3 years ago
3
ARTICLE AD BOX
Last year was marked by numerous negative workplace trends like the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, making it clear that employees want to question their work/life balance or their entire careers.
At the same time, business leaders fought their battle for the return to the office full-time.
This evident discrepancy between employees’ and employers’ needs has affected interpersonal relationships, threatening overall business success.
If you want to balance out your employees’ changing needs and critical business goals, you should understand the leading trends that will dominate the workplace this year.
Employee Engagement Will Continue to Drop
Employee engagement has fluctuated over the past three years, reaching unexpected heights during the pandemic, only to start to decrease in 2021.
This stagnation continued throughout the last year with 32% of engaged employees compared to a 7-year high of 17% of actively disengaged employees.
If this negative trend that threatens your profitability, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and well-being continues, you need to take actionable steps to increase employee engagement.
Start by listening to your employees’ increased demands for enhanced work flexibility and create a hybrid or remote work environment.
Hybrid Work Isn’t Going Anywhere
You may think that hybrid work is losing its momentum now that the pandemic restrictions are lifted.
But statistic shows that hybrid workplaces are the future of work.
More than 50% of the American workforce is capable to work remotely, and about half of them are now working in hybrid arrangements.
More importantly, about 60% of fully distributed and 33%of hybrid workers think that they’d search for more flexible work opportunities if their current employers didn’t allow them to continue working this way.
So you need to ask your employees what their preferences regarding preferred work location are and do your best to meet these needs to avoid soaring turnover rates, employee disengagement, and burnout that can affect your business productivity and profitability.
Hybrid Managers Will Be under Enormous Pressure
Employees prefer hybrid to office-based work.
But what does this mean for managers responsible for creating productive and highly collaborative hybrid work environments?
Hybrid managers are under enormous pressure trying to overcome various challenges while balancing between business leaders and their team members.
They have to coordinate the work of employees on different schedules while making sure that they collaborate effectively and are highly productive during work hours.
Hybrid team managers have a lot on their plate.
Luckily, advanced tools for remote workers’ time tracking can offer you real-time insights into how your hybrid or remote employees spend their work hours, showing you the tasks and projects they work on, and the apps and websites they use.
This insightful data can help you better coordinate a cross-team collaboration and boost the productivity of your hybrid employees.
Making work-related decisions based on remote time tracking data can take a significant burden off your hybrid team managers, leaving them more time to focus on fostering the company culture and building tight-knit hybrid teams.
Burnout Will Continue to Crush Employee Productivity
Only healthy and satisfied employees can be highly productive.
Knowing this, the fact that employee well-being has been endangered since the pandemic without any positive steps forward in 2022 should worry you.
One survey shows that 30% of employees felt burned out often or always at work, while 40% of them stated that their mental health suffers due to their work.
Consequently, employees experiencing mental health issues missed 5 times as many days as their healthy peers.
The most alarming burnout-related statistic is that 24% of employees believe that their leaders don’t care about their well-being.
If you want to prevent burnout and other serious mental health issues from ruining your employee health and productivity, take actionable steps immediately.
Start by devising a policy to protect employees from severe burnout effects, increasing work/life balance.
English (US)