In the summer of 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, everyone across the globe waited to see what would happen next.
The employment world was no different. In my role as a workforce futurist, I help organizations anticipate and prepare for near-future disruptions. As part of ongoing work with the US government, I produced a summer 2020 forecast for 2022-25. I asked: what impact would the pandemic have on employment two to five years forward?
Futurist professionals use a combination of methodologies to make our forecasts, including environmental scanning for emerging changes, trend analysis, and scenario planning. Although COVID-19 was in some ways an unprecedented event, similar crises had befallen the world before. Futurists examine published public and private sector research as well as media and expert commentary to try to extrapolate what those outcomes might mean for the current situation. The U.S. government was very interested in this expertise when faced with the first global pandemic in more than one hundred years.
In addition to the permanent installation of distributed work (which was fairly obvious even in 2020), I guessed that between 2022 and 2025, the world would be plagued by mass layoffs –due to potential economic instability resulting from the pandemic crisis.
Plus, I anticipated an escalating mental health crisis among workers after suffering the collective trauma of isolation during COVID-19.
Over the next few years, I kept my eye on whether the forecasted twindemic of layoffs and rising mental health issues was actually coming to fruition.
As of mid-2023, Zippia reported that 40% of all Americans had been laid off from a job at least once, and nearly one-third had been laid off within the last two years.
In the first ten months of 2023, the technology industry alone laid off a quarter million people. And, available unemployment solutions continued to underperform, resulting in the average unemployed citizen being out of work for 23 weeks, according to 2022 Statista research.
Most importantly, a 2023 study based on surveys in 29 nations published by Harvard Medical School in The Lancet Psychiatry journal found that in the post-pandemic era, one out of every two people in the world will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime.
Organizations Answer the Call for Employee Health Support
Many global organizations did recognize the psychological impact the pandemic was having on employees and stepped-up efforts to help them. For example, at Pinterest, employees who lost childcare or were caring for an ill family member could receive financial compensation for up to four weeks. And JPMorgan Chase implemented a well-being app to query employees about their mental health and stress levels on a weekly basis. By monitoring the app’s data, HR could provide struggling teams with customized support.
As the pandemic progressed, my research team noted a general increase in technology-based mental health offerings.
Two notable programs include the Spring Health mobile app – which prompts employees to take a guided mental health assessment and then matches them with a dedicated care navigator – and the Flourish DX app, which collects and reports employee mental health assessments to health and safety professionals as well as HR staff.
Similarly, there’s Lyra, a service that offers employees access to individualized care including self-guided programming, mental health coaching, and medication management. Lyra’s leaders claim that an astounding 88% of program users improve with care.
Given the frequency and severity with which layoffs and mergers are taking place – as the Zippia and Statistica data shows – it is clear that organizations need to continue to support their former employees.
And to a degree, thanks to stellar outplacement services firms like LHH, Right Management, and Mercer, this is happening. Mercer, for instance, claims that its outplacement services offerings help transitioning employees and displaced employees land a new job nearly 2.5X faster than the national average.
LHH’s outplacement services programs with Rexam were in part responsible for the business saving £22 million during an acquisition. And Right Management guided a global technology corporation employing over 400,000 people in more than 175 countries through an outplacement program that resulted in 81% of released candidates moving into a new role.
The trouble is, mental health and extensive job search support for laid off employees tends to be reserved for those at more senior levels. And economists say that more senior individuals are less vulnerable to the cascading effects of unemployment and can often afford to private services out of their own pocket.
The Far-Reaching Consequences of Unemployment
The long-term effects of unemployment on personal wellbeing are noted in several studies summarized by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
In short, unemployed individuals face reduced income, compromised physical health, strained relationships, poor academic performance for their children, and sometimes a permanent loss of self-esteem, self-worth, and intrinsic motivation.
This decrease in motivation subsequently creates a decrease in job seeking behavior, which means the problem then becomes a vicious cycle leading to prolonged periods of unemployment.
Unemployed individuals, especially those in lower to middle income brackets, are less likely to have the money and resources to spend on coaching and therapy that will help them get back on their feet.
A Futurist’s Forecast Leads to Tangible Action
Yes, forecasts are part of my job as a futurist, but the ideal is for my work to not just be theoretical.
I want to use my forecasts to actively generate solutions that can make the world of work better – so back in the summer of 2020, my consulting organization alongside academics at Northwestern University and the Feinberg School of Medicine put together a grant proposal with the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The result was DRIVEN – an experiential platform designed to guide high-risk workers back to employment while supporting them through what is often a deeply worrying and traumatic time.
DRIVEN’s six-week program is app-based and combines evidence-based cognitive behavioral techniques (CBT) with traditional job search strategies. Although CBT has entered the public’s awareness thanks to self-serve mental health apps, these techniques have not been traditionally leveraged in the career development and coaching space despite employment’s obvious impact on emotional well-being.
The program includes a range of tools including videos, exercises, and live coaching – because we believe the structure and accountability provided by a human partner is critical to success and that’s what a lot of today’s mental health apps are missing.
Every time a newly unemployed worker engages with the program, they encounter diversity of age, race, and ethnicity because we want our participants to see themselves reflected in every video host, coach, video, image, and animation they come across in DRIVEN.
When we first received our grant, our hope was that the resulting program would be in development and efficacy testing via clinical trial for three years, and by the time it was ready, the world would need it more than ever.
Now, as we near the end of that tenure, we hope that DRIVEN serves as an example of how forecasting can be used to produce tools that genuinely have an immediate impact on the health of the global workforce.
At its core, strategic foresight is an exercise in imagination, and the good news is, anyone with expertise and experience in a given industry, organization, or company can use it to shape policy, plan effective interventions, and avoid risk. HR professionals next must take the courageous step of looking likely futures in the eye and developing strategies that may seem “ahead of their time” now but may prove essential later.
This post was originally published on UNLEASH.
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