The trends that will define work in 2022

This is Working Together, a weekly series on equity in the workplace, and this is our last column of the year. I want to thank the Working Together community, which has grown to 230,000+ members, for all your contributions and insights this year. Have ideas of topics we should tackle next year? Let me know in the comments below or email me at [email protected]. See you in 2022!

We entered this year hopeful that things would be better than 2020. But 2021 was no cakewalk, for individual professionals and the economy overall.?

That’s the bad news. But the good news — if we can call it that — is that this year shed light on many issues that workers have been facing for decades.?

While it was a challenging year to cover equity in the workplace, with many headlines that pointed to problems rather than solutions, the conversations I have had with executives on these challenges are beginning to shift.

After reviewing the 50+ articles I published this year, here are the key trends that took shape shape in 2021, and will continue to make waves into 2022:

Working women bore the brunt of the crisis, but came back stronger

At the start of 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with perhaps its most devastating statistic to date: In December 2020, the U.S. economy lost a net total of 140,000 jobs, with women experiencing 156,000 losses and men gaining 16,000 positions. And from March to April of last year — the hardest employment months during the pandemic so far — women accounted for more than half of job losses. Later in the year, the World Economic Forum reported that the pandemic would set back gender parity by more than 36 years. These stats are a reflection of the outsized impact the pandemic has had on working women. While vaccines brought some relief to the professional world, working mothers continue to face uncertainty as they navigate an evolving child care landscape.?

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. We ended the year with some hopeful data out of LinkedIn: So far this year, female internal promotion rates have increased by 11.4%, while male promotion rates increased by only 4.5%, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. Back in 2020, the internal promotion rate for women in the U.S. dropped 8.2%, compared to a drop of 6.5% for men. While the increase in promotions is promising, the 7.1 million U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 54 that left the labor force during the pandemic still haven’t returned.

Corporate leaders cast aside the one-size-fits-all identity

For decades, companies have been eager to broadcast their efforts to improve diversity and inclusion. But most of these programs have barely made a dent. Of the 1,800 CEOs who have run Fortune 500 companies since 1955, four have been Black women. When you consider all C-Suite leaders today, 21% are women and just 1% are Black women.?

The events of 2020 forced corporate leaders to face an uncomfortable reality: Racism persists, both inside and outside of their organizations. The realization has pushed companies to rethink how they approach diversity at work. Black, Latina and Asian women? — who historically have been denied economic opportunity more than any other group in the U.S. — stand the most to gain from this shift.?

Experts like Ruchika Tulshyan told me at the end of the year that she is seeing more leaders take an intersectional approach to diversity efforts, prioritizing diversity initiatives that take into account the many different dimensions of a person’s identity. Moving into next year and beyond, companies will need to dial up these inclusion efforts — and more — to ensure talent can bring their whole selves to work.

“Flexible work” was called into question

Remote jobs listings grew by 357% in 2021, and many companies adopted flexible workplace practices that working women have been asking for for decades. But it’s up for grabs if these new policies will help -- or hurt -- working women in the end.?

Many women told us early this year that flexible schedules were in some ways making them feel like they always had to be working. Then, when offices did start to open up, there was a growing concern that more women than men would continue to work from home, exacerbating pre-pandemic gender disparities.?

Unless companies make a concerted effort to treat remote and in-office workers equally, workers who remain at home will be left behind. And to keep remote work burnout at bay, employers will need to think differently about how and when workers are expected to respond to digital communication.?

Microagressions were no longer considered micro

The rise of pandemic-era virtual work coincided with significant improvements in work satisfaction among Black employees, according to a survey by Future Forum, an organization led by Slack that focuses on the future of work. During this time, Black knowledge workers reported a 50% boost in their sense of belonging at work and a 64% increase in their ability to manage stress.?

The findings point to an unsettling conclusion: Office-centric work has been deeply uncomfortable for many Black workers, many of whom have been subjected to microaggressions and discrimination on the job.

This trend comes amid a ‘great reshuffling’ of talent across industries. Companies are rethinking their working models in the wake of the pandemic. And, in turn, employees are rethinking their relationship with work. Some 40% of workers are considering quitting their jobs, according to recent surveys by Microsoft. And even larger portions of the most marginalized workers are thinking about career switches altogether. In the private equity industry, a quarter of women and a third of employees of color aim to leave their employers within the next year.?

The best employers will respond to these challenges by changing how they approach underrepresented employees. And the reality is, the best talent will insist on change. Some 50% of multicultural women are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next two years because they believe both their gender and their race make it harder to advance. And 34% of Black professionals in a recent LinkedIn survey said that they feel their company talks about increasing diversity and inclusion but doesn’t make actual change.?

We saw the beginning of the end for the working mother “stigma”

In February 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I went on CBS This Morning with Gayle King to discuss the pressure many working mothers felt about having caregiving responsibilities outside of work. The message from working mothers that we surveyed was clear: They felt like if they openly discussed their children at work, they would be penalized.?

Then COVID-19 crisis put a nationwide spotlight on caregiving challenges and now a growing group of leaders in business and politics are pushing for a rethink on the relationship between parenthood and work. CEOs from companies like Patagonia, Airbnb, Levi’s, Sun Life Financial and more called on Congress to institute a permanent federal paid family leave program. And while the effort failed, more members of the business community realize they need to address this issue.?

A coalition of 200 businesses has banded together in part to combat the stigma many working mothers face. The Care Economy Business Council — which includes companies like JPMorgan, Verizon and McDonald’s — formed in May to encourage employers to adopt practices that support caregivers.?

If today’s cohort of business leaders don’t address this challenge, the next generation will show up in full force. In fact, they have already stepped up to the plate: Pilar McDonald and Lola McAllister, two Gen Z students, launched a Pledge to Care that outlines best practices they want their future employers to adopt. The pledge addresses leave policies, care programming, equitable hiring practices, returnship programs, the wage gap and more. To put this pledge together, McDonald and McAllister took advice from several notables in the growing care economy movement, including Eve Rodsky, author of “Fair Play,” and Amy Henderson, CEO and co-founder of TendLab.?

What trends do you think will shape the working world next year? Let me know in the comments below using #WorkingTogether?