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    Evolving the Workplace Through Rebellious Trends

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    Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of workplace trends develop which have taken over the headlines of nearly every career website and blog. Some, like remote and hybrid work, have resulted from the natural evolution of a post-pandemic workplace. Others, like “quiet quitting,” are simply old concepts (employee disengagement) given a catchy new name by TikTok influencers.
    But still, other trends take on a different form – one of rebellion and dissension. Today’s employees have watched the workplace change drastically in a relatively short time, and not always for the better. The current strength of a candidate’s job market and the ubiquity of trending hashtags have emboldened workers to make a few changes of their own, both to their post-pandemic work routine as well as to the way things have always been done.
    As employees continue to push boundaries, employers must now choose their battles as they determine which are really necessary to retain top talent while driving growth and profitability. Let’s look at a few workplace trends that have resulted from dissatisfaction and a desire for change.
    Coffee Badging
    Over the past year, many employers that have allowed employees to work remotely since the start of the pandemic have reversed course, now demanding a return to office. Leading the charge are high-profile companies like Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft, all extolling the virtues of “coming together” in the office several days a week. However, some employees who have worked from home for over three years are taking issue with the requirement. Their solution? Make a brief appearance in the office just long enough for security badge records to show they were there, then head out. While some may see this as a dishonest method of gaming the system, others view it as a way for employees to take back the leverage they rightfully earned while keeping companies afloat throughout the pandemic.
    Office Peacocking
    Upon witnessing the backlash to RTO mandates, some employers are hoping to quash the rebellion by doing some redecorating. After years of working from the comfort and familiarity of their homes, employees need some extra incentive to reacclimate to an office setting. Forgoing the allure of ping-pong tables and free snacks that workers now consider way too 2010, employers have opted to overhaul their offices, replacing sterile cubicle farms with inspiring décor. These redesigned workspaces prioritize collaboration and comfort through their use of vibrant colors, plants and natural light with the intention of easing employees’ transition from home back to a corporate environment.
    Hush Tripping
    Each year, millions of paid vacation days go unused. Furthermore, when employees do take time off, 29% say they feel guilty for doing so. If only there were a way to take some much-needed time away from work without burning any PTO, all while avoiding the ire of managers and coworkers who are left to cover the workload. For some, the answer is simple – pack up and go, then work remotely while enjoying vacation time that no one needs to know about. After all, as long as work gets done, does it really matter where it gets done? And if it helps prevent a disengaged or burnt-out workforce, all the better. This trend highlights the importance of work-life balance to employees, as well as the need for open communication with managers.
    Resenteeism
    For those who don’t like their jobs, there used to only be two options – keep slugging it out or quit. Now, there’s a custom flavor for every disengaged worker’s palate. For those who are willing to complete their job duties but not go above and beyond, there’s quiet quitting. For those who want to throw a wrench in the system and go out with a bang, there’s loud quitting. But somewhere in between, there are those who are openly dissatisfied with their jobs, but unwilling or unable to make a move due to economic or job security concerns. In fact, due to recent tech layoffs and the spiraling cost of living, both quiet and loud quitters may show signs of resenteeism and stick with their current roles – a distinct departure from the Great Resignation.
    Every few months, the workplace evolves, and the ease with which we’re now able to communicate via social media has accelerated its evolution. Workers haven’t been shy about voicing their concerns and frustrations, and while employers may push back on some issues, they have had little choice but to bend in order to stay competitive. The number of viral workplace trends and hashtags over the past year demonstrates employees’ dissatisfaction and desire for change. And though we’re nearly three years removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, the workforce is caught between settling into old habits and prompting the change that should have occurred years ago. Stay tuned…the next chapter is soon to come.
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      in Workplace

