The Top 10 Workplace Trends For 2020

Every year I give my forecast for the top 10 workplace trends for the upcoming year. The purpose is to help prepare organizations for the future by collecting, assessing and reporting the trends that will most impact them. You can read my predictions from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. These trends are based on hundreds of conversations with executives and workers, a series of national and global online surveys and secondary research from more than 450 different research sources, including colleges, consulting firms, non-profits, the government and trade associations.

In 2020, the forecasted GDP growth in America is set to slow even more than 2019 to 1.9%, while salary budgets are projected to rise by an average of 3.3%, up from 3.2% in 2019. The unemployment rate is projected to slightly increase from an average of 3.6% in 2019 to 3.7% in 2020. In 2019 there were 7.1 million unfilled jobs and that’s projected to be consistent through 2020. The biggest workplace trends you’ll see in 2020 include:

1. Employee monitoring. Companies are collecting more data on how employees spend their time at work in order to create a more productive work environment and protect resources. While in the past, employees viewed this as "big brother" and were concerned about how their data was being collected, and used, data from Gartner shows that employees are becoming more comfortable with it as long as it's used to improve their employee experience. In 2015, only 30% of companies were using monitoring techniques, which is expected to grow to 80% in 2020. At the same time, while only 10% of employees were comfortable with employers monitoring their email back in 2015, that percent is now 30%. Still, employees rightfully raise privacy concerns so transparency is important. Recently, Google was accused of having a tool that monitored their employees efforts to organize protests to discuss labor rights, reporting employees who scheduled calendar events with more than ten rooms or one hundred employees. But, on the other hand, employee monitoring can greatly benefit companies and their customers, like hospitals installing sensors to detect a nurses hand-washing practices since or Domino's pizza's AI-powered camera system to ensure customers get the right size pizza with the appropriate ingredients. Other countries have taken employee monitoring to the next, and more intrusive level, like in Sweden where thousands of workers have inserted microchips into their bodies so that they can sign into work without needing a key card. In China, companies are now using "emotional surveillance technology" to monitor employees' brainwaves and emotions in order to identify if they are tired, anxious or angry.
2. The rise of employee activism. I recently wrote about the growing trend of employee activism, where employees are now coming together to rally and protest against their companies based on their political and social values. 38% of employees report having spoken up to support or criticize their employers' actions over a controversial issue that affects society. The study found that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be an employee activist. There's been an endless amount of examples of employee activism in today's divided sensational political climate. Hundreds of employees protested Wayfair for selling furniture for a Texas detention camp for migrant children from Mexico. Then there was a consumer and employee protest of Equinox after majority owner (and billionaire) Stephen Ross, hosted a fundraiser for the president. More recently, many top CEOs (Twitter, Pinterest, Levi Strauss, Royal Caribbean and others) signed a letter, publishing in the New York Times, pressuring the government to pass a bill that requires background checks on all gun purchases.
3. How voice is activating the workplace. People are already using voice technology like Siri and Alexia to answer questions, get daily news content and order products. From smart speakers to phones to virtual assistants, we are using voice without even thinking about it. In our recent study with Oracle, we found that half of people have used AI voice in their house, 31% in their car, 25% at their desk and 18% in meetings. Companies are already testing voice in the workplace to help automate and simplify routine tasks. For instance, JLL has a voice-AI assistant called "JiLL" to help employees arrange meetings, book conference rooms, reserve desks, check cafeteria menu's and discover other things about their office. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a voice-AI assistant called "Einstein" that can pull data during meetings to give employees a daily briefing with notes from the meeting and tasks to be completed. We will be seeing a lot more voice-AI in 2020 now that Amazon is rolling out "Alexa for Business" with big companies like GE using it to make it easier for workers to locate parts in factories by asking a smart speaker. Gartner found that in the next few years, an entire quarter of worker interactions will be mediated by voice and have digital assistants.
4. The hiring of retirees to fill the skills gap. Despite our low U.S. unemployment rate, there are still over seven million unfilled jobs. The skills gap has forced employers to broaden their talent pool in order to find untraditional candidates they would normally not even look at. Over the past two years, we released two separate studies with Wiley Education Services to examine the skills gap and found that not only is the gap getting wider, but companies are hiring even more workers with dissimilar backgrounds. Two-thirds of companies have hired a retiree and only 20% have never hired a retiree. Companies are taking people out of retirement who have in-demand skills out of necessity in a way they haven't in the past. At the same time, the fastest growing demographic in the workplace are those age 65 or older with 10,000 of them turning retirement age each day. People are living longer, having encore careers and have experience that can be extremely valuable to companies with skills gaps. As a result, the attitudes around employing older workers has changed. National Grid, for example, keeps in touch with retirees in order to continue to tap into their talents. Some are taken in as part-time workers, while others have short-term projects.
5. The new role of a manager. In our AI at work study with Oracle, we found that 64% of workers would trust a robot more than their manager and half have turned to a robot instead of their manager for advice. Currently, managers spend 54% of their time during the workday on administrative tasks, only 10% of their time on strategy and innovation and only 7% on developing talent and engaging with stakeholders. With AI, those administrative tasks could be completely automating, giving managers the time to work on more important initiatives like people development. In our study, we wanted to understand what the new role of a manager was in a workplace that's adopting AI more readily. Workers said that robots are better than their managers at providing unbiased information, maintaining work schedules, problem solving and budget management, while managers are better at mostly soft skills like understanding feelings, coaching and creating a work culture. As technical, administrative and hard skills continue to be automated by AI, managers will need to focus on soft skills in order to stay relevant. The new role of managers is to be more human and less machine. Hilton has a careers chatbot that helps automate the recruiting process, thus freeing up a managers time from reviewing resumes in order to extend more offers to a more diverse pool of talent. They also have digital assistants to help answer questions and support performance review cycles.
