Looking Ahead to 2023

When I started drafting this newsletter, the intention was to be both mindful of the road ahead, but with a positive perspective.?But here we sit a week later?crammed crammed upstairs surrounded by the rescued tech from our ground floor flooding last weekend. Kudos to the team for taking it in their stride and literally "mucking in" to help with the clean up.?And if we're being?honest, work's a bit more fun with Sage and the Film 360 team working away in the Kitchen?like nothing ever happened.??

So Climate Change is surely on top of everyone's mind in Auckland??Whether we have extended our planetary boundaries, or our cities ability to handle its own growth, the fact is we are at risk.?Businesses are at risk.

?In the latest?Deloittes CxO report,?surveying 2,016 global C-level executives about the risks their businesses face;

"climate change ranked ahead of seven others, including innovation, competition for talent, and supply chain challenges. In fact, only economic outlook ranked slightly higher"

In this month's issue we take a look at a few perspectives on the trends we are seeing and pull together the common threads:?

* First up the flurry of?2023 Social Media Trend Reports?in the market.?We pull out some of the top trends that we think will influence your customers.??

* Next,?Cameron Bagrie?gives us an update on?his December report?and looks ahead to 2023.

* And lastly we extract some interesting content from?WOMAN+?exploring a number of article themes on the meaning of work, how employees - especially women - need work to fit in with life and life to fit in with work.??WOMAN+?also explores the concept of Self Determination. Whether it's a full time gig or a side hustle, we are innately wired to be ticking off the boxes of Self Determination - Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness.

Elisabeth Ric Hansen

Waitapu Group Business Director

First Friday Editor?

A Summary of 3 Social Media Channels 2023 Trend Forecast Report

If you're wondering what's up with your kids dress sense lately, then prepare for the worst. Raves are back. Expect gaudy, plastic-fantastic and - heaven-forbid - adults out in public with cute animal satchels.?Instagram says 68% of Gen Z plan to attend a rave in 2023.?

Are we in a similar space to the 90's in the psyche of the youth facing the computer generated apocalypse of Y2K.?Now in the 2020's a climate change apocalypse.?

Is this indicative of the youth giving up on their future?

With 445 million users,?Pinterest claims that 80% of their trend report predictions?have come true. They call their Trend Report?a "window into the future".?

With the psychology of Raves aside,?click here?here for our Waitapu Group summary of some of the top trends from Pinterest,?Instagram (in partnership with trend platform WGSN) and Tik Tok, that you may want to start thinking about for your business.

THE UPPER PAW

By?Cameron Bagrie??for the Waitapu Group

"We start 2023 with the bears having the upper paw" writes Cameron in his perspective piece looking ahead to FY24.?"There is no doubt the gloss is rapidly disappearing on the economy, such is the reality of taming inflation, impact of higher interest rates and direct words from the Governor of the Reserve Bank telling people to rein things in."

Bagrie goes on to caution that "a sense of perspective is still needed.?Be careful how you interpret confidence surveys. They ask respondents whether the year ahead will be better, the same, or worse than last year.?For many businesses, most of 2022 was stellar, and less stellar is not necessarily bad, just less good".

“A pullback from extreme highs might be a recession in the technical sense, but in the reality space, just a pull-back from highs.”

"Bad news is good click-bait" says Bagrie, "so the term recession will appear frequently this year" but Cameron says

"I prefer the phrase reset.?Recession invokes negativity. Reset involves some of that but also with an element of opportunity."

"It is about embracing change. You do not purge decades of excesses in a few months or a couple of quarters of negative growth. The knuckle down period is longer."

"Rising interest rates mean you need to take real risk to make real money.?That sounds normal to me. We should be encouraging business growth not a framework to sell more expensive houses to each other." says Bagrie.?

Build me up buttercup.

The economy does not work economically or socially with inflation, so we need to get rid of it. That will involve some difficult time.?Well-being needs an economic base. Stimulus from printing money, low interest rates, or huge government spending is a temporary lever to drive growth. Now the era of identifying drivers that have substance is here. Today’s problems are not just a manifestation of Covid, they reflect decades of failures to act.?

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New Zealand has become both economically and socially unhealthy.

We have pushed the boundaries when it comes to housing, inequality and we do not reside in a society where there is equality of opportunity. The result is a very divided society.?We need a policy platform that will help New Zealand mend.

Climate change is real, and one consequence will be a series of ongoing inflationary shocks. That will create greater economic and social tension.

So, while the temptation will be to get dragged down by the inevitably recession that is around the corner, it might pay to focus on the big picture. Change is the new normal. That is an exciting environment.

The past thirty years should not be the playbook for the next thirty years.

One plus one now equals eleven and mindsets need to reflect the non-linear environment we now reside in.??Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis should not usurp all the attention –?“fortune favours the brave”.

Read the full article written for Waitapu Group by Cameron Bagrie here

WOMAN+ digital has grown its page views by over 400% in its first 3 months and reaches 45% of New Zealand Women ages 30-69 every month.

Content written for women, by women, this platform is fast becoming the go-to digital platform for women in Aotearoa.?We took a look at two articles on our site that relate to women in business and what we can expect from them in the year ahead.

In the age of resignations and global chaos, more and more of our employees have been going through a process of reevaluation about work, what it means to them and why they should "put themselves through it".?There are countless stories from millennials and Gen Z as well as Gen X women who are reevaluating the workplace and questioning whether they may be better off doing their own thing.?Emma Mclean from?Works For Everyone?explored this in?an interview with Susanna Andrew?from WOMAN+.?Not only does Emma work with mothers but she takes on the employers too, asking the hard questions such as?Where are the part time roles? Where are the job shares? How do you support your working parents during the school holidays? What provision do you have for sick leave for working parents? When will both parents be eligible for paid parental leave, not just the mother??

But what is motivating your workforce right now? In a climate of natural disasters, pandemics and inflation, it has to be money right??Well, maybe not.??MAHITHA KUMAR?explores the concept of?Self-Determination Theory?(STD) when it comes to human motivation - or quite simply what gets us up in the morning.?The theory emerged in the 1970’s based on studies considering different extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.?STD states that people are motivated to grow and change by three intrinsic basic psychological needs - Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness.?Autonomy means that people need to feel that they have the liberty and sovereignty over their own actions. They need to feel in control of their behaviours, aspects of their lives, and any goals they want.?This will be challenging in a tough inflationary environment, where you may not have these choices.?Relatedness and?Connectedness are essentially the sense of belongingness and explores our “will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others.”??

So don't lose the softer side of business, the empathy and the culture building. These remain important aspects, no matter what the future holds.

Click here to read more on this at WOMAN+