      6 Workplace Wellbeing Trends that Will Continue to Rise in 2024 

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      According to our 2023 Healthier Nation Index, 44 percent of us said our jobs had negatively impacted our mental health at some point this year.
      Employers have a responsibility to help individuals manage both their physical and mental wellbeing. But it’s clear businesses still need to work harder to provide targeted support to their employees.
      But the good news is that changes in the corporate world are trying to make this possible. Previous Nuffield Health research showed that 2 in 3 businesses offer physical and mental wellbeing to their workplaces.
      With this in mind, I suggest six workplace wellbeing trends we can expect to see grow in prominence in 2024.
      #1 Workplace ergonomics
      Our 2023 Healthier Nation Index showed that 36 percent have taken time off work due to musculoskeletal issues, which shows there’s a significant need for physical wellbeing support in the workplace.
      As we move into a more permanent hybrid work set-up in 2024, we’ll see the development of specialist programs and more technological innovations as potential solutions to improve workplace efficiency and prevent MSDs.
      For example, wearable technologies like exoskeletons are revolutionary mechanical frames that a worker can wear to support and protect the body from the strain of arduous work. Research shows they can offload up to 40 percent of a load, and reduce the labor required by muscles.
      Virtual reality is also on the rise, as it can assist in employee training by simulating work environments and helping employees identify workplace hazards.
      Away from tech and innovations, it’s vital for employees and employers to note their legal requirements to provide a provision at work and at home including desk and DSE assessments.
      #2 Shifting organizational values.
      Research shows the hybrid work model has been forecasted to rise to 81 percent adoption, with Gen Z amongst its most enthusiastic supporters.
      In the past, we may have seen resistance to such demands from businesses, but now, more than ever, employers are working on ways to stay open to employee suggestions and adapt work models accordingly.
      We’ll see more of this in 2024, which highlights that workplaces are beginning to understand the importance of ensuring workers are satisfied across the board rather than just adequately remunerated.
      Companies will continue to focus on how to improve work/life balance, wellness, intellectual challenge, and personal growth and development.
      #3 Non-negotiable self-care
      According to our research, only 15 percent of us take more time to focus on self-care, when trying to support our mental health. Self-care time has traditionally been reserved for outside work hours, like a morning walk or a hot bath at night.
      However, work is invariably intertwined with our life routines, and it’s becoming clear to businesses that weaving moments of self-care throughout the day will be more beneficial to employees than grinding through a hard day and leaving their “me” time for later.
      In 2024, we’ll see more businesses encouraging their employees to educate themselves on their self-care needs. More will provide employees with helpful tools or sessions that encourage them to slow down and breathe.
      Whether it’s introducing company mindfulness sessions, inviting in experts to teach individuals about different self-care practices or researching new ideas that could potentially benefit the whole team, building awareness will be key to many businesses next year.
      #4. Inclusive wellness initiatives
      Workplace wellness is for everyone, and in 2024, diversity and inclusion efforts will continue to extend to wellness programs.
      Many businesses are starting to rethink their benefits offerings to promote fairness, equal opportunity and prevent burnout. For example, is offering a subsidized gym membership a benefit if employees are not located near a gym or able to afford the reduced membership?
      To address such disparities, gathering feedback from employees is essential. Understanding their unique needs and challenges allows tailoring benefits to address immediate concerns.
      In 2024, there’ll be a heightened focus on ensuring that every employee, regardless of background or abilities, has access to the support and resources they need to thrive.
      #5 Reducing financial stress.
      Our 2023 Healthier Nation Index revealed 59 percent of individuals believed the cost of living or a change in personal finances had negatively impacted their mental health over the past year.
      Financial worries can significantly impact mental health, and without effective support, mental health conditions can affect a person’s confidence and identity at work.
      More businesses will adapt their wellness offerings to enable employees to cut costs where they can. For example, offering flexible work options, like remote work, flexible hours, or compressed workweeks, can help employees better manage their schedules and save on commuting costs.
      There’ll also be a greater focus on offering childcare benefits or access to discounted childcare services, which will also support employees in managing the high costs associated with childcare.
      #6 NOT sleeping on the job.
      Our Healthier Nation Index highlighted that poor sleep is still a huge issue across the nation. On average, Brits are only getting 5.91 hours of sleep a night, this is down from 6.11 in 2022 and 6.19 in 2021.
      There still exists a vital need for employers to be more attuned to the sleep needs of their staff and the potential role it has in improving employees’ physical and emotional wellbeing if businesses prioritize its importance.
      In 2024, more companies will collaboratively engage with their healthcare partners to bolster sleep education and the relevant employee benefits needed to support those struggling.
      We believe more businesses will provide wellbeing support through external services like cognitive behavioral therapy, an effective therapeutic therapy for insomnia. CBT-I considers how your thoughts and beliefs about sleep may influence your sleep behaviors, examines behaviors and habits around sleep, and introduces techniques like relaxation and sleep restriction.
      By Marc Holl, Head of Primary Care at Nuffield Health.
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      in Talent Acquisition

