ELAINY MATA: 2023 was a fairly tumultuous year for the world, as well as the worlds of work and business. So what can we expect in 2024? In a recent HBR article, analysts at research and consulting firm Gartner say the answer is more disruption.
And they've identified nine trends that could shape work in the next year. Are you and your team ready for these potential game changers? Let's find out.
Trend one-- organizations will offer benefits to address the costs of work. Employees who shifted to working remote or hybrid have experienced what it is to work without bearing the financial, time, and energy costs of going into the office every day. Not having to commute is a huge savings for many.
Organizations will try to tackle the costs of work head on by sharing or reducing the tangible and intangible costs of returning to the office. Trend two-- AI will create, not diminish, workforce opportunity. Everyone's concerned gen AI could replace many jobs.
But in the short to medium term, that seems unlikely. What gen AI will do is lead jobs to be redesigned to include new responsibilities, such as prompt engineering and cybersecurity. Gartner predicts that gen AI will play a role in 70% of text and data-heavy tasks by 2025.
Trend three-- four-day work weeks will move from radical to routine. This once seemed like a dream as distant as flying cars. But four-day work weeks have been raised in union negotiations and are the preference for many workers.
Recent pilots of a four-day workweek have suggested benefits for productivity and employee well-being. Trend number four-- employee conflict resolution will be a must-have skill for managers. This year, conflicts between employees are poised to be at an all-time high.
Managers who can effectively navigate and manage conflict among employees will have an outsized positive impact on their organizations. Trend five-- gen AI experiments will yield hard lessons and painful costs. Gartner found that gen AI has already reached the peak of inflated expectations.
It will next enter what they call the trough of disillusionment, a two to five-year period during which gen AI just won't live up to overhyped expectations. Companies will need to actively manage expectations, as well as the risks associated with implementation. Trend six-- skills requirements will overtake degree requirements.
College degrees are the top requirement of yesterday's job descriptions, not tomorrow's. Organizations today are increasingly shredding the paper ceiling. It's the invisible barrier workers without degrees face.
And they're embracing skills-based hiring, even for some corporate jobs long considered degree dependent. Trend seven-- climate change protection will become a new employee benefit. 2023 brought new visibility to how climate change is impacting workforces worldwide.
As these events shift from localized and episodic to widespread and persistent, organizations are making disaster response plans a more explicit part of their employee value proposition. Trend eight-- DEI will become more embedded in the way we work. For too many organizations, DEI still operates in a silo with no accountability or ownership, limited decision-making powers, and ineffective cost enterprise DEI efforts.
In 2024, companies will begin to embed DEI throughout the organization, positioning it not as what they do, but how they achieve high performance in their key objectives. Trend nine-- traditional stereotypes of career paths will collapse in the face of workforce change. More employees are stepping out of the workforce mid-career, shifting across industries, or embracing less predictable work at some point in their careers.
Workers are also contending with involuntary disruptions to their careers due to economic cycles, caregiving responsibilities, displacement during conflict and natural disasters, and shifting responsibilities as technology and business models evolve. As atypical career paths become mainstream, organizations must rethink the well-entrenched stereotypes that underpin most talent management strategies. So there you go-- nine predictions for the year ahead.
For more details on these upcoming trends, visit hbr. org or click on the link in the description.
