Future of work narratives can feel about as reliable as a used printer.
But this particular moment in the history of the workforce is perhaps more uncertain than any we’ve previously lived through. The direction that leaders move in when it comes to adopting new skills, work models, and new technologies will play a major part in what work looks like in the near and long term.
Against a backdrop of cautious excitement, our 2024 Workplace Trends Report details the concerns, hopes and predictions of HR leaders from a variety of industries. Combined with expert insight from leading thinkers and practitioners in the world of HR and people operations, the report lays out how leaders are preparing their organizations for the next 10 years.
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Who And What We Asked
We surveyed and interviewed over 200 HR professionals from across industries and geographies. Of the industries represented, the three most common were:
- Software and IT
- Government, public, and nonprofit
- Healthcare, pharma, and medical.
The vast majority (93%) of respondents come from companies with less than 5,000 employees and more than half of them can boast over a decade of experience in people ops and HR.
The questions they were asked to answer regarding the world of work were reasonably simple. We wanted to know:
- What concerns you most in the coming year?
- What workplace trends do you feel the most positive about?
- What do you think the leading trends in human resources will be this year?
- What do you think will cause the biggest disruption to the workforce over the next ten years?
To get answers to these questions, we identified a mix of leaders at major companies, startups, consultancies and even academia to share their insights and help us understand what they think is going to shape technology trends and the future of the workplace.
- Bill Huffaker, Vice President of Talent Management at Workday
- Tina Wang, Divisional Vice President of HR at ADP
- Mary Alice Vuicic, Chief People Officer at Thomson Reuters
- Alex Link, Lead Director, L&D, at CVS Health
- Benedikt Dischinger, Vice President of Finance, People and Culture at DocuWare
- Amanda Halle, Founder & CEO of Mindful Growth Partners
- Weronika Niemcyzk-Savage, Chief People & Culture Officer, Cyncly
- Victoria Myers, Global Head of Talent Management, Amdocs
- Annette Vandamas, Director, People Partner, ABBYY
- Felicia Shakiba, Fractional CPO, CPO Playbook
- Robert Bird, professor of Business Law at the University of Connecticut
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1. The Shifting Talent Market
There have been some significant shifts in the talent landscape over the last year.
While retention is still (and maybe always will be) the top concern for many HR leaders, some have dubbed this shift as “the great stay”, a reference to an era of what seems like talent stability after the years of the “great resignation.”
But, of course, there’s a catch!
Now that you’re keeping this talent, the next question becomes “What are you doing with it?” and “How do we keep people engaged?”
Searching for an answer to this question couldn’t come at a more confusing time as AI becomes not just a tool, but a member of your workforce.
The great promise of AI is that it will free your people from time-sucking admin tasks and low-level creative projects to focus on more strategic aims.
This shift, however, is not something that comes naturally to the workforce, nor is it something that will produce results immediately as people have to be trained on how to implement the technology.
Instead, it will take leadership willing to patiently guide people through a process of rethinking the nature of work and providing them with the skills to remain relevant in the new era.
Image Credit: peoplemanagingpeople.com.
2. The inevitability of AI
Talking about workforce trends without mentioning AI would be like talking about the future of a sport and not mentioning the players.
It’s at the center of every conversation about what comes next, whether that’s how we train and assess people or how workforce planning is conducted.
“When we think across the enterprise, it’s helping people understand the importance of this, because it will impact every single role, and that not only for business success is it essential that people understand the technology and start using it, adopting and experimenting with it, but also their career resilience,” Vuicic says.
AI’s potential value for businesses is unmeasurable. We won’t know for several years where its ceiling is, or if it even has one. Today, people are still the primary driver of business success and the primary goal of implementing AI should be to make them more productive and successful.
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3. DEI Remains With Pay Transparency On The Rise
2023 may have been a tough year for diversity, equity and inclusion, but rolling it back up under HR’s purview after it had become its own thing doesn’t mean the focus on inclusion is going anywhere.
Around 5% of survey respondents cited DEI and pay transparency as an important trend to take note of in 2024 as more states implement pay transparency laws and gender diversity continues to be a priority.
As standard practices around pay transparency change and DEI structures shift, each was going to be ab important topic for HR and people ops professionals.
However, in a year where politics is already going to be on everyone’s mind, it’s likely that DEI and pay transparency get attention from other parts of the organization as well.
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Top Priorities
As we mentioned previously, the talent landscape hasn’t become easier to navigate just because people are starting to leave less frequently. Instead, what they want from employers looks exactly like what the employers themselves want… reskilling and upskilling.
Almost universally, experts predict that learning and development is going to play a big part in what comes next and is at the core of any good talent retention program.
Also among the top trends was something many listed as a top priority in 2024; establishing a return-to-office policy that made sense for their people and continued to meet employee expectations.
The fact is, the pandemic changed people’s mentality around not just where they could work, but where they should work. That isn’t to say those opinions all move in the same direction. There’s a great deal of complexity around people’s experience, needs, the demands of their role, and what sort of environment will serve their professional development and goals best.
“Continuing to offer that flexibility in that hybrid world is going to be key. This builds trust between the employer and the employee and that organization,” Wang said.
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Where Do We Go From Here?
The move to becoming a skills-based organization is something HR teams are going to continue talking about over the next five years.
In a workforce that will soon have five generations inhabiting roles across the business, soft skills and a desire to learn continuously will remain evergreen. For the organization, getting the right people involved at the right time will unlock new ways of working and achieving larger aims.
Sounds great, right? Not so fast. Given the data issues many companies have and their overall preparedness to shift the way they approach talent, a great many organizations interested in a skills based approach simply aren’t ready for it.
“The top to bottom organizational skill taxonomy and cataloging we know is going to die in the next year or so,” says Dan George, CEO and Founder of Piper Key Analytics. “It’s a never ending job and trying to build a new model of it with AI is proving too much work for too little reward.”
George advises that organizations who do well with executing a skills based approach tend to look at what are their critical skills and what’s driving the biggest the largest amount of business growth?
Less of a rigid skills taxonomy is needed and the answers to these questions cannot simply be “the entire organization”. Instead there must be more of a focus on who has the right skills and wants to do certain types of work.
The types of work may not be what you initially hire an employee to do. Job titles will likely lose some of their meaning.
“We want to be able to identify what our employees learned over time, what they’re interested in doing, if we have the right resources for a particular project, etc,” said Victoria Myers, Global Head of Talent Attraction at Amdocs. “It means moving from being job and role-based to looking at what skills we need for a project or initiative and what skills are currently available in the workforce.”
About the Authors:
About Finn Bartram
I’ve been on the editorial team of People Managing People since 2021. I predominantly work with subject matter experts in the HR and leadership fields to produce practical and inspiring content for rapidly scaling startups.
I also keep a keen eye on workforce trends such as AI, the aging workforce and 4-day workweek.
About David Rice
I’ve been writing about HR since the first confirmed cases of COVID turned the industry and workplace on its head. I’ve specialized in the areas of HR technology, DEI, employee experience and talent management. Through that work I’ve been able to consult on leadership development, employee resource groups and employee engagement strategies.
This article originally appeared on Peoplemanagingpeople.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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