Three “Workplace Culture” Trends Worth Noting

This year, we’ve travelled across the country to several conferences and trade shows, and we’ve had the pleasure of listening to some excellent thought leaders on stage, both within the HR and recruitment industry and outside of it. Much of their content reflects what we are seeing on the ground in our recruitment practice as well, so we wanted to share that intel with you.

Here are three top cultural trends impacting both our workplaces and hiring practices today:

1.???? As a collective, we tend to freeze in the face of change: Increasingly, on both the jobseeker and employer sides, we are seeing people wanting to avoid change at all costs. Still reeling from the after-effects of the pandemic, people’s fatigue of precarious change is morphing into a fear of making changes in general. This continues to present challenges in business, especially because the greatest potential for profits tends to lie in transformation.

So, how can we get our people to be more open to facing changes and difficult situations? The answer lies in shifting our focus from staring at a problem, to focusing on possible solutions instead. In one of the talks we attended this year, Chris Hadfield’s wisdom came up. When he trained to become an astronaut, he and his team looked at where anything and everything could go wrong. They were proactive in seeking solutions to every possible scenario. Their training was essentially based on problems. Check out his riveting TED talk entitled: “What I learned from going blind in space,” where he shares more of this story. In our workplaces, this shift in perspective towards solutions, effectively takes us out of panic mode, and empowers our mindsets with “can do” focus. Hiring leaders who can cultivate this exact shift at work will become an increasingly valuable strategy in the future. It’s about establishing norms where employees are expected to come to leaders with solutions they’ve thought about in advance, instead of only presenting a problem.

2.???? We know ‘disruption” is good for business, but we don’t want to hire people who “rock the boat”: ?One speaker at a conference talked about how as a politician, when she came into power, she wanted to do things differently. But government officials kept reminding her, “That’s not how we do things around here.” Aptly, her question back to them became: “What’s preventing me from changing the way we do it now?” Her philosophy was that it’s always better to try something new and take a risk, so we don’t get stuck in the same old patterns. With dogged determination, she implemented her changes.

To push limits, innovate, and move forward, we need to hire candidates who aren’t afraid to “rock the boat” sometimes. That is the only way to disrupt the status quo. Consider when you are looking to hire your company’s next superstar – as an employer, are you open to new ideas from your new hires? Do you welcome the idea of doing things differently? We are noticing that all too often, leaders want change, but they also want to keep doing things the way they have always been done. They want to stay safe in their comfort zone. We need to make change our new comfort zone.

3.???? People are searching for greener pastures because they’re bored at work: When leaders have teams that are performing, they feel good. But if those teams are performing without learning or growing, that is where companies are at risk of losing their best staff. Those workers are most often – bored! Winning companies embed learning into their corporate culture, and they routinely invest portions of their profits back into their peoples’ growth.

A 2023 Athabasca University study reported that nine in 10 Canadian workers say they want to continue learning for their own personal benefit and growth. We see this in our interactions with candidates too. Today’s top-performing talent have an intrinsic thirst for continuous learning. They are passionate and ambitious. This is especially evident among the highly coveted and small pool of skilled Bilingual English/French talent in Canada. We meet job candidates every day who are considering jumping ship for better learning opportunities.

Too many companies still put a lot of emphasis on performing that is purely transactional. But people aren’t robots. They need to be nurtured to prevent boredom. This is why it is critical right now, that we hire people for their potential , not just for their past experience.

It is more important for us than ever before, to pay attention to the collective emotions that are influencing our workplace culture. Whether we realize it or not, these trends are also influencing how we approach our hiring efforts. By making a few important tweaks, our hiring efforts can contribute to the positive transformations that so many businesses are seeking today. ?