Your workforce continues to change. To help you keep up, we’ve identified the five big trends you must tackle, and outlined how you can start to take them on.
Trend One: Allowing More Flexibility
The move to hybrid work is creating a generation of digital nomads who choose not to live in one location, and who expect to work remote most — if not all — of the time.
In addition, those employees who live near your offices will still expect to work from home part of the time, and retain the ability to even travel and work on occasion.
In short: Your employees now demand a lot more flexibility with where they work, when they work, and how they work. You will need to accommodate this demand, while still finding a way to perform the fundamentals of HR and communications, like:
- Tracking performance and providing feedback
- Recognizing great work, privately and publicly
- Offering promotions and career progression
Trend Two: Changing Culture and Values
57% of companies expect remote and hybrid work is going to significantly change their corporate culture. Employee engagement has already dropped 11% over the past year and a half, and only 17% of leaders are considered to be “modern” by their employees. It’s clear that corporate culture needs an update, and fast.
To start, companies need to better meet their employees’ changing value. In a recent post, Workplace from Meta identified the five core employee values that companies must align with today:
- Build a greater community and more employee connections
- Create a more flexible workplace (see “trend one” above)
- Promote your employees’ personal growth
- Support your employees’ wellbeing (see “trend three” below)
- Unite your workplace under a shared purpose
Trend Three: Avoiding Employee Burnout
With remote and hybrid work, the lines between your employees personal time and their professional time are blurring. As a result, employees are working more than ever and neglecting their self-care. No surprise, burnout has increased 15% over the past year and a half, and it’s up to you to solve this problem.
As corporate wellness coach James Davis explained, “There have been a number of surveys showing that employee health and wellness is now one of the top things people look for in an employer.” Your people are now looking to you to help them set boundaries, keep work from consuming them, and overall keep a balanced life. And if you don’t, then they might burn out, drop their productivity, or even leave.
Trend Four: Turning Employees Into Brand Ambassadors
56% of employees feel their organization’s culture-building efforts — like driving diversity and inclusion — do not feel sincere and 66% feel they are ineffective. Employees are no longer satisfied with new slogans and big statements from the CEO that never seem to go anywhere. Instead, employees want real change, and they want to be the ones driving it.
This means you now must empower your employees to be your biggest brand advocates, both inside and outside of your company. Forbes recently outlined some great principles for turning employees into brand ambassadors:
- Never mandate that your employees become brand ambassadors — just encourage it to happen naturally
- Identify which employees are genuinely passionate about their work
- Give them guidelines for how to authentically share their passion
- And talk one-on-one with disengaged employees to engage them
Trend Five: Adopting New HR and Communications Technology
Finally, you need new tools to manage your new workforce. To drive all of the changes we discussed in this blog, you will need some way to:
- Monitor and manage your employees, no matter where they are working
- Really listen to your employees and adapt your culture to what you hear
- Check-in with your employees and make sure they are happy and healthy
- Identify your most passionate employees and amplify their voices
Grytics helps you do all these things, and much more.