      Top 2022 Recruiting Strategies for Fast, Effective Hiring

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      In December 2021, total payroll employment rose by 199,000 nationwide, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%. But despite the solid rehiring in the last few months, the labor force participation rate remains short of pre-pandemic levels.
      A low participation rate – coupled with a labor shortage that is giving workers more leverage than they have experienced in years – is continuing to challenge employers in attracting and retaining key talent.
      While positive for workers, the competition for talent is expected to last well in 2022. And though hard to predict what the future will hold in this candidate-driven market, it is clear that hiring will not get easier in the coming year. To overcome this, recruiting teams should turn to various tools including talent acquisition (TA) planning “workbooks,” which are catalogs of tools designed to help recruiters approach strategic recruitment in the new year with a reimagined gameplan.
      Create a high-level strategy
      The first step in improving recruiting strategies this year is creating a strategic and detailed plan to help achieve 2022 hiring goals, including anticipating the number of new hires over the next 12 months. Recruiting teams should work with their executive leadership team to understand what the company’s strategic plans are for the new year, and in turn, what roles they will need to hire.
      This is also a key time to examine if a team should:

      Conduct employee engagement surveys, which can help anticipate satisfaction, engagement, and turnover.
      Study historical trends, as some employee turnover and hiring needs can be cyclical. For example, many employees make the decision to leave their current jobs in January.
      Estimate the impact of the “Great Resignation” on your employee base and anticipate increased employee turnover as well as expectations such as increased wages, better working conditions, remote work options, flexible workplaces (especially for working parents), and improving diversity, equity, & inclusion (DE&I) efforts.
      Similarly, get a firm understanding of DE&I goals for 2022, as well as any plans for attracting, hiring, and retaining talent from all walks of life.
      Consider any internal mobility or promotions anticipated that will lead to the need for new hires. Additionally, determine the anticipated number of new employees needed by role, location, and business unit.

      This strategy should help establish goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Recruiting teams should set a realistic number of goals that a given team could achieve depending on team size, maturity of the TA function, and the company’s strategic plans. A great way to think about goals is to put the team into the future: “By Dec. 31, 2022, the team will have hired 10,000 new employees, increased the percentage of underrepresented employees by 10%, and reduced time-to-hire by 30%.”
      Build targeted audience plans
      Another strategy recruiters can employ in 2022 is identifying, prioritizing, and nurturing the audiences most important to the organization. Specifically, this includes:

      Key talent audiences: These audiences have the experience and skill set to fill high-volume jobs, geographically targeted jobs, or critical jobs like executive hiring.
      Strategic audiences: These demographic groups that businesses want to attract such as underrepresented candidates, veterans, and military hiring, along with university relations for students, interns, and recent graduates.
      Relationship audiences: These include candidates that the business already has a known relationship with, including employees, alumni, employee referrals, contingent workers, and past applicants, such as high-potential candidates.

