What will the talent market look like in 2023?
Here’s a round-up of the lessons learnt in 2022.
Why You Should Care
2022 is coming to a close.
What lessons have been learnt this year around attrition and retention?
Here's some predictions from UNLEASH about the future of talent, and hybrid work, in 2023 and beyond.
I cannot believe that 2022 is almost over. It’s been a whirlwind year. For us here at UNLEASH, it has been one full of business travel and a return of our industry-leading shows, UNLEASH America and UNLEASH World.
At our UNLEASH conferences, we invite HR leaders from the world’s largest brands to share the challenges they have faced, and then talk about how they solved them.
So, let’s start off this round-up of the 2022 with the biggest challenge, at least in the talent area of HR: the ‘Great Resignation’. What will the war for talent look like in 2023?
The ‘Great Resignation’ is going nowhere
When I sat down this time last year and wrote my predictions for 2022, I wrote about the ‘Great Resignation’ and the need for businesses to see it as an opportunity.
This is even more important as the ‘Great Resignation’ is over 18 months old, and it is showing no signs of slowing down – despite a looming recession and sky-high inflation.
So, what’s the solution? Yes, pay rises and bonuses have a role to play, but they alone cannot fix high attrition rates.
In 2021, there were rumblings about a lack of internal mobility being a core trigger of the war for talent, but the development side of retention has really come to the fore in 2022.
Those organizations that are thriving are those who don’t just look externally to solve their talent or skill shortages. Instead, these employers look at reskilling and upskilling their talent to ensure their business is resilient for the future. One example is Zurich Insurance, who I spoke to twice in 2022 about the world of internal mobility and the skills of the future.
The role of HR tech in retention
As career development and internal mobility have become more important in retention strategies. As predicted by Jeff Schwartz last year, talent marketplaces have come into their own in 2022, and will continue to play a core role in 2023.
Ahead of UNLEASH World, I sat down with Novartis’ head of talent Markus Graf, and he spoke about how the pharma giant’s investment in Gloat’s talent marketplace has changed the game.
But talent marketplaces are not the only type of technology that can help companies thrive in the ‘Great Resignation’. Remember while career development may be important right now, a looming recession may change employees’ priorities – so employers need to be continually checking in and listening to workers and their preferences.
The easiest way to do to this is with the help of employee engagement tools. But the most important thing is not just collecting the data, but actually analyzing it and taking appropriate action, as Protiviti’s EVP of people and culture Scott Redfearn shared with me in a recent interview.
There are lots of data and analytics tools that can help here – two examples that I have spoken to this year are Visier and Tableau.
At Salesforce’s World Tour event back in June, Tableau’s SVP of EMEA Dan Pell shares that employers must go beyond asking employees why they stay, and instead use exit interviews to find out why employees are leaving. And then aggregate and analyze that data to identify company-wide trends.
“Of course, people do leave, that’s always going to happen, but the aim to make sure you’re capturing that information, and then using that to improve and fix whatever was causing the problem,” Pell shares.
The beginning of the ‘Great Regret’
2022 has definitely been the year of buzzwords. Beyond the ‘Great Resignation’, we had all the ‘quiet’ trends – ‘quiet quitting’, ‘quiet firing’ and ‘quiet constraint’ (‘quiet promotion’ was also doing the rounds at one point). Forbes also coined the term the ‘Great Rebellion’ as 2022 has seen a flurry of unionization and industrial action
The latest, which came up in a recent interview I did with Mastercard’s Matthias Leitzmann, is the ‘Great Regret’.
Leitzmann will be speaking at UNLEASH America 2023, and during our pre-event interview we got onto the subject of the ‘Great Resignation’, and he mentioned that over the past few months Mastercard has seen actually seen significant numbers of ex-employees returning to work at the payments giant.
Mastercard isn’t alone – HR leaders at Salesforce and Medidata have also mentioned a recent rise in boomerang employees.
At UNLEASH, we predicted that 2022 would be the year of the ‘Great Regret’ or what we termed the ‘Great Return’. As I noted in an UNLEASHCast episode earlier this year, it seems we might have been a bit ahead of ourselves.
2022 has more been the year for a second round of quits where employees realized maybe employers didn’t practice what they preach and they are looking for a new opportunity.
But given that big employers like Mastercard and Salesforce are starting to see an increase in boomerangs, it is likely that 2023 will be the year employees realize that maybe the grass isn’t always greener and return to their original employer.
In this context, HR teams need to be revitalizing or creating alumni programs or other ways to stay in touch with former employees. Again, ask your employees and analyze the data about the best way to do this.
VR and making hybrid work
I started at UNLEASH in March 2021. At that point the UK was in a national lockdown and vaccine rollouts were at their very beginning, and debates about the future of remote work were in their infancy.
You might remember that Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon declared long-term remote work to be an “aberration”, well the last 20 months or so have seen numerous business leaders come out in favor of in-person work (the latest example being British entrepreneur James Dyson).
This occurs in the context of employees who can work from home repeatedly expressing their preference for hybrid working models (this is where they split their time between offices and remote locations).
The issue for HR teams is balancing business needs with employee preferences, and ultimately making decisions about which model to roll out.
Should you mandate the days employees in the office as Apple has done? Should you take Dropbox’s route and transform offices into places solely for collaboration? Or should you take another route altogether?
After two years of experimentation and collecting and analyzing data, 2023 is the year that employers must figure out how to balance in-person and remote work.
Ultimately, research shows that hybrid models are failing to provide adequate amount of social connection that employees want. This challenge was acknowledged by Danone’s CHRO Roberto Di Bernardini during his keynote session at UNLEASH World 2022.
The food giant like many other employers haven’t figure out the correct model, but it is leaning into social events, redesigning offices and technology as a solution.
On the topic of technology, research by both Meta and Microsoft suggests that virtual reality tools, including the metaverse, could be extremely helpful here. Can they supercharge remote meetings and make them more interactive and immersive than ordinary Teams or Zoom calls?
Thanks to Meta, I had the opportunity to try out Horizon Workrooms and the Meta Quest Pro earlier in December. I had always viewed the metaverse as a gimmick, but, now having experienced it first hand, I do see how it is better than a 2D video call. The spatial audio element is particularly critical.
At the moment, this technology is still in early stages of development, and I think we are long way from employers of all sizes seeing VR tech as a good use of money.
In 2023 and the challenging economic environment, maybe organizing more socials and off sites is a better solution to the disconnection that employees feel. But longer-term, don’t write off the metaverse without at least trying it first.
The International Festival of HR is back! Discover amazing speakers at UNLEASH America on 26-27 April 2023.
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Chief Reporter
Allie is an award-winning business journalist and can be reached at alexandra@unleash.ai.
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