Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

The Future of Workspace in the Age of Adaptability

Most global cities are taking a long time to recover their pre-pandemic vibrancy, and that’s in large part to ongoing low utilization of corporate office space. As shared in ManpowerGroup’s Age of Adaptability research, organizations are experiencing a culture revolution in which the traditional office environment takes a back seat to more dynamic, flexible places of work.

Leaders accustomed to rigid, in-person workplaces and schedules may wish for the world to return to the way it was (hence the return-to-office or RTO wars), but workforce futurists believe that ongoing societal disruptions and employee pushback are likely to change the model permanently.

Let’s examine what’s happening and why, and how the question of the future of workspace is likely to be answered in the end.

The State of Office Space in 2025

Pervasive corporate office vacancies speak for themselves. And according to CBRE’s Office Occupier Sentiment survey, more than half of executives anticipate further reductions of their office footprints to trim unoccupied space, with most executing this upon lease expirations that will occur within the next few years. Similarly, Altus Group found that the cumulative volume of 2023 office transactions was 43% below 2020 levels, and 57% below the 10-year average over the same period. 

In a conversation I had with Brad Serot, vice chairman at commercial real estate consultancy CBRE, I learned that many organizations are still committed to an office-centric approach. But a majority of CBRE’s survey respondents are seeking flexibility in lease agreements, including more latitude to expand or contract their total space, and shared building services and amenities.

The research picked up on a trend toward “flight to quality,” in which organizations are relocating to newer and more desirable buildings – of which there’s a limited supply. The highest-performing options today combine walkability as well as housing and high-end experiential retail.

Serot said that rather than just telling their workforces how things will be, smart leaders work alongside employees to design spaces that provide the appropriate structure and technology support based on geographic, industry, and company-specific norms as well as employee choice.   

This model works best when each corporate-sponsored physical office has a designated purpose – such as hosting in-person meetings, offering individual employee hoteling space, or placing team members on the same schedule in a neighborhood-type environment.

International Workplace Group CEO & Founder Mark Dixon himself described modern office space planning as a “hub and spoke model, with smaller central offices, more regional hubs, and growing numbers of local satellite offices.” He said that the concept of the 15-minute city – the idea that any place a person would need to go would be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of one’s home – saves time, is good for individuals’ health, and fosters community.

The Rise of Third Places 

I’ve been working in coffee shops since 2005. Once upon a time, I was the only person with a laptop in the store. Now, the preference to work at coffee places is so pervasive that some have had to implement “no laptop” policies to keep their establishments from being turned into mini-offices. 

In sociology, the third place refers to social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. Third places require either direct or indirect social interaction with other people and are also defined by the fact that no one is forcing you to be there. Besides coffee shops, popular third places for remote and hybrid workers include libraries, clubhouses, and conference centers. Coworking spaces like WeWork and Regus are good examples of businesses built on the premise of the third place. 

Some employees find third places desirable because they boost motivation and productivity, may have fewer distractions, and may also encourage them to get out of the house and look presentable. And given their popularity, leaders need to weigh whether it’s better for remote and hybrid employees to work in an independent third place or in the aforementioned regional hubs or local satellite offices.

Certainly, thorny issues like skill-building, confidentiality, privacy, and data security are easier to solve when an employee is working under a company-sponsored roof. Company-sponsored workspaces that are close to home may also boost connection and relationship building because one can see coworkers in person while working at the same location.

For the rest of the piece, check out the ManpowerGroup full blog series.

The Changing Nature of the Employer/Employee Social Contract

Over the last decade, employee expectations in the workplace have changed in a variety of interesting ways. Technological advances, a steady march toward globalization, unionization, and societal disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have fundamentally shifted the nature of the relationship between organization and worker. And while this relationship might not be as straightforward and “quid pro quo” as it was in the past, the evolution opens opportunities for both employer and employee growth, as well as a positive transformation of culture and the employee experience.  

