BCG Creating People Advantage Reports: The Collection

HR leaders must address a wide-ranging array of topics, from training and development to strategic workforce planning to HR architecture and people analytics. The advent of AI adds urgent new challenges and opportunities. Today, CHROs must understand how AI is reshaping workstreams and processes and build the right talent to capitalize. To help HR leaders meet these evolving demands and prioritize the most impactful topics, BCG partnered with the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) to periodically survey thousands of business and HR leaders—one of the biggest and longest-running people management analyses in business. Taken together, these reports offer a longitudinal view of how people management priorities evolve, and where HR leaders should focus their time and attention right now. Underscoring all of these areas is the continuing need for HR to directly serve business units and create value.

Explore 2026’s Biggest People Management Priorities

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The matrix above allows you to gauge 28 people management topics across two dimensions: their future importance, as ranked by more than 7,000 HR and business leaders in our survey, and companies’ current capabilities in those topics. This cross-cutting analysis identifies the biggest priorities: those deemed to be most important in shaping company performance in the future, and where companies currently report lower capabilities. In particular, digital solutions made the biggest jump in terms of their future importance among respondents, but current capabilities in this area are among the lowest overall. That underscores the need for CHROs to redouble their efforts in implementing AI.

From the first Creating People Advantage report published in 2008 to the most recent, we have maintained a consistent goal: to help HR leaders prioritize their resources on the most impactful topics to improve workforce and overall enterprise performance. Past analyses can provide key insights on how those priorities have changed, enabling HR and business leaders to look back on their performance and determine where they excelled and where they might have done even better. Taken together, our Creating People Advantage reports offer a longitudinal view of both the quest for business value and the evolving people management agenda for HR leaders. The previous reports appear here in reverse chronological order.