Employee Trends for 2024

In 2024, employees want to know what’s in it for them (and they’ll leave if they don’t get it)!?

We asked nearly 37,000 employees across 32 countries about the state of work, and our experts parsed through the results to identify emerging trends.

Employee expectations will be higher than ever in 2024, and employees want to have a voice when it comes to building an experience in the workplace that suits their individual needs.?

These are the trends that will define the employee experience in 2024:

The new-job honeymoon phase is over.?

Historically, employees were more engaged during the first year in a new role, but now, new hires show lower levels of engagement, well-being, and inclusion compared with more tenured employees.??

More than a third (39%) of employees who have been with a company for less than six months plan to leave within the next 12 months, a 6-point increase from last year. Some are even “boomeranging” back to a previous job.

Some time in the office is better than none – unless it’s five days a week.

Employees in hybrid working arrangements have the highest levels of engagement, intent to stay, and feelings of well-being and inclusion in comparison to employees who work full-time in the office or fully remote.

Employees are comfortable sharing work emails and chats for an improved employee experience, but are more ambivalent about social media posts being used.

Today’s employees are comfortable with their employer listening passively to work emails, work processes like interview notes, virtual meeting transcripts and chat messages to improve their experience.?

In fact, 70% of workers are comfortable with their organization using email data to better understand and improve their experience at work. However, they are less comfortable with companies using social media posts, whether anonymous or not - just 41% of employees are comfortable.

Frontline employees are unhappy, poorly supported and least trusting.

The pandemic transformed office- and desk-based work, introduced new technology and raised expectations for flexibility around when and where work is completed. The nature of customer-facing, frontline jobs often prevents them from being able to take advantage of many of these changes, which may be contributing to an unhappy workforce seeking better resources and benefits. At the same time, staffing shortages and inflation have added pressure.?

Employees would rather AI assist them than evaluate them.

As organizations work to incorporate AI into their business, leaders have work to do to build trust among employees. Workers are more comfortable with AI in the workplace when they have a sense of control over it, such as for writing tasks (61% of employees would use AI for this) or as a personal assistant (51% of employees), than in higher-stakes situations like performance evaluations (37%) or hiring decisions (29%).?

Want to dive deeper into the data? Read the full report here.

What do you think about these trends? Do they surprise you or do they resonate with you? Tell us what you think in the comments below. ??

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