Let’s take a closer look at some of the intricacies of this changing relationship and how employers may need to rethink their workforce strategies to succeed amid these new realities.  

Employees are commodities no more

As Mercer’s Kai Anderson, Ilya Bonic, and Kate Bravery wrote in their recent book Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age, employees have traditionally been seen as assets working under a transactional loyalty contract in which pay, benefits, and security were exchanged for time and output as dictated by the company.  

“The pandemic quickened the pace toward what we call the thrive contract – an employment model anchored in purpose, equity, and impact,” the authors said. “Employees demanded a healthier experience in exchange for a commitment to the organization’s renewal.” 

As part of the thrive contract, instead of viewing employees as commodities, employers care for employees in a holistic manner – supporting the whole person and both their personal and professional objectives. And this requires a shift in the very definition of what constitutes full-time employment and what is expected from full-time employees (FTEs). 

The meaning and relevance of full-time employment is changing 

A full-time job is generally one that requires employees to work a minimum of 30 hours a week, but in many countries, there is no legal definition of full-time employment, and specific arrangements are left to the employer and company policy.  

So, while the number of hours is standard, the timeframe in which an FTE works those hours has become far more flexible. Rather than being defined as work from Monday-Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, work scheduling arrangements for FTEs now run the gamut and include four-day work weeks, rotating in office and remote workdays, and shift swapping.  

Some FTEs use the increasing flexibility as an opportunity to devote more time to personal pursuits, while others take on other roles like gig work. Either way, employee work-life balance has become a central concern of organizations who once did not bother themselves with what went on outside company walls. For instance, employers who have implemented in-office mandates are now often expected to make those mandates easier for employees by providing childcare and transportation assistance.  

Furthermore, in the old contract between employers and FTEs, a “job” was well defined. FTEs already possessed most of the skills necessary to perform that job and were compensated accordingly. Today, employers are redesigning jobs in real time to make room for smart technology partners, and employee upskilling and reskilling efforts must keep pace.  

For the rest of the article, head on over to the Dayforce blog.

Kelly Monahan on Why the Future of Leadership is Emotionally Intelligent

Over the last decade, I've had the privilege to work with the brilliant Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan while they were at Deloitte, and then again with Kelly as a future of work subject matter expert for Upwork, where she leads the Upwork Research Institute. When I learned they were writing a book together, I couldn't have been more excited, and Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts Are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership has certainly delivered on its title. I recently sat down with Kelly for a Q&A to share more details about the book writing process and the 21st century leadership advice we can't afford to ignore.

How did you two meet each other and how did this collaboration come about?

Kelly: Christie and I met almost a decade ago at Deloitte. She and I began to partner on research together and figured out pretty quickly we enjoyed working together. I bring more of that analytical research thinking while she brings the executive strategic viewpoint. Our paths then crossed again at Accenture where we started kicking around the idea of a book, but the timing just wasn't quite right. Finally in 2023 we were both at a point to visit this collaboration again and as they say the rest is history!

 

Briefly, what's the origin story of Essential? Why did you both feel you were the right duo to write this book?

 

Kelly: I am using the Elmo fire GIF to describe the way most leaders feel today. Yes, leading teams and businesses have always been challenging. But what's different today is that there is disruption at nearly every level of society today. Whether it's working across distributed teams, dealing with the fast and furious AI developments, government changes and a generally burned out workforce coming out of a pandemic, there is a lot to manage. And, most leaders haven't been trained in the psychology of human behavior at work. We've taught a lot of leaders how to manage a P&L in a relatively stable environment, but haven't done a lot to help them navigate the needs of people in uncertain environments. So, we wanted to provide a research based look at helping leaders navigate the human side of business today. We feel we are the right duo because of generational differences. Christie is a seasoned executive representing the existing leadership paradigm that Baby Boomers have established. I represent the Millennial generation that has often challenged a lot of what Baby Boomers have normalized in business settings. Our hope in writing this together was to bridge the generational gap that we often experience in the workplace and bring both sides of the lived experience of work today.

