All good things must come to an end.
My syndicated WSJ column, The Workplace Report, is coming to an end. The last 20 months have involved an unprecedented amount of change in the workforce and human resources spheres. I'm leaving it with five major predictions for the near future world of work, featuring Workplace Report highlights from the last year and a half of coverage.
The demand for skilled workers will reach a crisis point due to demographic shifts and falling fertility rates. According to Manpower Group’s 2023 Talent Shortage Survey, 77% of global employers say they are already struggling to find workers with the right mix of technical skills and human capabilities.
Talent intelligence, internal talent mobility, skills-based hiring, and the rise of short-term, rapidly assembled teams comprised of a mix of people with different geographies and employment arrangements – including contract workers and the first permanent WFH employees – will alleviate the squeeze.
Generative AI spreads its influence across industries. Generative artificial intelligence is a form of AI capable of generating text, images, or other media by learning the patterns and structure of input training data and then generating new data that has similar characteristics.
In the coming years, we will see expanded accessibility and impact via AI democratization, the integration of AI into a variety of work functions, and numerous use cases developed and publicized. People are unlikely to lose their jobs due to Gen AI alone, but rather to a human who knows how to work with Gen AI. And managers will need a whole new skillset to supervise human workers empowered by AI to make independent decisions.
Organizations are called to step up holistic employee care. In keeping with the longstanding view of employees as commodities, most organizations have been unaccustomed to concerning themselves with aspects of employee lives outside what they did between office walls.
However, as the definition of full-time employment becomes more fluid and mental health and burnout numbers remain higher than pre-pandemic, some (but not all) organizations will answer their employees’ calls for help (retaining COVID-19-era benefits and adding new ones, managing layoffs effectively, etc.).
Employee experience will rise to the forefront as an essential part of engagement. Across the employee lifecycle, from talent acquisition to onboarding to learning and development, performance management, and offboarding, companies are making progress customizing their employee experiences to different groups depending on their unique journeys and requirements. Diversity, equity, and inclusion and allyship strategies will continue to be a priority for the most forward-thinking organizations.
The employee experience of the next several years is high tech and high touch and focuses on two overarching themes: purpose and flexibility. Also, the employee experience of 2030 will likely begin to include the metaverse, which will greatly impact organizational culture and work structures.
HR compliance is rising to a never-before-seen level of complexity. This has involved hundreds of new regulations associated with re-opening, distributed and remote work, vaccination, and labor relations, as well as those associated with human capital disclosures, pay transparency, and the increasing use of AI in organizations.
It is just a matter of time before lawmakers draft guardrails to use these technologies ethically and to safeguard sensitive data. As these regulations will vary by country, state, or locality, this will be increasingly difficult for HR and workforce professionals to keep up with.