Our industry-leading expertise in workforce trends and human behavior enables us to build innovative, impactful products that optimize the people experience and deliver extraordinary business outcomes. That’s why, every year, an international team of UKG researchers, thought leaders, and social scientists partner to reflect on the previous year’s developments, evaluate the implications for business and HR teams, and predict how these forces will shape organizations and their industries for years to come. With a backdrop of a global pandemic, historic talent shortages, and widespread demand for progress on a variety of social and environmental issues, employers are facing a shift in the balance of power—and this will have significant long-term repercussions.
Megatrend #1: The growing reliance on grey-collar workers
Workforce conversations have traditionally centered around either white- or blue-collar workers, with extra attention — and investment — gifted to white-collar employees. This is problematic for several reasons, but particularly because these generalizations overlook many crucial — and growing — subsets of our workforce that don’t fit nicely into either category.
So-called “grey-collar workers” often find themselves at the intersection of technology and service, with both white- and blue-collar elements to their jobs. In most cases, these are positions that require some combination of physical and technical skills — like teachers, healthcare professionals, robotics operators — and they are often the result of increased digitization (which, of course, was fast-tracked during the pandemic). This hybrid functionality also makes these roles difficult to fully automate, and as a result, their prevalence is (and will continue to be) skyrocketing. Of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ top 20 fastest-growing roles, 13 fall under the “grey-collar” category. And a common theme underlying LinkedIn’s 2021 “Jobs on the Rise” report—which analyzes job trends in 15 countries around the world—is that people are flocking to roles with digital skills and remote functionality, sometimes changing their careers and retraining to do so.
People are leaving grey-collar roles en masse just as there is a rising, urgent need to fill positions in healthcare, supply chain, and other foundational industries. These employers are finding it incredibly challenging to both hire and retain their people. In addition to the general talent shortage plaguing employers of all industries, grey-collar employers are facing an uphill battle due to pandemic-related burnout (many grey-collar roles also fall under the “essential worker” umbrella), widespread demand for remote and hybrid options (usually not feasible with these workers), and an aging workforce. What’s more, employers around the world are facing a reskilling emergency, particularly when it comes to technological skills gaps. Grey-collar workers are at the forefront of this crisis — and by recognizing, respecting, and investing in these roles, employers can start to reverse these concerning trends.
How should leaders respond?
- Inspire greater action from employees through ongoing career development and learning
- Allw employees to define goals with their managers, gain continuous feedback, and view and respond to performance review feedback at any time, on any device
- Leverage best practices t guide workforce conversations that focus on employee growth and development
- Understand the meaning behind emplyee feedback with natural language processing and AI-backed insights
- Transfrm standard performance reviews to a collaborative and conversational process
- Balance employees’ needs and life-work priorities while meeting company goals
- Leverage advanced AI capacities t construct best-fit schedules that satisfy employees and enhance their life-work journey
- Allw employees to easily view schedules, make scheduling requests, pick up shifts, and request time-off from any device
- Enable pd-scheduling to help manage contact tracing and allow employees to work with their key colleagues
- Deliver actinable insights to managers via interactive reports and compare to standard workforce KPIs
- Gain key insights into workforce productivity and performance to make smarter, people-driven decisions
- Clsely monitor workforce overtime trends to project and limit future overtime, adjust schedules as needed, and prevent employee burnout
- Lok at trends in employee activity to identify top performers and determine engagement levels, ensuring you take the right actions to support individual employee needs
- Perfrm real-time analysis of survey data, and go beyond positive and negative sentiment to detect the real emotions behind employee feedback
Technology Recommendations:
- Autonomous Shift Swapping and Shift Marketplace: Balance employee scheduling needs and life-work priorities with meeting the organization’s goals. Employees can view schedules, make scheduling requests, and pick up shifts that suit their needs. Additionally, pod scheduling not only helps to manage contact tracing, but also enables employees to work with their preferred colleagues.
- Pro Gig Explorer and Talent Mobility: Provide short-term, hands-on learning opportunities that are matched to a person’s level of experience and area of interest. By uncovering special assignments and high-impact initiatives organizations can allow for their talent to grow and thrive.
- Just-In-Time Learning: Build a culture of continuous learning and development with consumable on-demand content, when and where it’s convenient for the learner. Organizations can rapidly deploy learning programs and course structures that span multiple teams, business units, and locations
- Career Designer: Empower employees to grow and diversify their career within the organization with intuitive tools that illuminate a unique path towards a more fulfilling career.