 

An emotionally intelligent leader in the age of AI may at first seem counterintuitive. Why do you feel human-powered leadership is more important now than it has ever been?

 

Kelly: I think AI is challenging us to ask the fundamental question of what does it mean to be human today. When a lot of the cognitive work can know be done by AI, what should humans be doing. For so long we've used technology to do the same type of things faster and cheaper, but now it's time to upend what we know of work and ask newfound questions like how can organizations better meet the needs of their people? How can leaders suspend their self-interest so that more people thrive in our organizations? How do we optimize rather than maximize resources at the expense of people and planet? We are at a critical juncture in our shared human work experience and I think AI can cause us to ask even more human questions than we've done before.

 

Both of you have very deep research benches. Why do you think it's important for "future of work" people to have quantitative support for their forecasts?

 

Kelly: The reality is if you want to get a seat at the table you need to bring data. For too long the people movement have been overlooked by business executives and board rooms because they've failed to see the link between performance and meeting human needs. This is why we wrote Essential. We wanted them to have the data and science behind elevating humanity at work. At the end of day, yes it's the right thing to do, but as we laid out in the book, it is also the right business thing to do. Businesses that treat their people well outperform in the long-run those who don't.

 

If readers could remember one thing from Essential, what's the lesson you'd want to impart?

 

Kelly: Stay curious! The world is rapidly changing around us and we have to keep an open mind to rethink many of the norms of business today. Relationships, routines and resource allocation can all be done better if we change our frame about people at work. Most people today want to work; they just feel overlooked and forgotten in their work systems. Be the leader that sees their people and remains curious!

 

Thanks to Kelly (and Christie) and please check out Essential at your first opportunity!

Building the Next Generation of Skills Inside Your Company

It’s common for employees to want to build skills at work, but an effective learning infrastructure isn’t as common. As organizations grow, they tend to lose track of their people’s skills. Leaders don’t know the competencies employees have acquired at work, what they can do next, and the skills they can develop to grow their contributions to the organization. 

Employers often don’t dig too deeply either, preferring instead to seek fresh talent externally when a need presents itself. But even if the current job market could support it, it’s difficult to maintain the hiring pace needed to source emerging skills from the outside. This reality leads to persistent understaffing and longer role vacancies.  

It’s imperative to build a skills-based organization that can flex to evolving business and employee needs. But where to start? 

The following five strategies may prove helpful as you seek to solve today’s labor shortage conundrum with your own reliable and already proven workforce. 

Understand the size and composition of your workforce 

Using analytics programs, employers should determine the current internal and external trends in workforce supply and demand. Examine the gap between the skills possessed by your workforce today and the skills your business requires to be successful now and in the future.  

It might be beneficial to use a skills segmentation matrix that includes the variables of scarcity (how common or uncommon the skill is in the market), criticality (how essential or non-essential the skill is for work to be successfully completed), and volume (how much volume of this skill the business requires).  

Seek feedback on your matrix from a diverse group of stakeholders across the organization, and during your investigation, determine the in-house superstars in in-demand areas. You can then enlist the help of these employees in crafting appropriate strategies and training to boost the organization’s overall level of skill competency. 

For the rest of the article, head over to the Dayforce blog.

The Future of Compensation in the Age of Adaptability

In ManpowerGroup’s 2024 Age of Adaptability report, we discussed how workers are expecting greater customization in all aspects of the employee experience – which, of course, includes compensation and benefits.

Since the business world became more structured more than a century ago, fixed and consistent compensation among groups of employees has been the standard, but increasing hyper-personalization is a thread that runs through all our considerations about the future of total rewards.

In HR.com’s 2024 report on the future of compensation and total rewards, 70% of leader respondents agreed that updating their organization’s total rewards strategies will help keep pace with changing attitudes around compensation. In addition, 85% said that it’s important to modify reward strategies for individual contributors.

