5 Employee Experience Trends To Watch

5 Employee Experience Trends To Watch

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1. Turn the office into an event space

Employees have had a year and a half to customize their home office. Now that they’re cozy and connected, it’s going to take a lot to convince them they should return to their pre-pandemic routine. To entice people back to the office, businesses need to start thinking about their workspace the same way event planners think about an event. How do 

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1. Turn the office into an event space

you get someone to physically show up to a space? How do you make the space so fun and intuitive that people want to stay? What amenities do people want today? How do you create a compelling and valuable agenda? To hire and retain employees, I think companies are going to start investing in talent and tools to build the next-generation 

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1. Turn the office into an event space

workplace, which will look a lot more like an event center than an office. It will be easy to reserve and reconfigure flexible spaces and conference rooms. Services such as catering for small groups will be standard. Attendee scheduling should be seamless and a meaningful agenda of deliberate, collaborative work will be expected.

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2. Address the labor shortage

To earn and maintain employee trust, businesses need to compete on culture. In the year ahead, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.  Frustrated with work conditions and enticed by other opportunities, employees are resigning at historically high rates. Not surprisingly, we’re seeing a simultaneous rise in activism within the workforce. 

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2. Address the labor shortage

Grassroots advocacy is growing, with workplaces around the country unionizing and advocating for their rights. On top of that, employees are more socially conscious than ever before. They want to see proof that companies are investing in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) goals beyond simple quantitative scores. 

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2. Address the labor shortage

They also want to see DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives that do more than just check a box. Employees today are savvy enough to question how companies are nurturing underserved talent. Today’s executives recognize they must work to build a corporate culture that dismantles barriers for new employees, rather than erecting new ones. 

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2. Address the labor shortage

Many will stop requiring four-year degrees in favor of certificates and other self-skilled certifications.  Business leaders will prioritize transparency about pay and promotion equity, using digital tools to track and showcase progress.

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3. Provide benefits that matter

One of the results of the Great Resignation and the rise in employee advocacy is that employees are no longer satisfied with traditional benefits. Before Covid-19, many companies fixated on who could offer employees the coolest perks. But the pandemic poignantly highlighted the benefits that 

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3. Provide benefits that matter

matter for people’s day-to-day lives. For instance, a lot of women ended up leaving the workforce to perform caretaking responsibilities. Now, how will companies bring them back? People are no longer happy to settle for bare-minimum benefits or trendy perks. They want what matters: healthcare, education, childcare, adaptable 

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3. Provide benefits that matter

work schedules, the flexibility to care for family and friends.  I think we’re going to see an increase in quality-of-life benefits like transportation and training subsidies. Creative solutions such as giving equity to lower-ranked employees will become standard.

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4. Separating work time and downtime

A work-from-home workforce values boundaries between work time and downtime, since both often happen from the same desk. Clarifying the separation between the two is something executives need to do going into 2022. On the one hand, organizations that allow people to work from home will increasingly subsidize home office 

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4. Separating work time and downtime

equipment to attract talent. At the same time, leaders want to ensure they’re not enabling managers to indulge in scope creep.  We’re already seeing countries around the world passing new remote-worker legislation. This trend will continue. Companies that win the culture war will be ahead of the legislation and invest in privacy around working from home. 

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5. Investing in the talent supply chain

Problems with global supply chains have impacted businesses across every industry in unexpected ways, and it seems that will continue into next year.  Some businesses are trying to regionalize their supply chain to avoid dependence on international suppliers. Others are stockpiling supplies locally so they won’t find themselves 

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5. Investing in the talent supply chain

without mission-critical tools and parts. As business leaders continue this move away from lean supply chain thinking, it will create new issues with the talent supply chain. The talent supply chain starts with the workers who produce raw materials, extends to the factory floor, and ends at the business itself. When companies move their 

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5. Investing in the talent supply chain

manufacturing and development in-house, they have to adjust their talent supply chain: who they’re hiring, for which jobs, where, and when. Some will invest in automated intelligence to power smart manufacturing. In fact, companies worldwide are already doing that. But robots aren’t a panacea. Someone has 

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5. Investing in the talent supply chain

to maintain them, and certain jobs require creativity that robots don’t have.  In the coming years, business leaders will need to rethink the talent supply chain in the context of a widening talent gap. Meeting this challenge will require innovation and empathy in equal measures.

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