- Coaching and Development: Enable leaders and their teams to achieve deeper, more meaningful conversations about performance with purposeful meeting templates, shared notes, trackable action items, and ongoing 360-degree feedback.
- Employee Voice: Better understand what employees are saying and how they truly feel about the workplace with surveys and sentiment analysis capabilities. By analyzing employee feedback, organizations gain insight into key motivations, drivers, and areas to prioritize for improvement.
- Flexible Earned Wage Access (UKG Wallet): Provide access to earned wages before payday so employees can take care of any unplanned financial needs. Financial counseling and other resources are also available to help support employees in more meaningful ways.
Megatrend #2: The new ethics of leadership
Ethical leadership has become more important, and more challenging, than ever before. Social justice, AI, climate change, and employee wellbeing continue to be hot-button issues, and both employees and society are holding leaders accountable for the impact their organizations have on their people, society, and the environment.
We predict the extent to which employers embrace these trends will be reflected in their long-term success. People-purposed leadership will be required to succeed in the future of work.
Unfortunately, many organizations and leaders are failing in this regard, particularly when it comes to fostering cultures of trust and resiliency. Transparency and listening are foundational to trust, and countless studies, including a recent report from The Workforce Institute, suggest that organizations are falling short when it comes to building cultures where employees trust their leaders. At the same time, the pandemic has highlighted another unsettling truth: Far too many leaders and managers don’t trust their own people.
According to Gartner’s Chief of HR Research, the use of surveillance technology has doubled from 2020-2021, primarily for office workers but also for delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and more. These technology tools are intended to assist managers by keeping track of employee productivity, but their utilization can potentially do more harm than good.
Monitoring and data privacy risks are further eroding already precarious levels of trust, and what’s more, these surveillance tools often fail to provide a clear representation of an employee’s true value or level of impact within the organization. Instead, leaders should focus on building a culture of outcomes-based leadership and investing in tools designed to truly serve employees while providing valuable insight to leadership.
How should leaders respond?
- Actively listen to and understand your people
- Build emplyee surveys using best-practice templates to gather feedback throughout the employee lifecycle
- Curate internal and external listening strategies t better understand your employees’ emotions, motivations, and key drivers for satisfaction, regardless of the platform they choose to express themselves
- Receive real-time actinable insights and analysis for improving employee satisfaction and retention – based on both their survey responses and activities indicating potential burnout or flight risk so you can proactively support your people
- Gain meaningful cntext of survey results by benchmarking employee engagement and satisfaction against other similar organizations
- Create a truly inclusive workplace where employees feel like they belong
- Attract a mre diverse talent pool by reducing potential unconscious bias and provide all qualified candidates equal opportunities
- Understand hw employees feel about DEI&B initiatives inside their organization with appropriate employee surveys
- Analyze pay disparities and help achieve a mre equitable workforce
- Prvide an accessible experience for all employees that is customized to their unique needs and level of ability
- Provide a sense of greater financial wellbeing to help ease the strain of the current economic environment
- Cnsider providing employees early access to their earned pay to assist with challenging times
- Prvide financial counseling and resources to help employees learn tools to manage their finances
- Help emplyees keep more money in their pockets by offering savings on everyday essentials
Technology Recommendations:
- Employee Voice: Real-time insights into how employees are feeling about the workplace enable organizations to create action plans that help improve engagement today. Executives can also dig into survey results to evaluate which leaders need more support and in which areas.
- Prescriptive Leadership Actions: Present managers with recommended actions for coaching and developing their people. Not only can managers identify retention risks and individuals with the potential to become high performers, but they can also view suggestions to perform specific activities to help retain that individual and support his or her career path.
- HR Service Delivery: Leverage the right tools to promote open and honest communication with employees, helping to alleviate some of the psychological and emotional strain employees feel during trying times
- People Assist: Support people in a meaningful way with the opportunity to share frequent updates with employees at scale. Organizations can provide on-demand, instant access to helpful resources via an intuitive knowledge base, while simultaneously managing one-off employee questions and requests effectively
- DEI&B Solutions: Provide the transparency needed to uncover any gaps in how people are paid and where they need support
- Great Place to Work/Culture Solutions: The Great Place to Work certification is the mark of a great employee experience centered on trust. Organizations can quantify their culture and inform their people strategies with actionable feedback on the experience their people are having, benchmarked data on the drivers of high-performing cultures, and employer recognition for creating remarkable workplaces For All™ through our Certification™ and Best Workplaces™ list programs.