In this piece, we’ll explore compensation best practices as we approach the quarter mark of the twenty-first century, such as agile compensation models, pay transparency and equity strategies, lifestyle and financial wellness offerings, and the involvement of AI in decision-making – which could paradoxically make compensation more uniform at a time when employees are demanding the opposite.

Pay Grades and Salary Bands No More

Traditionally, organizations made compensation decisions based on pre-set pay grades and salary bands, but in the post-pandemic business world, many question whether this model is fair, equitable, or well-suited to rapidly evolving conditions.

My research suggests that the most effective compensation strategies are more agile and allow organizations to recalibrate total rewards based on real-time factors inside and outside the company.  And rather than being assigned a one-size-fits-all title, salary, and benefits package upon hiring, employees can now customize the total rewards package that best matches their individual preferences based on an a la carte menu of options.

As Anita Lettink, a global future of work expert and the author of Equal Pay for Equal Work, told me, this approach works better because we can no longer view employees in homogenous groupings when offering rewards. “People don’t adhere to specific life stages anymore – for example, needing childcare in one’s 30s – so it makes sense to let employees pick and choose on a monthly basis,” she said.

In practice, a new hire may exchange lucrative stock options or company-funded retirement for a lower base salary. In tandem with this trend, more organizations are offering company equity to individual contributors rather than reserving it for senior leaders. Lettink said companies are also launching “employee sharing” initiatives in which workers receive payouts for something the organization created or revenue they helped to generate. “These programs encourage behaviors that are beneficial to company growth,” she added.

Agile compensation models don’t rely on a once-a-year performance review to determine an incremental salary bump or bonus, but rather leverage technology to auto-adjust rewards frequently in keeping with industry and market developments, larger economic factors like inflation, and peer feedback. These nimble strategies involve a broader range of metrics for assessing value including specialized employee skills, innovative contributions to company growth, and supervisor effectiveness.

Pay Transparency and True Equity Will Sweep the Globe

Pay transparency, which refers to openly disclosing the salary range for a given position, is considered a critical step in the journey toward pay equity. Although Lettink correctly noted that pay transparency is driving positive change for employees – especially at the lower levels – many organizations tend to drag their feet until they are mandated to deploy it. However, the concept is gaining momentum all over the world and we should prepare for it to be universal in the coming years.

Despite increased attention to the issue over the last decade, pay disparities based on race and gender remain stubborn problems. In response, a bevy of equal pay regulations designed to promote fairness have taken root. Organizations are ensuring compliance with these regulations by increasing their use of pay equity software to run statistical analyses of their compensation models, develop benchmarks, and derive core insights by comparing internal and external data.

Equity analysis isn’t just for leveling the playing field for women and underrepresented minorities. These tools may also illustrate pay disparities between employees at a specific location, function, or level and employees with similar characteristics inside and outside the company. Objective and ongoing reporting of pay gaps facilitates their immediate resolution and prevents these gaps from becoming systemic and leading to legal liability.

For the rest of this piece, check out the full blog series at ManpowerGroup.

HR Compliance Developments Going into 2025

According to Dayforce research, nearly half (48%) of surveyed leaders believe that increased compliance and regulatory complexity will impede their organization’s ability to achieve its business objectives. This could be due in part to the sheer number of emerging workforce compliance trends and how many different areas they impact. 

This shift requires substantially more oversight than the compliance function needed in the past. To help simplify the situation, I’ve rounded up key workforce compliance trends that should be top of mind for HR professionals through 2025.  

Non-compete agreements 

In certain nations, including Malaysia and Mexico, most post-termination non-compete agreements have generally been prohibited for some time. Then, in the spring of 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published a final rule that would effectively ban all non-compete agreements between employers and workers. The exceptions to the rule pertain to existing agreements with senior executives, sale-of-business non-competes, and causes of action that accrued before the rule’s effective date of September 4, 2024. 

