HR trends beyond 2026

Written by Karen Robinson from KR 4 HR Coaching & Consultancy

HR is in a really interesting place at the moment. It feels like the conversation has moved beyond the usual employee engagement, wellbeing and flexible working topics into much more practical questions about AI, employment law, leadership, accountability and what HR actually needs to look like in the next few years.

Having had this discussion in various HR circles, I believe there are a few topics that need to be put firmly on our radar.

AI in HR

AI is still huge. But it’s no longer so much, how can HR use AI, but more, where should we use AI, where shouldn't we, and who is accountable when it goes wrong?

I do believe there is space for AI in processes such as recruitment, creating job descriptions and policies, employee communications, analytics and some learning. But I’m also aware of the growing concern around bias, confidentiality, employee data, AI decision-making and governance.

Some may question that if AI can do the administrative part of HR, what value does HR bring to a business? But then we are back to the time served perspective that HR is nothing more than an admin function.

The uniquely human value that HR brings, is in the things that require judgement, empathy, courage, context and relationships.

AI can give you ten possible approaches to a problem, but it can't truly understand the history, personalities, relationships and unwritten dynamics behind a situation in the same way an experienced HR professional can.

It’s clever enough to recognise that someone is upset, but it can’t sit with them, listening to what they're not saying, and respond appropriately. It takes a time served HR professional to know when to challenge someone, how to deliver difficult feedback, when to stop talking and listen, and when a situation is about something completely different from the issue being presented.

Sometimes HR has to say what nobody else wants to hear. When something isn't fair, when the manager is part of the problem, when the business is exposing itself to risk, or when the real issue is being avoided. AI can suggest the wording, but HR has to have the courage to say it, challenge the behaviour, support development, and encourage a different perspective.

And above all employees aren't data points, managers aren't algorithms, and organisations aren't machines. The human part of HR understands people, their personalities, fears, ambitions, relationships, experiences and emotions that they bring into the workplace every single day. AI can help us process information, but it can't replace the human relationship at the heart of HR.

The Employment Rights Act 2025

This is probably the biggest practical issue for UK HR right now. And although we have implemented a number of changes, there are still a number to tackle.

October 2026, sees the employment tribunal time limit increase from three months to six months. Changes to sexual harassment law means employers must take “ALL reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. The new changes also cover employers’ liability for sexual harassment by third parties, including customers and suppliers.

There is a new duty for employers to inform their workers of their right to join a trade union, updates on access for trade union representatives to workplace accommodation, facilities and time off to carry out duties, and increased protection for workers who take part in industrial disputes.

December 2026 sees a change to tipping law where employers will need to consult with their employees before creating or amending their tipping policies, share the summary of the consultations with the employees and update the policies every three years.

And then the work continues into 2027, including:

Reducing the unfair dismissal qualifying period, from 2 years to 6 months along with the removal of the compensation cap, meaning that businesses will need to consider changes to their probation period timeframes and criteria. Firing and rehiring on worse terms and conditions will also automatically be considered unfair dismissal.

There are set to be amendments to flexible working rights relating to rejection reasoning. Employees on low and zero-hours contracts are to be given guaranteed working hours, along with the introduction of compensation and reasonable notice for changes or cancellation of shift patterns.

There are also to be further changes to collective redundancy consultation, more protection for pregnancy and maternity, the introduction of electronic ballots for trade unions, a new statutory right for bereavement leave, mandatory gender pay gap and menopause action plans and finally, legislation that voids clauses in NDAs that prevent disclosure of work-related harassment and discrimination.

For HR, this is massive, it isn't simply “what does the law say, and what is changing? but “how do we implement this change as seamlessly and painlessly as possible into our business?”

HR burnout, exhaustion and the emotional toll

There's growing recognition that HR professionals are expected to absorb everyone else's problems while simultaneously being expected to remain objective, commercially focused and emotionally resilient.

We deal with employee problems, management problems, legal risk, organisational change, wellbeing, recruitment, retention, AI, employment legislation, cost pressures and a myriad of other people related things. And those quick chats that so many people think we can have, are very rarely quick!

Statistics from the Ultimate Resilience Report 2026 showed 62 per cent of HR professionals are likely to burnout, 63 per cent have a low level of wellbeing and 87per cent feel that the support they receive is insufficient. The HR Wellbeing Survey 2025 run by Evolving HR tells a very similar story. 95per cent of HR professionals experience stress and overwhelm, 75per cent have taken time off in the last 12 months due to work related stress and 74per cent have experienced burnout.

Going forward, it seems that the broader people agenda needs to be more about, education, support, connecting work design, wellbeing, leadership and organisational resilience, rather than treating wellbeing as a standalone initiative, or even worse, believing that asking for help is a weakness.

And if burnout and exhaustion aren’t enough, HR are now facing a mental health crisis of our own. The Ultimate Resilience survey found that 73.5per cent of HR professionals are struggling with depression and anxiety, which is 2.5 times higher than the general population. HR is increasingly expected to support mental health, conflict, trauma, personal crises, difficult relationships, neurodiversity, menopause, bereavement, domestic abuse, and financial difficulties, to name but a few, with very little, if any, support coming in our direction.