      Most companies are already focused on developing great content, whether it be through clear job descriptions, cultural videos, or company blogs as means to attract and engage new job seekers. To ensure this content is seen by the right candidates, recruiters should incorporate targeted audience planning into the research and development steps that come right before the content is built. Before executing any recruitment marketing effort, TA professionals should gather a team made up of a representative from marketing, recruiting, customer success, sales, and employees who match the type of hires the company is looking to attract in order to ensure materials are seen through multiple perspectives within the organization.
      Overall, organizations need to become more adaptable to labor market conditions in the new year. In addition to the above, this can include automating recruiting processes and leveraging innovative technology such as intelligent messaging and chatbots, as well as outsourcing more jobs and making more internal hires.
      These strategies are just the beginning of ways teams can ramp up hiring efforts in 2022. Because of the constant change in the TA landscape over the last year, it can be difficult to know where to begin when preparing for the new year in recruiting. But with the worksheets as a tool, recruiting teams can take stock of current programs and make data-driven decisions to get better results from future processes, ensuring a positive return on their hiring budget for the new year.
      By: Kerry Gilliam, Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Jobvite.
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      How Remote Work Can Foster Inclusion and Psychological Safety

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      People success platform leader Glint, part of LinkedIn, has published results on workplace culture that show that remote work is creating more inclusive and psychologically safe workplace experiences. The company’s Head of EMEA People Science tells us more.
      Our global pandemic-initiated shift to remote work has had many consequences, but one that isn’t called out as much as it should be is equality. In many ways, remote work has equalized opportunities for employees to be heard and seen. In a virtual work environment, every meeting looks the same, and each person takes up the same space on the screen, from the CEO to the intern.
      Virtual work bolsters inclusivity
      Glint has tracked a range of metrics about our changing workplace over the past year. Their latest trends report notes that employers that have committed to supporting remote work appear to be creating more inclusive and psychologically safe work experiences as a result. In companies that support remote working, workers feel freer to speak their minds and see their companies as valuing diversity.
      The analysis used a number of measures to derive its conclusions, including how many remote work-permitted job postings an employer puts on LinkedIn (over 275,000 adverts were surveyed from 375 organizations). Millions of Glint survey responses from over 600 organizations were also fed into the model. The analysis shows that employees at remote work-friendly firms were 14% more likely to feel safe speaking their minds. 9% are more likely to report that their leaders value different perspectives, compared to their peers in less remote work-friendly brands.
      The study shows that virtual work creates many features that can bolster employees’ feelings of inclusivity. Virtual work can provide flexibility to people with caregiving responsibilities, bypass location bias, and reduce the amount of time and energy required to conform to potentially unhelpful ‘professionalism’ standards, for instance.
      As organizations re-examine how to foster diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the new world of work, early signs indicate they’d do well to build on virtual work and expand habits, programs, and tools that help people bring their authentic selves to work.
      Culture in the new world of work
      This matters, as the survey also highlights the fact that what team members see as defining a great work culture has changed dramatically over the first year of the Covid pandemic—50% of the top 10 drivers in 2020 were not in the top 10 in 2019. Opportunities to learn and grow have emerged as the strongest drivers of work culture, shooting up eight positions.
      In the first half of 2020, employees’ sense of belonging also started to impact employee happiness, increasing by 12% to become the second most important characteristic people look for to describe a great work culture. That’s one of the ways in which work culture has changed drastically in 2020. Work culture was once shaped heavily by in-person interactions—coffee breaks, shared meals, team retreats, and the like. But when the pandemic not only stripped away physical interaction but also threatened our safety, the less tangible drivers of work culture—growth opportunities, belonging, and values—became more important to employees.
      There’s also a positive uplift here for recruitment and retention, as the research shows that employees at organizations with highly rated cultures are 31% more likely to recommend working there to peers and contacts, and 15% more likely to report being happy working there.
      Employees want more from their employers now than just a pay packet. They want to be challenged, and they want to work in a space where they can bring their whole selves.
      By Steven Buck, Head of EMEA People Science at Glint.
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      in Workplace

      Modern Office Trends for 2020

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      Professionalism in the workplace is a topic that continues to evolve as we head into a new year and a new decade. Gone are the days of the completely formal office environment stuffed with cubicles and suits. Today those are being rapidly replaced with open floor layouts and casual dress codes. Business owners are shifting […] More