Expanded leave requirements 

Globally, the parameters of paid and unpaid leave are constantly in flux. Most interesting is the increase in laws that allow employees to take paid time off (PTO) for any reason. Generous accommodations for new parents and senior caregivers are also becoming an expectation for employers of a certain size. Just this spring in Japan, Parliament passed legislation requiring companies to offer flexible working options to employees with young children to help them balance work with child rearing. 

Minimum pay thresholds 

In the U.S., the beginning of 2024 was marked by an increase in the minimum wage in more than 20 states, and more changes are occurring in individual states and localities as the year progresses. Canada continues to raise its minimum wage every year, while European countries continue to realize the effects of 2022’s Minimum Wage Directive, which took aim at in-work poverty. If you have employees in the U.S., you should note that in April, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a rule updating overtime pay requirements. This rule increases the minimum salary threshold for employees to be exempt from overtime pay, with the first phase having taken effect on July 1, 2023 and the second phase on January 1, 2025. 

For more compliance happenings, read the full article on Dayforce.com.

The Future of AI in the Age of Adaptability

For the next several months, I'm going to be featuring a "Future of..." series I'm working on with ManpowerGroup as part of its new Global Insights team.

Within the next five years, we anticipate that the democratization of AI-based technology will lead to greater accessibility across the organization and that employees at all levels will be empowered to integrate AI into relevant job tasks as they see fit. 

As we discussed in “The Age of Adaptability” report, businesses anticipate a 23% churn in jobs over the next five years between the creation of new roles and the reduction of others. But, because more cross-industry examples will emerge detailing how best to deploy AI, organizations won’t be as mystified by its presence and impact on the workforce. AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good!

One might imagine that a futurist has extreme ideas about the future of AI. And while it’s true that I believe AI-based technologies will be true partners in work moving forward and will play a role in the development of the metaverse and immersive work environments that Manpower recently researched, I don’t think the AI of science fiction is likely to come to fruition anytime soon. We are still far from achieving what’s called artificial general intelligence, which is a form of AI that thinks and creates on its own, essentially surpassing human abilities in all types of work.

Since AI-based technologies are not in a position to take over all human jobs as is still feared, this piece will focus on the technologies that are available now – namely generative AI applications and talent intelligence applications – and the role they can realistically play in the workforce in the coming years.

Generative AI Has Legs, But It’s Not the End

Generative AI is 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. A workforce-related example involves the development of sophisticated digital assistants that can use an existing arsenal of HR information to respond more accurately to online employee queries, even if they weren’t trained on those exact questions.

The technology has been introduced to the market at a very rapid pace. ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, and then shortly thereafter, OpenAI released a large language model called GPT-4 that was a measurable improvement over the original ChatGPT. Microsoft, Google, and other big technology players are quickly getting in on the action. 

But generative AI is not necessarily the massive breakthrough people think it is. Its release is more the result of a logical linear progression, as we’ve had smart chatbots for quite some time now. Although there has been significant media interest in ChatGPT, it’s not substantially different from what came before. In its current state, generative AI still requires a great deal of human oversight and regulation, and the majority of organizations are just figuring out how to use it effectively for various business purposes. So, if you haven’t cracked the code yet, you shouldn’t lose sleep over it. You’re not behind.

For the rest of this piece, head over to the ManpowerGroup's Global Insights blog.

Building Culture with a Distributed Workforce

As we close out 2023, the post-pandemic return-to-office question seems to have resolved. Most organizations have embraced a hybrid model, mandating that non-frontline employees work onsite between one and three days per week. However, this structure doesn’t necessarily equate to a positive work culture that employees are reluctant to leave.

According to the forthcoming Dayforce 2024 Pulse of Talent research, nearly 70% of employees are either looking for a new job or would leave their current organizations if the right opportunity came along. Thirty-eight percent said they had issues achieving their performance goals in the last year, with the main reason being too large of a workload. Only eight percent said their employer is giving them everything they need to be productive.

