HR Practices in Ireland 2025-2026

Conducted in conjunction with Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, our annual report explores the latest insights on the strategies and challenges for the people profession in Ireland.

HR Practices in Ireland 2026 | Report

This year’s report explores how organisations and people professionals are responding to a demanding operating environment and the priorities shaping the profession today. AI disruption, ongoing skills shortages, changing approaches to hybrid working, and rising expectations around wellbeing and inclusion mean that HR’s strategic role has never been more important.

The findings show HR’s growing influence as a strategic partner and cultural leader. They also highlight a widening gap between AI as the biggest driver of change and HR’s readiness to lead AI. The report examines how organisations are approaching talent attraction and retention in a market shaped by skills shortages, housing pressures and the cost of living, and what this means for workforce strategy. It also explores how hybrid working has shifted from debate to day-to-day management, and what effective practice looks like in supporting productivity, performance, and culture. Alongside this, the report considers the ongoing pressures affecting wellbeing and productivity, including mental health, absence, workload and always-on culture, and how organisations are responding.

The report provides clear recommendations and practical guidance to help organisations take action.

HR practices in Ireland 2026

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Key findings and recommendations

Impact of the people profession

HR continues to strengthen its role as both a strategic partner and cultural leader, with 80% reporting an improved perception of the function and 84% recognising its contribution to evidence-based decision-making. This is up significantly from 2025, suggesting the profession is becoming more meaningfully guided by data.

HR continues to deliver strong value across core people priorities - employee experience (93%), championing diversity (91%), learning and development (91%), leading the wellbeing agenda (88%), contributing to strategic direction (87%), and contributing to job design and organisational development (86%).

Perceptions of HR’s role in championing people-centred technology have fluctuated in recent years, rising to 71% in 2026. Despite this progress, technology leadership and analytics remain HR’s weakest areas.

HR impact continues to be constrained by limited line manager capacity (61%), budget constraints (57%) and inadequate systems or technology (37%). Gaps in leadership, digital capability and people data also limit progress.

Recommendations

Define a clear HR target operating model aligned to organisational strategy, with ownership, capacity planning and a people risk focus covering managers, data and AI readiness.
Reset performance expectations for hybrid work, with stronger manager capability, clearer roles and consistent measurement of outcomes.
Build capability in people analytics, data literacy, and responsible AI so that HR can lead on people‑centred governance.
Shift from reactive hiring to capability building, using skills data, workforce planning and succession to address leadership and digital gaps.
Reduce pressure on line managers by simplifying processes, clarifying accountability and supporting managers with tools and standards.
Strengthen people data foundations to improve decision-making and support evolving regulatory requirements, including AI.

External drivers and top priorities for HR and organisations

Organisations are operating in an increasingly complex external environment, with automation, technology and AI the leading drivers of change for the third consecutive year. Continued pressure from talent availability and evolving workforce expectations remain persistent issues.

In a notable shift from 2025, HR priorities are aligning more closely with organisational needs. Culture (40%), talent management and skills development (34%) and digital transformation and AI (31%) emerged as the top HR priorities for 2026, reflecting current business pressures and signalling HR’s growing strategic relevance. Interestingly, leadership capability remains a critical capability gap and constraint on HR, yet this was not given as a top priority but rather ranked fifth on the list.

Recommendations

To continue to align the people strategy to the business strategy, frame the people plan around the organisation’s strategic outcomes (growth, cost, risk, customer, innovation) and show the contribution of culture, skills and technology in measurable terms.
Treat culture as an operating requirement, set clear behavioural expectations, measure engagement and manager effectiveness, and use the data to drive targeted interventions rather than broad campaigns.
Establish cross-functional governance for responsible AI, with HR leading on policy, skills, job impacts and communication. Prioritise clear, consistent workforce data as the foundation.
Engage with strategic workforce planning and capability. Shift from vacancy-filling to capability building through skills taxonomies, workforce forecasting and internal talent pipelines, particularly for leadership and digital skills.
Use organisation design and development to improve agility and efficiency, simplify layers, redesign work around value streams, and deliberately plan where automation removes transactional work and where people move up the value chain.

Digital transformation and AI readiness

Digital transformation and skills shortages will continue to dominate the year ahead, with automation, technology, and AI now the leading drivers of change for organisations for the third year in a row. HR has a key role in ensuring that AI is adopted ethically and responsibly, particularly under emerging regulations, such as the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, where many HR-related applications are likely to be classified as high-risk.

Organisations have moved from seeing AI as a secondary concern in 2025 to their dominant driver of organisational change in 2026, while HR has also shifted upwards in its ranking of AI as a priority, though less sharply. However, HR capability is not keeping pace. Full adoption within HR is minimal (7% in data analysis; 6% in engagement platforms) and the strongest partial adoption is in increasing efficiency (55%), use in data analysis (48%) and automated HR processes (44%) and talent acquisition (43%). Areas like wellbeing (77%) and making predictions (72%) remain largely unsupported by AI. Notably, 67% of HR professionals identified AI for HR as their top professional development priority.

