October Trends to Watch

For two of the three trends this week, we’re seeing some of the flows and ebbs we’ve been following over the last 12 months begin to start making some waves. Read on to see how the trends we began to track a year ago are manifesting. From through people shifting their priorities based on self-preservation, grappling with emergent norms and mental models for our quickly changing world of work, and trying to reclaim power in their working lives.

1) Self-Preservation

Three factors are converging to put self-preservation as a trend on our radar.

First, the day-to-day reality of hybrid working is sinking in. Although the pandemic suddenly forced our workplaces into our homes, the technology we adopted to work through pandemic lockdowns means the pendulum might never swing back to a place where work started and ended at the office door. The boundaries between work-life and home-life may permanently remain porous.

Second, the dismal state of global affairs—including geopolitics, economics, and health—is leading to bad news cycling through our screens and inboxes 24/7. Recessions, rising COVID rates, war, nuclear threats, shortages; the list goes on. This is emotionally and mentally draining—reading bad news releases stress

Third, talking about mental health in the workplace is increasingly normalised (thanks in part to its more accessible cousin, ‘wellbeing’). This means many people can be more open and honest about the impact of the world outside of work, on work. But also, many organisations are trying to better understand the impact of mental health on workflow and productivity. For example, see this recent study on how children’s mental health impacts their parents’ performance at work which, in turn, can impact business performance.

How does this lead to the emergence of self-preservation? We each have a limited amount of mental, emotional, and physical energy to spend in a day. Where would you spend yours? Worrying about your child’s mental health, or on a difficult colleague at work? Stressing about rising food prices or about tight project deadlines? Self-preservation is about investing energy areas that matter more to you, and necessarily de-prioritising others.

One thing you can do to be ready for this…

Reframe disengagement, fatigue, and burnout in the context of self-preservation and a prioritisation challenge. What matters to your people? How can you give them the space to engage with what worries them (or upskill them to manage it), so they have energy and headspace to invest at work? Think about your learning & development programme’s value outside of the immediate workplace skills it imparts they can help you support your people more widely with the skills to navigate what is happening beyond work.

2) Always in Transition

This trend could also be called ‘Everything Is the Same, Nothing Is the Same.’ It stems from the increasingly (and likely permanently) porous boundaries between work-life and home-life. These increasingly blurred boundaries are due in significant part to the evolution of communications technology, starting in the 1990s when the PDA arrived. They grew along with the smartphone market in the 2000s and exploded with the surging adoption of productivity and communication tools during the pandemic. It is going to be hard – absent of the government intervention we are seeing in some countries – to return to a world where work ended when most of us left the office. Generally, a step forward in making people easier to reach for their employers is hard to walk back.

However, although we are seeing an unprecedented blurriness in work and life boundaries, this is not the first time the world of work has changed. And it definitely won’t be the last.

Put differently: how we work, where we work, and why we work has continuously changed over the long arc of history. And we’ve had to develop new norms, new business models and even new legal frameworks to adapt to this change. The weekend, for example, was adopted over time in response to the way the world of work was changing following the industrial revolution. We are currently on a larger journey (from a social and historical perspective) on building and adopting new norms, business models and mental models in response to our currently shifting ways of working.

One thing you can do to be ready for this…

Ask key questions to understand why your people do what they do. These include questions like “What role do your people want work to play in their life? What do your people want from work? What do they look to get from elsewhere?” Then ask the same questions of your organisation. “Why does your organisation do what it does? How does it bring out the best in its people? What does it need from its people?” Purpose-finding sessions, both individual and organisational can help you set the norms and mental models your people and business need to navigate the change we’re currently all undergoing.

3) Power Plays

Three trends we’ve previously covered are converging—all centred around power. These are: the power dynamics between employer and employee, diversity and inclusion becoming table stakes rather than nice-to-haves for employers, and the rise in employee activism propelled by the younger generations in the workforce. The result? Power dynamics, power structures and power plain-and-simple are being engaged with in more complex and, at times, authentic ways at work.

This claiming of power is manifesting in a range of ways. Quiet quitting could, in some respects, be seen as an attempt to claim back power over what one chooses to give, or not give, at work. Self-preservation, written about above, can also be framed as a way people are attempting to claim back some measure of power over their lives. Following a pandemic that largely left us powerless, the sudden focus on power makes sense.

When it comes to diversity and inclusion, we are seeing a growing awareness—and a growing conversation—that power fundamentally matters. Specifically, the growing awareness that talking about inclusion matters less (or not at all, for some) if power relations are not reconfigured as a result of those conversations. It matters who gets a seat at the table where decisions are made that make workplaces more inclusive and equitable—not just appear to be, not adopt initiatives to try to be, but actually be more inclusive and equitable. We expect that people are going to lose patience with the organisations they work in getting it wrong or tripping over good intentions.

One thing you can do to be ready for this…

Overinvest in engaging your people in your business. There are many ways you can consider doing this, from investing in their development and upskilling, opening up opportunities for internal mobility, or even simply listening more to your people. Identify which approaches and strategies work best for you. Incorporate your people’s needs into how to execute these.