It's clear that despite having more flexibility than ever before, employees are not as satisfied as they could be. And this does not bode well for a business climate that will continue to be plagued by labor and skills shortages.

Understanding how to build a strong culture in a distributed work environment, a task that few attempted before the pandemic, has now become an organizational imperative. The following five strategies infused with the right employee experience technology may prove useful as you navigate this new terrain.

Conduct ongoing employee needs assessments.

The move to permanent distributed work requires a culture shift in all organizations, but instead of viewing this as an insurmountable task, leaders should look at it as a valuable opportunity to understand the unique requirements of all your employees and address concerns impacting specific groups.

For example, caregivers may report that office commutes are a hardship, while employees who are underrepresented minorities may experience greater bias and more microaggressions in an in-person office environment. Leaders should know about these issues before they result in quiet or actual quitting.

Employee pulse taking doesn’t have to be a ton of work. You can automate an employee experience platform to survey your employees on a regular cadence and determine what they need and want as well as general workplace sentiment.

You can also leverage an employee experience platform to create a real-time, two-way path to more in-depth dialogue and feedback with senior leaders and HR representatives. Once upon a time, the flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization might have been more of a trickle, and c-suite communication may have lacked transparency, vision, and purpose. When an organization is empowered by employee experience technology, this no longer has to be the case.

Reimagine office space as a destination.

Since employees are in the office less frequently and often have a choice whether to be there on a given day, leaders must make attendance worth their while. Facilities like onsite daycare, a gym, and open, casual lounges to support informal interaction are great-to-haves, but if your budget doesn’t allow for such things, offering a space employees want to visit could be as simple as providing extra time with leaders via scheduled and unscheduled office events. It’s also okay to spend a little money on offsite gatherings as the rapport-building that takes place at these is often priceless.

Finally, if your online employee experience is immersive enough, it will complement the -person experience beautifully. Used to market and generate excitement about upcoming events at the office and bring your employees’ great work to life, these platforms can add depth and creativity to your in-person culture and be a fun destination in their own right.

Watch out for proximity bias.

A Prezi survey found that over 66% of hybrid workers feel that workplaces favor employees who are together in a physical office. Additionally, according to my own research, a majority of employees feel they are not as effective when communicating via videoconference. Leaders can remedy this issue by restructuring meetings, revamping performance expectations to focus on output, and ensuring there is a fair mix of in-person and online platforms to network and show off one’s skills.

An employee experience platform can also assist with combatting proximity bias. Select technology that can highlight individual employee profiles on the manager’s home page so everyone on the team – remote and non-remote – is front and center. Managers can also be offered the option to easily develop and send targeted employee communication that calls attention to each direct report’s personal and professional development.

Offer assistance specific to distributed work challenges.

Always-on employees require easy access to systems that allow them to complete work wherever they are, and “hoteling” at the office should be a seamless, non-chaotic experience. Match your in-office policy with more flexible benefits for taking time off when needed, and coordinate team office time so your employees reap the full benefits of in-person collaboration and aren’t simply sitting in an empty cubicle farm alone.

A distributed work environment in a constantly changing business climate also requires your HR information delivery to be comprehensive and on point. Consider an employee experience platform with mobile and device agnostic capabilities, which can customize content for particular teams and roles, and help employees find what they need through intelligent search.

An AI-enabled platform has the additional benefit of screening incoming HR issues and quickly routing them to the correct person, which is essential when leaders cannot guarantee that an employee who walks down the hall to HR will be able to speak to a live human.

When your people are running at a million miles an hour and spread out all over the country or world, it is unfortunately easy to lose sight of what makes your organization a special place to work. While a distributed work environment requires leaders to put more conscious effort into culture, ultimately this renewed focus is probably for the best!

This article was originally published on Ceridian.com.

 

Strategic Foresight in Practice in the HR Space

 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.

 

Goodbye to My Current WSJ Column, The Workplace Report

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.