Many organisations are still at an early stage of adoption. Gaps in skills, leadership readiness and governance continue to constrain progress, with only 44% providing clear guidance on AI use, 33% offering training, and just 19% reporting leaders are equipped to lead in an AI-enabled environment.

Recommendations

Build a clear, holistic business case to demonstrate how AI can support the organisation. Ensure that the business case incorporates employee feedback and goes beyond efficiency to support a sustainable workforce and business strategy.
Create a staged AI readiness roadmap for HR. Start with efficiency and data analysis use cases, then scale into more sensitive areas only when governance, data and capability are in place.
Use strategic workforce planning and organisation design to assess roles impacted by automation and put in place job redesign, redeployment, and reskilling plans to support higher-value work.
Use the target operating model and data foundations to standardise workforce data and ensure that HR can produce high-quality, trusted insights for decision-making, compliance, and AI-enabled processes.
Future capability should prioritise AI literacy across all employees, with targeted role-based training for HR, managers and leaders to close the gap between strategic importance and implementation.
Put in place clear AI policy and governance, aligned with EU legislation and covering responsible use, data protection, bias and high-risk HR processes.

Talent management, skills and workforce turnover

Skills shortages remain widespread, affecting 91% of organisations, with leadership and influencing skills (22%), IT / technology skills (32%) and frontline roles (32%) most impacted.

Skills shortages and changing macro environments continue to put recruitment practices, workforce planning and employee turnover under pressure, with 80% reporting difficulty retaining talent. The cost-of-living and housing crises continue to impact recruitment negatively. Organisations are responding by widening talent pools and increasing focus on skills development. Flexible working continues to deliver the strongest impact, while hybrid working is now embedded, shifting the focus to how it is managed. Turnover has increased for one-third of organisations, with career progression (71%) and financial pressures (41%) the main drivers, reinforcing the need for stronger workforce planning and clearer pathways for development and progression.

Recommendations

Use strategic workforce planning to build capability through a clear skills taxonomy, skills-gap data, and scenario planning, creating stronger links between recruitment, internal mobility, and succession planning and future business capabilities.
Strengthen capability and L&D by prioritising leadership and digital/AI skills, with practical pathways for managers to lead hybrid teams, manage performance, and support engagement.
Improve culture and engagement to reduce turnover by strengthening career pathways, transparent progression, and internal mobility, so career progression is achievable inside the organisation, not just by leaving it.
Embed performance and productivity through clear expectations, consistent feedback, and fair outcomes that work across hybrid roles and locations to avoid proximity bias.
Increase use of predictive and diagnostic analytics (turnover, absence, engagement drivers) to identify risks early and move from reactive retention to proactive workforce management.

Sustainable people practices

There has been a huge increase in organisations having a strategy on sustainable people practices, with 61% of organisations now reporting that they have one – up from just 18% in 2025.

Recommendations

Strengthen sustainable people practices by building governance, capability, and data into your operating model, using the CIPD Sustainable People Practices framework as a practical guide to embed sustainability and meet ESG/CSRD requirements. Sustainable people practices framework - Sustainable HRM Skillnet

Wellbeing and productivity

Productivity improved in 60% of organisations, with hybrid working, digitalisation and improving workforce enablement as the primary drivers.

With 60% of organisations citing productivity benefits from their integration of AI and 39% reporting no change, this would suggest that productivity gains are less about technology adoption alone and more about how effectively technology is integrated.

Wellbeing pressures continue to affect progress within productivity levels, with over a third reporting challenges and 28% increased absence – 51% of respondents cited mental health as the leading cause of absence. Flexible and remote working continues to play a positive role, with 86% agreeing it improves wellbeing and 72% agreeing that it contributes to an inclusive workplace.

Recommendations

Strengthen productivity and performance management by defining clear expectations on what “good performance” looks like in each role and team, aligning objectives to organisational goals, and measuring outcomes consistently across hybrid settings.
To help mitigate wellbeing as a performance risk, embed wellbeing through culture and engagement, making it part of how work is led, with clear norms, psychological safety and strong people management.
Treat line manager time and skill as a material constraint; design and apply the target operating model to simplify people processes, set clear standards, provide tools and coaching, and set minimum standards for manager practice in performance, absence and wellbeing.
Improve organisation design and job design to reduce workload strain, clarify priorities, and remove low-value work to protect capacity for higher-value activity.
Use AI and digital responsibly by setting expectations for always-on behaviours, supporting the right to disconnect, and assessing impact on workload and wellbeing.
Use workforce data (absence, engagement, turnover, workload indicators) to target interventions, track impact, and make the business case for investment.