"Also the younger generations who are happier to work in a coffee shop than in a cubicle will have an increase focus on well-being with far more inventive benefits that are more holistic, whether that be bringing your pet to work, scholarship funds for your kids or unlimited vacation time. We will get more creative. And finally, we will bring social responsibility to the heart of everything we do, because the generations joining the workplace now expect us to balance profit generation with giving back to society and to the environment, and to enable the long-term sustainability of our world."

–Natalie Bickford, group HR director at Merlin Entertainments

 "With the high demand of technology, we will see more efficiencies gained, and we'll have to retrain our managers and supervisors on soft skills and leadership. That will take a significant amount of resources and time to retrain those folks, so we can better engage our employees."

–Chris Mullen, director of HR, housing and dining services at the University of Colorado

"I'm seeing a continued complexity in the relationship between the customer and the employee and the manager. We're seeing it with the likes of CVS and the purchase of Aetna, and the whole relationship is going to put stress and complexity into the work environment."

–Mark Wales, workforce management industry advisor

"My prediction for 2018 is that companies are going to be finally – after sort of being forced into it – spend much more money on training and development. This has been one of the things that over the last eight, 10 years, certainly since the recession, that companies have cut back on. What they're finding now is that many of their employees, or many of the people that they're looking to hire, don't have the skills that they need to really compete. Training and make sure people have the right skills is really the essence of competing and competing for the right talent in the future."

–John Hollon, editor at RecruitingDaily.com, award-winning journalist, and nationally recognized expert on leadership, talent management, and smart workforce practices

2. Employee appetite for accessible, applicable workplace data grows.

"The appetite for data is going to grow even more than it already has. Google has been driving this hunger – the access for information in a useful format. That's going to continue to grow as people consume more and more information, whether it's mobile or through a laptop, or through any other source. This accessed information is going to become demanded in the workplace. Employees are going to want the same access when they go to work, that they have when they're not at work, and that's going to drive the need for analytics. Analytics deployed properly, so people can have access to information in a useful format. That's going to allow them to make better decisions faster."

–John Frehse, senior managing partner at Ankura Consulting Group LLC

"My prediction for 2018 is the rise of the digital workplace for the hourly employee. The digital workplace enables new and exciting ways to work using consumer-grade technology. It's been something that white-collar workers have had at their disposal for a long time through their laptops, through their tablet, and most recently through the ubiquitous mobile phone, but we're going to see that come to the hourly employee this year. It's going to allow them to make better decisions at work, it's going to allow them to do on-demand training, it's going to allow them to really take control of their work-life balance, to the point where they can create their own schedules for when they work."

–Bob Clements, senior principal at Axsium Group

"I'm looking at companies like IBM and blockchain and how this could impact the way that we're actually having a secure network and the ability to be able to have that ledger of activities, perhaps around employment. Then there's Microsoft, and the work they're doing around staff hub and the ubiquitous way to access your schedules, and perhaps in the way that they're using LinkedIn and beginning to affect the way that employees actually plan and manage their jobs. What impact is that going to have on turnover, engagement and tenure?"

–Mark Wales, workforce management industry advisor

3. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning make HR and operations more strategic.

Dan Schawbel, best-selling author and partner and research director at Future Workplace:

"The biggest topic in HR for 2018 will be artificial intelligence. There are some that say that in the next decade, half of all jobs will be automated, while others say that certain tasks within jobs will be automated. Workers in today's economy have to look at the skills in the future, not their current job and responsibilities and they type of skills they have now. Always be looking in the future about how you can address those skills from an HR perspective, and for a professional, to acquire and look to the next set of skills because things are changing rapidly."

David Almeda, chief people officer of Kronos Inc.:

"Artificial intelligence I think will start to really be more prevalent in HR in 2018. More specifically in two spaces: talent acquisition, around screening and sourcing of candidates and being more efficient, and areas like benefits, like tuition reimbursement, career planning, and in all those areas where you can loan into a digitized database and use that learning technology to help employees quickly get answers in a more humanistic way."

Dennis Miller, chief employment officer at Cal Poly Pomona Foundation:

"I don't believe there'll be much change compared to 2017 in the labor market. The one possible change will be with the market in India. The labor market there and the IT sector is starting to be heavily impacted with automation. Hundreds of thousands of those workers are going to need to be retooled, retrained, possibly redeployed. We do have some shortage of workers in the United States – it may be possible that some of those Indian workers that are displaced will transfer to the United States, barring any federal legislation that will prohibit that type of outcome."