Megatrend #3: The rapidly changing compliance landscape
The frequency and speed with which new workforce legislation is rolled out has been increasing steadily since 2008. As a result, employer fines and penalties increased 92 percent from 2018 to 2020, a trend that was only amplified during the pandemic. For example, in the U.S. alone, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA)increased activity, vaccine mandates, heightened lawsuits, and the rapidly changing compliance landscape looks like it will only continue to become more volatile in future years.
HR and business leaders need to completely rethink their approach to compliance. Rather than viewing it as a set, stagnant force to react to from time to time, leaders will need to become agile to stay ahead of the law.
Businesses should get ahead of compliance trends by watching where the industry and legislation are headed and take proactive steps before they are legally required to. This not only helps by preparing the organization for the future, but also typically results in employee goodwill and positive PR in the present. A great example here is minimum wage: an organization that waits until legislation forces their hand to increase wages will receive no positive press or employee gratitude because it’s clear that the organization only did so because it had to. If that organization increased wages proactively, however, or did so above the suggested minimum wage, it’s likely that employees would be excited and grateful, as well as allowing the company to potentially be seen as a positive player in the industry as well. There are countless examples of organizations successfully implementing this strategy who are witnessing a range of positive impacts as a result.
What’s more, while reporting on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) metrics is currently voluntary, we expect to see these metrics becoming mandatory, standardized, and audited sometime in the next decade or so, similar to how financial reporting metrics became standardized approximately one hundred years ago. Businesses should begin auditing their own metrics now to understand where their baseline is and where they need to improve. Progress is already being made on this front: in September 2020, four of the world’s top accounting firms released suggested ESG metrics, and more than 60 organizations (including Unilever, Sony, and PayPal) have agreed to start reporting on these metrics.
How should leaders respond?
- Improve HR’s productivity by shifting focus from manual work to more strategic initiatives
- Practively manage compliance anywhere in the world with critical compliance-related capabilities built directly into your technology solutions
- Quickly implement new HR prcesses, global and local, to meet changing compliance laws with little to no IT involvement
- Give emplyees convenient access to HR information with in-context knowledge relevant to their tasks
- Autmate internal HR processes, such as onboarding and internal transfers
- Proactively prepare and quickly respond to workforce emergencies and changes
- Allw users to view people insights related to current or past emergencies and quickly respond to current events
- Gather critical infrmation on workforce impacts during challenging times via notifications and reminders on any device
- Check in regularly with emplyees regarding their safety status, daily or on a specific cadence
- Understand critical changes within yur workforce as they immediately occur
- Leverage key analytics and reporting to make smarter decisions as compliance laws and obligations continue to change
- Understand why certain business trends are ccurring and respond appropriately
- Set up practive alerts of important events or metrics to proactively address business issues or compliance violations
- Reprt on data across HR, payroll, talent and workforce management to make well-informed decisions
Technology Recommendations:
- HR Service Delivery and Community Broadcast: Consistently communicate with employees and managers as quickly as possible, requiring minimal effort to identify the employee groups who need to remain abreast of relevant information (e.g., location closures, protocol updates, etc.).
- People Assist: Empower employees to find answers to their HR-related questions through an on-demand, user-friendly, personalized knowledge base. Also initiate more complex requests to HR, which are automatically routed to the right person or group to help resolve it in a timely manner.
- Compliance: Comply with HR, payroll, and employment regulatory requirements and easily record key information for government compliance, reporting, and analysis worldwide. UKG is 100% dedicated to HCM technology, which means support for compliance is a top priority. Pro delivers the right technology and reporting for complying with changing rules and providing a great employee experience.
- People Analytics: Gain insights from across the organization, including newly created fields and processes as well as adding richer context by combining data from external sources. Complete visibility will provide a much greater advantage to make data-driven decisions.
- Privacy Manager: Helps organizations avoid potential fines and issues that commonly arise when handling people’s personal data. HR teams are empowered to easily comply with time-sensitive requests and emerging data privacy laws (e.g., CCPA, GDPR, etc.) with the ability to submit, approve, and track data erasure and portability requests.
Conclusion: Prepare today for the future of tomorrowThe workforce has undergone a historic change during the past two years, but in many cases the pandemic fast-tracked pre-existing trends rather than creating entirely new ones. As the balance of power continues to shift and CEOs and organizations continue to play a role in navigating complex social and environmental challenges, HR and business leaders face more challenges—and opportunities—than ever before.