6. The return of the liberal arts major. AI will automate technical skills and drive the demand for soft skills like creativity, communicate and empathy. While there's been such a focus on recruiting STEM over the past several years, those majors will continue to lose relevance, while liberal arts majors will become more valuable to companies moving forward. Since 2009, it was believed that STEM degree recipients would have job stability, and command high salaries, while liberal arts majors would be unemployable. The fact is that while liberal arts majors have lower starting salaries, their salaries rise much quicker over the course of their lives than STEM majors. A report by McKinsey analyzed the jobs that are most susceptible to automation and discovered that jobs that harnessed a workers soft skills are the least likely to be automated. For instance, jobs that involve managing and development people have only a 9% automation potential. The biggest workplace gaps through out technology evolution will rely on the soft skills that are cultivated by a liberal arts education instead of technical expertise. We will see an uptick in liberal arts hiring in 2020, which is driven by these gaps and the low unemployment rate. Slack Technologies has half of their leadership team majoring in liberal arts and Infosys is hiring 10,000 employees in the next year, focusing specifically on liberal arts majors. Google crunched their people analytics data and found that STEM skills are the least important when it comes to hiring and soft skills are the most (coaching, communicating, empathy, etc.).
7. Therapy in the office. Mental health continues to becoming a growing concern, with half of Millennials and 75% of Gen Z's having left a job due to mental health concerns. Yet, mental health hasn't been taken seriously by companies that have workers who have suffered from it. The Harvard Business Review found that half of workers felt like it was prioritized at their company and fewer have leaders that advocate for it, but the majority agree that company cultures should support mental health. Nearly half of workers say that their workplace has a negative impact on their overall mental health. As a result over the widespread mental health epidemic we are experiencing, companies are hiring therapists and are creating health centers to support employees. Google has a "Mental Health Program Manager" that manages therapists onsite so that employees don't have to travel to make an appointment and are thus more likely to use the services. Out of all the industries that need mental health support services, the biggest one is financial services, where two-thirds of workers experience mental health problems. JP Morgan has hired therapists in multiple cities already including New York, Chicago and London. Goldman Sachs is training dozens of UK staff to be mental health first aiders who can spot colleagues who are suffering and then help them. The UK is leading the way when it comes to supporting mental health with protections under the Management Health and Safety at Work Regulations Act of 1999. We will see more pressure on companies to create or support mental health programs and therapists (in-person or virtually) will be part of many of the packages.
8. Internal mobility for retention. There will continue to be a highly competitive job market in 2020, which is why more companies are creating internal mobility plans to retain and grow their talent. Most companies have made it quite difficult to change jobs and don't have a culture that allows for career mobility. A Gallup study found that 91% of those who recently left their job had to do so because they didn't have enough internal opportunities and only 27% say it's easy for them to find internal opportunities. Deloitte found that nearly half of employees say that managers resist internal mobility because it lacks the proper incentive structure around it. Companies like UBS have used technology to map internal mobility opportunities. Their platform is called "Career Navigator", which allows employees to match themselves against the roles they desire through a self-assessment, custom training courses, and also matches your skills to open roles. Recruiters at UBS can use the tool to find employees who match open roles as well. The tool has been used over 40,000 times, 120 employees have applied to new roles through it and now 10% more employees have said that the company offers the right opportunities to develop in-house. They even have someone whose job is focused on internal mobility.
9. Purpose and meaning at work. Earlier this year, we surveyed thousands of Gen Z's globally with Kronos and discovered that after compensation, they want to work for a company that does meaningful work. This desire for meaning weighed more than employee benefits and even schedule flexibility. A study by PwC found that 79% of leaders think that purpose is central to business success and Gallup found that 41% of employees want to know what a company stands for. As a response to the prominence of "purpose", PwC hired a "Chief Purpose and Inclusion Officer" to support the companies corporate social responsibility efforts. Back in the 1970s, economist Milton Friedman argued that the purpose of a business is only to generate profit for shareholders. In today's business world, citizens are demanding that companies be a force for good, not just a machine that churns out cash for the wealthy. As a result, the Business Roundtable, a group of 181 of the most prominent CEOs, changed the "Purpose of Corporation" to benefit all stakeholders instead of just shareholders. Part of the new purpose is to invest in employees by helping them develop new skills. Marc Benioff, a member of the Business Roundtable, explained in his New York Times op-ed that we need a new form of capitalism that works for everyone and that supports the world. At Salesforce, he says that they've donated nearly $300 million to causes like public schools and to address the homeless problem in California.
10. Sustainability initiatives are increasing. As a result of the pressure on businesses to instill purpose at work, and give back to all stakeholders, there have been more sustainability programs. In a study by HP, they found that 61% of people believe sustainability is mandatory, 58% said environmentally conscious practices are key to engaging the future workforce and 46% would only work for sustainable companies. Harvard found that workplaces that are environmentally friendly increase employees cognitive performance, decrease sick days and boost sleep quality. For example, Starbucks promotes sustainability in their employee training manuals and employees pass that information onto customers in stores. These include offering cutlery only on request, discounts for customers who bring their own mugs, reusable cups and more. Levi Strauss has set goals to reduce carbon emissions in both their facilities and supply chain. They have an executive whose only role is to carry out sustainability initiatives and have products like "Water<Less? jeans" that have helped reduce water usage by two billion liters over the past eight years. DELL has a "2020 Legacy of Good Plan" covering their social, environmental, health and safety goals. So far they've reused 100 million pounds of recycled plastic in their products, delivered five million hours of community service and reduced wastewater discharge in manufacturing by 4.56 million cubic meters.

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