China Gorman, a human capital management consultant, speaker, and writer who is former CEO of the Great Place to Work Institute and former COO of the Society for Human Resource Management:

"My prediction is also a request – and that is that we begin to really focus not just on robotics, not just on AI, not just on really some of the large technological changes that are coming, that we absolutely must embrace, but also we have to start paying more finite attention, more pointed attention to the relationships we have between leaders and employees in our organizations if we're going to thrive – and if we're going to retain the critical employees that we need. Leaders really need to be personal and approachable, they need to be authentic, and they need to be trustworthy. They also need to provide and acknowledge meaning in work. Employees today want to understand how what they do plays to the larger good – not just within the organization, but within the community and within the world."

4. More focus on the human side of leadership.

"I think we're going to see a lot more conversation and a lot more investment in ways of creating more trust and transparency in the workplace.

Employees and employers want to find ways to have more open communications, and to build more trusted relationships. That plays up in terms of education for leaders about how to build and maintain relationships in the workplace. That also means leveraging technologies that are already out there that allow employees to work remotely, request a shift change remotely, tools that allow employees to collaborate with each other."

–Joyce Maroney, executive director of The Workforce Institute at Kronos

"The focus is going to be on talent management and culture. For the government sector where I work, I believe that there's a lot of pressure on how do we recruit, how to do retain, how do we develop employees in an economy with very low unemployment. Compensating employees is also a big big issue now because during the recession, governments fell behind on their compensation plans. The whole area of culture is around all that we've been seeing recently about increasing harassment claims and how our senior leaders are addressing those issues."

–Neil Reichenberg, executive director of IPMA-HR

"The area of harassment and harassment prevention I think is going to play itself out in two ways – training, but more importantly, assessment of culture and adjustment of culture. For those organizations that really don't have a handle on this, they need to sit back and be honest with themselves, about how they're going to deal with these things, and what kind of environment they're going to create going forward."

–David Almeda, chief people officer of Kronos Inc.

"Companies are going to be much more accepting of mental wellness. Already we're seeing that companies understand that a third of the U.S. population is suffering from some sort of mental condition. You have a company like PwC, where in the U.K. they all wear badges signifying that it's okay to talk about mental wellness at work. Financial well-being is also a major topic because 78 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and being are still underemployed or unemployed or have just given up on the job search completely, so there's still a lot of struggle still. So even when they get to work, they're stressed out about how they're going to pay back student loans, for example. Companies like Fidelity have gotten behind this and said, hey we're going to help recent graduates who are now Fidelity employees pay back their student loans."

–Dan Schawbel, best-selling author and partner and research director at Future Workplace

5. Retirement moves from a casual conversation to a full-blown crisis – and other uncertainties to grapple with.

"Retirement as a concept is going to move from casual conversation, maybe even an area of concern, to a full-blown crisis. We have lots of people leaving the workforce and organizations aren't ready for that loss of talent – and they need to figure out how they're going to preserve it."

–Sharlyn Lauby, The HR Bartender and president of ITM Group, Inc.

"There's a lot around workforce and succession planning. You have the baby boomers that are leaving in increasing numbers and how our government is going to plan and how are they dealing with the whole issue of workforce management."

–Neil Reichenberg, executive director of IPMA-HR

"We're going to be living in uncertainty, not only regarding exchange rates, but also regarding terrorist attacks and how this impacts some industries. Also natural disasters and also a redefinition of some trade agreements, such as NAFTA. So companies are going to have to learn to deal with a lot of uncertainty."

–Veronica Baz, founder of profesionistas.org.mx and former general director of the Center of Research for Development in Mexico

"There is so much uncertainty in the world, and we just can't re-imagine what's going to happen. This is true in politics, it's true in technology, but even business models – Amazon has a different model, and suddenly you will be getting your tomatoes from what was originally a bookseller. I just can't imagine that was going to be where the competition was coming from if I'm the tomato business. So I predict fear and terror, and I think that should be appropriate, but by same token it's going to be exciting, because you just don't know what's going to happen next."

–David Creelman, CEO of Creelman Research