Each year comes with a string of surprising trends that impacts the way we interact with each other, manage our work and lives, and make sense of our world. Reflecting on the rollercoaster of 2024 and the post-COVID years, we should expect nothing less than constant change and further upsets to working norms in 2025.
The following three are my top workplace transformation trends to watch out for, noting what’s up and what’s down, for 2025.
Return To Office Mandates: Down
In late 2023, we saw increased mandates for workers to return to their offices after years of successfully working remotely during- and post-COVID. Resentment toward these policies built throughout 2024, leaving us all to question their effectiveness but not their popularity.
Jumping on this backlash trend and reinforcing their work-from-anywhere policy, Spotify Chief HR Officer Katarina Berg told Raconteur, “You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grownups and then treat them like children”.
Following Spotify’s lead, we should expect to see fewer mandates and more support for remote work in 2025, including a demand for coworking spaces and results-only work environments (ROWE) where there is a focus on outcomes rather than on hours worked.
Tolerance for Employee Surveillance and Monitoring: Down
As mentioned with the return to office mandates above, employees are pushing back against a lack of trust. With advances in technology come, too, advances in employee surveillance. Employees are frustrated with a common practice of prioritizing efficiency over employee wellbeing. Despite the detrimental impact on employee morale, the data is inconclusive as to whether increased surveillance and monitoring is even effective. Yet, ever more scrutiny has been applied to workers daily lives.
Most recently, AI emotional tracking has been used to detect employees’ biological emotion signals, such as their facial expressions, vocal tones, and other markers that can be used to create assumptions about their emotional states.
The intrusion and lack of privacy are not being met with acquiescence; employees are outraged and calling for boundaries around what ‘Big Brother’ can use against them.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Fatigue: Up
Wokeism, or the political term used to call out anything too progressive or too left leaning, is also on the rise. DEI programs and initiatives have been scrutinized, scaled back, and criticized. In some cases, initiatives have been introduced poorly without an evidence-base of support, people who represent majority groups are feeling fatigued after years of ‘walking on eggshells’, anti-woke accusations hurled by the political right are being leveraged as arguments against DEI, and costs need to be cut from somewhere.
These are a few reasons why employees and leaders may be experiencing DEI fatigue.
Intersectionality is only just being discussed, though it’s often not well understood. While the push for equity that considers intersectionality is vital for inclusion, the bandwidth for adopting and practicing inclusion at work is shrinking.
Women and those from minorized groups may experience leadership challenges in this climate of DEI fatigue. In times of crisis, these individuals may be offered or pushed into leadership positions that are precarious, at best, and poisoned, at worst. This phenomenon identified by Professor Michelle Ryan and Professor Alex Haslam in 2007 as the glass cliff and was listed by MIT Sloan as a top 5 Working Definition of 2024. Something to look out for as companies in trouble look to bounce back using any means at their disposal.
A New Year Of Work
Brace yourself for an exciting year of ups and downs. The future of work is constantly evolving and expanding. How will you make 2025 work for you?