After two years in a
Jeff Schwartz — vice president of insights and impacts at career mobility platform Gloat, and the author of “Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work” — believes 2022 will be a year of reflection and growth as business and HR leaders embrace their experiences from the last 20 months.
“I think 2022 is going to have two major themes: adaptation and reimagination,” says Schwartz. “Adaptation is largely about the things that we've already been doing in the last 20 months and sustaining them. Reimagination is about things we just started to do but now have the opportunity to really move forward with.”
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How leaders approach these themes in the new year could mean the difference between surviving and thriving in this new work landscape, explains Schwartz. Already, a survey from Gloat revealed that 48% of employees are looking for a new job in the next 90 days, marking a continuation of the great resignation into 2022.
Employee Benefit News spoke to Schwartz about what it will mean to adapt and reimagine in 2022, and how leaders can successfully approach their business resolutions for the new year.
What areas will employers need to adapt to and continue to expand on in 2022?
Well-being is something we need to find a way to adapt and make sustainable going forward. It’s incredibly clear from the last 20 months that well-being means physical, mental and financial well-being. It is absolutely front and center for employees, and obviously, it's front and center for recruitment managers, talent managers and business managers.
In terms of attracting, keeping and motivating people, whether it's from a recruitment perspective or a retention perspective, it is absolutely critical for employees to have a purpose — it’s important on a day-to-day basis for whether people join your company, whether they stay with your company and whether they continue to engage and fully participate in your company.
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As for the employee experience, employees want their work and their lives — even their longer lives — integrated. Although we are worried about the impact of the pandemic, people generally are living longer lives and have longer careers. So, how can we develop experiences for employees so that they can move across our company and within our company in ways that are much easier than they were before. It’s also about how employees can integrate their jobs and learning into their lives and balance it with family and personal responsibilities.
How should leaders practice reimagination in 2022?
First, we have to reimagine talent, mobility and talent choice. How can every worker feel like they have mobility and choice within their organization that is as good, if not better, than outside their organization? As for talent recruitment, it’s become a matter of holistic talent access — we have to reimagine that companies not only access talent internally and externally, but through service contracts, external gig markers and internal gig markets.
Then there is the question of human-machine collaboration and augmentation. How do we reimagine the role that people and technology play as part of the workforce, not as separate parts but as a common team? How do we put AI and robots on the team, so the teams of people and technology can do things that they could not do before?
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Lastly, how do we reimagine hybrid and remote work as new ways of working? We spent a lot of 2021 deliberating if we should be back in the office. In 2022, we're going to deal with the more challenging question of how to manage a workforce where some people are in the office and some people at home.
What’s your biggest takeaway from 2021?
We learned that our workforces are capable of so much more than we thought — just look at our level of innovation, from automobile companies making ventilators or the life sciences industry creating vaccines in the matter of a year. We did that through the resilience and creativity of the workforce.
But resilience is not easy — thousands of people died and we've had some very difficult situations. We need to be honest about that and recognize how exhausted people are. We need to be very human and have a huge degree of empathy.
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What is your advice to leaders as we enter the new year?
In order to lead with impact in 2022 as HR leaders and as business leaders, we recognize that we need to shift our mindsets and our mental models. I would write the headlines for 2022 that you want to look back on in January of 2023. Where do you want to be? What shifts do you want to be able to implement? What would be your proudest achievement in January of 2023 that you will accomplish in 2022, given all we've been through in 2020 and 2021? It’s a time of choice and consequence, but it does not happen on its own. It happens because we make bold decisions that will help us change.
