through stretch assignments, reflection, and feedback
- Enabling reverse mentorship and peer learning so leadership becomes a shared and evolving skill
- Using skills intelligence to identify hidden potential and align development to business needs
- Exploring immersive experiences such as VR leadership simulations for real-world application
When leadership is treated as a core competency that is accessible, practiced, and measurable, organizations become more resilient, and more people are ready to step forward.
The trends outlined in Deloitte’s 2025 report aren’t problems to solve. They are tensions to navigate. Paradoxes that require organizations to flex, adapt, and rebalance over time. Workforce agility is what makes that possible.
It’s not about choosing one side over the other. It’s about building a workforce that can shift between speed and stability, structure and empowerment, technology and human connection, based on what the business needs in the moment.
Organizations that embrace agile practices like skills-based planning, continuous development, and flexible talent movement are better equipped to manage these tensions and lead with confidence.
At Cornerstone, we define workforce agility as the ability to:
- Understand the capabilities of your workforce in real time
- Align those capabilities to evolving business needs
- Deliver learning and development at scale, with personalization and precision
- Empower employees to move, grow, and lead across the organization
This is where the value of the Deloitte and Cornerstone partnership comes to life. Deloitte helps organizations reimagine strategy, structure, and leadership. Cornerstone delivers the connected technology, intelligence, and learning experiences to bring those strategies to life.
Together, we help organizations rethink how work gets done and provide the tools to make it happen, so you can build a workforce that’s ready for whatever comes next.
Explore the full Deloitte 2025 Human Capital Trends report or connect with us to learn how Cornerstone and Deloitte can help you put these ideas into action.