This creates a huge question around professional boundaries and emotional load, and we should be asking “how can HR care about people, without carrying everyone else's problems home with them?”

The go to answer usually leads to the self care, and the resilience training space, but I believe there is a lot more to it. With 90 per cent of HR professionals feeling lonely (Evolving HR 2025 survey), surely, we should be looking more into specialist coaching services, effective peer networking, and supervision groups?

Employee relations is coming back into the spotlight

I have also picked up on a noticeable shift away from HR being primarily about employee experience and more towards employee relations, accountability and organisational risk. It seems to be evident of the long term effects of Covid, where many people revaluated their lives and decided that they were no longer prepared to put up with things that they would have done so before hand.

HR need to start thinking about preventative measures rather than just solutions for concerns such as, poor performance, absence, conduct, conflict, bullying, and difficult managers, before they result in grievances and disciplinary action. I believe a lot of this will revolve around training managers to notice things before they become something and nipping it in the bud, as well as more informal solutions such as mediation. And with employment tribunal pressures already significant, organisations have even more reason to resolve problems early and well, rather than allowing issues to escalate.

HR needing to get a seat at the table, is old news.

It’s more about what HR actually contribute once we're there. There's much more emphasis on HR demonstrating, commercial understanding, productivity, workforce planning, skills, retention, leadership capability, organisational effectiveness, data, and ROI. We don’t need to become accountants or operations expert, we just need to understand how the business makes money, what affects performance, and how people decisions influence those outcomes.

HR increasingly need to be able to understand a basic P&L and the process flow of the organsiation. How the business makes money, which products/services are most profitable, what the biggest costs are and the biggest constraints. What are the business's growth plans, what do customers need, where productivity is being lost and which roles are genuinely business-critical.

We need to start considering the benefits of measuring outcomes over activity. It’s not so much achieving the numbers, but what financial effect does that have on the business? For examples, lower absenteeism means lower quality concerns, lower customer complaints, a reduction in rebates and an increase in repeat orders, leading to higher profits.

We need to understand bottlenecks in a business, what inefficiencies these lead to and the effect on the business. Is it a training issue, a headcount issue or a management issue? It may be seen as a business problem, but HR can make a hefty contribution to the solution.

It is easy for HR to get caught up in the day to day firefighting but given the opportunity to look strategically we are able to plan workforce requirements, like recruitment, training, and succession planning in line with what the business needs and when. By giving us the opportunity to understand what skills we have in the business, and what we need for the future, it also gives us the opportunity to identify high risk roles and potential successors.

When someone leaves the business, it’s not enough to just start looking for a replacement. HR also needs to understand the economics of retention. It’s not just a colleague moving on, it’s the cost of lost skills and knowledge, recruitment and onboarding the replacement, the financial impact on customers and time lost in order to get the replacement up to speed. Now retention has a financial implication too.

HR often spends a lot of time developing leaders without establishing whether leadership capability actually exists. Business strategy requires:

• commercial thinking

• accountability

• change leadership

• performance management

• coaching

• decision-making

• succession planning

• financial understanding

Create a leadership capability framework linked to the strategy and assess leaders against those capabilities. This helps to identify where the leadership risk is.

When it comes to data, it’s easy to produce a monthly report, but what do the numbers actually mean? We need to be asking what the data is telling us, why it's happening, what trends there are, what the impact on the business is, what are the potential risks and what we recommend needs to be done.

And finally, ROI.

Every significant HR project should be able to identify, how much it cost? What changed? What did that mean financially or operationally to the business? And what did the business get back?

Job hugging

This is one I think you'll find particularly interesting. People are staying in jobs they don't necessarily want because they're nervous about the employment market. So rather than quiet quitting, we're seeing conversations around people holding tightly onto the job they have because leaving feels too risky.

That creates a strange situation, they're still there, but they're not necessarily engaged. Which raises some brilliant HR questions around career development, retention and employee motivation.

Leadership accountability

Organisations are increasingly recognising that it is no longer HR’s responsibility to fix bad managers, culture, engagement, and retention, as leadership behaviour moves much more into the spotlight. Afterall, it’s well known that around 75 per cent of people leave a business because of their line manager and that line management is one of the four main pillars of employee engagement (Galllop Report)

So now, line managers need to become a lot sharper on not just how to run their department, but how to support and develop their people.

Specifically through:

• Culture

• Psychological safety

• Retention

• Performance

• Absence

• Employee relations

• Wellbeing

• Engagement

Don’t get me wrong, HR will always be there to support leaders, by coaching, advising, and challenging them. But they can’t do their leadership for them.

Final thoughts

It would seem that a lot of HR professionals will continue to spin a lot of plates in 2026 and throughout 2027. Whether it be navigating the benefits and pitfalls of AI, rolling out changes to employment law that business leaders don’t agree with, holding everybody and everything together, showing that we are a lot more than just an admin function, understanding people risks and holding others accountable whilst also supporting their growth, and ultimately trying not to break ourselves in the process.

I’m Karen Robinson from KR 4 HR. HR Consultant based in the Midlands and accredited coach who helps UK HR professionals who are emotionally exhausted, struggling with loss of confidence and don’t know who they are anymore.