2022: Time to simplify

For nearly two years now, employees have grappled with uncertainty and doubt. When will I go back to the office? Will it be safe? Does working from home reduce my chance of a promotion? Is my job secure??

At the same time, HR and business leaders have had their best-laid plans for returning to “normalcy” foiled time and again as COVID cases surged. It seems like just about every company has announced a return-to-the-office date, cancelled it, announced a new one, and then given up on announcing: Apple, Ford, CNN, Google, Facebook ... the list goes on.

As we move into 2022, employers may feel like they’re having a deja-vu moment as the health crisis continues, but there is some good news: Two years of remote work experience means we are entering ”precedented times,” when leaders can examine their past efforts and zero in on the key policies and programs that truly achieved meaningful, measurable results.

Companies that learn from the past will empower their managers to adapt to the new rules of hybrid work. Those that fail to do so will pay a heavy price. Here are my predictions for how the workplace will evolve in 2022, and how employers can adapt to get the most from their teams.

1.The focus will shift from the individual to the team

In 2012, my co-founder Dr. Jessie Wisdom and the Google People Analytics team discovered that team culture matters more than team composition. Focusing on team -- rather than individual -- performance could boost productivity by as much as 21%. We published the work as Project Aristotle.

In the pandemic, companies spent small fortunes on the individual, focused on employee monitoring, counseling, and coaching. But burn out and resignations have increased, not decreased. Why? Because the source of burn out isn't always within the individual. As one executive told me, "I'm not burnt out because I'm broken. I'm burnt out because I'm surrounded by a**holes."

Even if most situations aren't as dire as that one, the insight is there: focusing on the individual will be replaced by focusing on the team in 2022.

2. Smart leaders will combat “solution fatigue”

Over the past two years, leaders offered their people support via any program, platform, or policy they could get their hands on. In 2022, it’s becoming clear that offering support -- and offering support that works -- are two different things. In conversations with executives, managers, and employees, I’m hearing over and over that people are suffering from “solution fatigue.” They’re tired of getting pings and notifications about programs that haven’t done much to make their lives easier.?

Faced with this reality, successful leaders will give up the kitchen sink approach and prioritize efficacy and simplicity. They will identify the two or three programs and policies that actually drive measurable improvement, focus their efforts on those, and ditch the noise.

3. The Great Resignation will hit knowledge workers in full force

Last year, the Great Resignation affected mostly frontline workers. Our research shows that in 2021, knowledge workers were 40% more likely to stay in their jobs than those in industries like retail, hospitality and manufacturing. In 2022, we’ll see that gap evaporate. Every CHRO I spoke with in the last 3 months said they are already seeing this in technology and data science jobs, which are leading indicators of a broader trend.

With recruiters ramping up their efforts, employees in the corporate sector will leave for new opportunities in droves, extending retention challenges to a much wider swath of companies. These employees tend to feel that their growth opportunities were put on hold during the pandemic, and that the way to make up for lost time is to switch jobs. Our research shows that employees who feel their careers are stagnating are a massive 8 times more likely to look for a new role than their more contented peers. If managers can’t convince these workers that their prospects are about to improve, they will head for the door.

4. Without support, new hires will struggle and under-perform

In 2022, a growing schism will open up between tenured and new employees. Tenured folks can live off the social capital they developed before the pandemic. New employees lack that advantage. That makes it much harder for recent hires to get on leadership’s radar. Managers will need to be deliberate about shining a spotlight on and offering opportunities to their superstar new hires.

Some ideas to achieve this: When emailing other departments or higher-ups about things that teams have done well, managers should name the specific people involved and copy them on the thread. Showing them how you promote their work internally will demonstrate your appreciation and advocacy for their contributions. You can also invite them to present their good work at larger internal meetings, such as a company all-hands.

5. Successful leaders will pair complex analysis with simple support

Hybrid makes work so complex that one-size-fits-all solutions will fail. Instead, leaders need to dig into the specific bottlenecks to growth, inclusion, and performance that exist within each of their individual teams.

But once they’ve surfaced unique team-level differences, leaders need to offer their people straightforward, step-by-step support. In our most recent manager survey, combating burnout consistently came up as a top challenge. People are exhausted. Asking them to remember 20 cultural values won’t work. Pick the three you want them to live by—and that you know will make a real difference—and outline a few key behaviors that map to each of those. We’re already seeing this trend among leading organizations, and I believe we will see much more of it in 2022.

The past two years have taken an immense toll on employees and the managers who lead them, but it’s not too late for companies to learn from the past and correct their course. Your employees want to work, and they chose to work at your company for a reason. The challenge is to identify the handful of key policies and programs that will allow them to flourish and take action before it‘s too late.