We are bang in the middle of prediction season. That can only mean one thing! Today, I’m sharing not only my top five predictions for the year ahead but also my three ‘not a trend’s. 2024 promises to be yet another turbulent year. Will the ‘2024 word of the workplace’ be stability? I doubt it.
Five trends to look out for
GenAI: Surprise, surprise! It wouldn’t be a predictions/ trends blog without the mention of GenAI, would it? My first prediction is that GenAI will not only continue to dominate the conversation but will move swiftly into integration with everyday work. With Microsoft giving up precious keyboard real estate to an AI icon, & every tech org looking to integrate some form of GenAI, there is going to be a large pressure on the workforce to upskill regardless of whether HR helps or doesn’t. The question is – just how much of a role will our profession play in ushering this change? Will we keep talking about it and be slow to move or will we roll up our sleeves and get straight into action?
While many start-ups have already started releasing previews or beta versions of GenAI integrated products, a majority of HR professionals are still figuring out what the hype is all about. Maybe the first step is getting the HR team upskilled on the basics and then moving onto hackathons on how to integrate it with everyday processes. However, given it is a skill new to the market, it is critical to identify which workstreams will be modified & the roles that are consequently most likely to be redundant, which training will help upskill those impacted and which roles will likely get ‘costlier’. Say what you might, unlike the metaverse, this trend is here to stay.
Return to Office: As much as I don’t want to, in 2024, we will continue to talk about working from an office. Almost every single prediction report mentions RTO in some form or the other. CultureAmp emphasizes the importance of building commute worthy experiences while in the words of Gartner, ‘employees now have a sharper awareness of what they “spend” to go to work. In 2024, organizations looking to attract and retain talent will not just try to find the perfect hybrid strategy, but they will look to tackle the cost of work head-on via two strategies: by sharing the tangible and intangible costs of returning to the office or by finding ways to reduce the total costs. This may include things such as: caregiving benefits, housing subsidies, financial well-being programs, or the ability for associates to bring their pets to work’. Pushing return to office purely via compliance is short term thinking. Yes, few are voting with their feet at the moment but it will begin to show eventually. Think of it as a pendulum with fully remote at one end of the spectrum and mandating a specific number of days in office at the other end of the spectrum. We’ll keep swinging back and forth for at least a few years before long term research begins to tell us if and what the optimal stabilization point is. Until then, the trend stays.
Fixing the trust deficit: There’s a reason why Fast Company said we’re bang amidst the great gloom and why CultureAmp calls it out as its number one trend for the year ahead. With layoffs, increased top down guidance and the push to return to office, employees are at a loss on what to expect next. If you walk around your office floor and ask your employees (and maybe you should), ‘On a scale of 1-10, how much do you trust your employer?’, I am willing to bet that the average will lie lower than you would like it to. Let me ask you – ‘how much do you trust your employer?’ 2024 will be the year of regaining that trust. Employers will begin to realize that trust does not flow only in one direction. As the report says – Trust is hard won and easily lost. In 2024, we will demand leaders who share their long-term vision and the difficult choices needed to get there along with why they landed at the decisions they did. Communication will be open and honest and hopefully, our profession can coach leaders into being just that. Shall we make the 2024 word of the workplace ‘trust’? I think we should.
Anxiety will continue to be high: As much as we’d like to adapt to a continuously changing world, the matter of fact is that human beings and financial markets both like certainty and predictability. In an environment that lacks both, no matter how Zen we get, anxiety will creep in. It is also well established at this point that one can’t park anxiety at the door while walking into work. 2024 looks to be more turbulent than 2023. Violence is on the rise in various forms and so is climate anxiety. A big part of determining our new way of work will be how do we build a workplace that (a) acknowledges the issue and (2) does not add to it.
Moving in increments vs giant leaps: My last prediction is more of an observation than a prediction. Yes, I am cheating (a little). I have been a part of the HR profession for longer than I care to reveal at this point and have been a key observer of what has come before. Because of many reasons, including the need for multi-generational studies to demonstrate success, our profession is really bad at making drastic changes unless forced by external circumstances. I say this at the risk of upsetting members of the profession: we are not path-breaking experimenters and rarely at the forefront of innovation. We spend years talking about a change before it truly finds a firm holding. Sometimes for good reason – the sphere of impact is large. We are good at making incremental shifts but never a drastic jump. It is because of this, 2024 will only see small incremental changes vs anything Earth shattering. Of course, if we see anything Earth shattering, rest assured, it will be covered here.
Not yet a trend
Four-day workweek: Gartner says that in 2024, Four-Day Workweeks Go from Radical to Routine. Now, if this was an article on what I’d like to see in 2024 (and maybe we’ll do that too!), a 4-day work week would be right on top. However, I am going to take a bet and say this is not happening; not this year. We’ll talk about it. We’ll hmmm haw, drag our feet and maybe in 2025 do something about it. I want to be wrong. I could be wrong. But from where I am standing right now, I disagree with Gartner.
Pay Transparency: CultureAmp and a few other reports have touted 2024 as the year of increased pay transparency especially as the EU Pay Transparency Directive, adopted in January 2023, moves into implementation mode in 2024. However, I am 100% sure that organizations will do everything possible to mask data and while pay transparency may incrementally improve in the EU, it will take at least another year before it makes waves globally. 90% of the HR professionals I interact with still believe employees cannot handle pay transparency. What they happen to forget is that they too are employees who have visibility into ranges, how ranges are determined and where they land on the range. If we can handle it, maybe everyone else can too.
More ‘great’s’: Lastly, I may be shooting myself in the foot with this one, but I am willing to bet that we’ll see a lot less ‘great’s’ this year. After the great resignation, the great regret, the great depression and god knows how many other greats, I think we’ve had enough. The word has begun to lose its meaning and has set eyes rolling around the world. 2024 is the year where we finally stop abusing the word and come to terms with the fact that not everything is ‘GREAT’.
There you go! We’ll come back in December to see how many we got right but always remember: the first rule of predictions is that ‘no predictions are wrong’. They just haven’t happened yet.
How many predictions do you think I’ll get right?
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