With the scope of HR continuing to grow, the profession is witnessing an increasing number of HR teams that are struggling to meet this increasing demand.

In a recent LinkedIn poll, we asked our followers to share where their teams were facing challenges.

Almost half of respondents, 43%, said CAPACITY (having enough of the right people available when needed), 23% cited CAPABILITY (having the right skills and experience within the team), and 27% stated BOTH were issues.

Just 7% responded ‘NEITHER – we’re in good shape’.

This means that an overwhelming 93% of HR teams feel that they are not properly resourced to deliver everything their organizations need.

The impact of this on practitioners is highlighted in a study by HR software company MHR which found that half of HR professionals are on the verge of quitting due to burnout. Indeed, a separate study by Gartner found that 71% of HR leaders believe burnout amongst HR teams is more of a challenge than it was pre-pandemic.

And it’s no wonder this is happening. Since the pandemic ended, HR have been at the forefront of responding to a seismic shift in the workplace – the rise of the ‘carpe diem’ mindset has seen a significant increase in the importance of employee wellbeing; the ‘quiet quitting’ phenomenon brought to light important conversations around boundaries and work-life balance; and all of this on top of the mass adoption of hybrid and remote working across the world.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Also thrown into the mix is the need for companies to focus on their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, offer learning and development opportunities around the assimilation of new technologies, manage the change fatigue that emerges from this, and create a bulletproof Environmental, Social and Governance plan… all the while maintaining their ‘business as usual’ HR processes!

In our experience, the best route forward in a situation like this is to take a step back.

At OrgShakers we have pioneered the use of the Program Acceleration Office (PAO) whose role is to work with individual project managers to align, connect, and optimise resources across the whole team. In doing so the PAO creates a shared ‘big picture’ vision for the HR function based on a common roadmap, defined dependencies and impacts, and agreed outcomes. And once the organization’s in-house HR practitioners are optimally deployed, the PAO can objectively identify those areas where external resources are required.

We offer a range of services and expertise across all areas of HR, including fractional HR generalist and specialist support to bolster your team. So, if you would like to discuss how we can help with your capability and capacity needs, please get in touch with us today.

According to The Harris Poll’s Out of Office Culture Report, 37% of millennial workers have admitted to ‘quiet vacationing’ – that is, taking time off without telling their managers under the guise of working remotely.

For those getting flashbacks to the days of ‘quiet quitting’, they may be appropriately timed. Much like how quiet quitting was found to be a misnomer for employees wanting clear work-life boundaries and balance, ‘quiet vacationing’ may also be misleading.

This is because the report includes other findings which can help shed some light on why ‘quiet vacationing’ has emerged as a trend – particularly amongst Millennials.

Why Millennials? The most probable answer is that people in this age group are likely to have school-aged children, and they are likely to ‘quiet vacation’ as a means of attaining the flexibility they need but maybe aren’t being offered by their employer.

‘Quiet vacationing’ may also be a symptom of employees who don’t feel they have a proper work-life balance, as the research also discovered that 78% of employees who get paid vacations don’t take all the vacation days they are allocated. The reasons cited for this are to do with demands from work and pressure from managers not to take time off.

Work-life balance is quickly becoming a pivotal factor for many employees, with one study finding that more than half (56%) of employees would be willing to accept a lower-paid job in exchange for a better work-life balance.

So, what ‘quite vacationing’ and ‘quiet quitting’ have in common is that if employees are not getting the work-life balance they need, then they will find innovative ways to create it for themselves.

With the increase of hybrid and remote working styles, employers have been forced to adopt a new mindset of managing employee output (tasks completed) rather than input (showing up 9-5 five days a week). And the fact that the existence of ‘quiet vacationing’ has only been revealed through this latest study highlights that employees are still getting their jobs done – albeit at times which better meet their personal circumstances.

If there had been noticeable and consistent dips in productivity, this phenomenon would have been identified already. But if deadlines are being met on time and the work is getting done, then maybe this is just a case of recognizing that as long as employees can do what is expected of them, it shouldn’t really matter when they do it.

Now, this isn’t going to be applicable to every type of role, but for the most part, employers should be focused on managing the output of their employees, especially in a hybrid and remote working world. After all, someone can sit in an office all day and appear busy. But if the productivity of someone periodically ‘quiet vacationing’ from home remains consistent, is there really a problem?

A third of executives say they would leave their organization if it requires employees to return to the office, compounding HR’s challenge of retaining a strong leadership team, according to a recent Gartner report.

The flight risk is concerning because, according to a 2023 Gartner survey of 520 HR leaders across a number of industries and regions, 80% of CHROs do not think they have a deep list of possible replacements for senior roles.

“If a mandate is put in place and a lot of executives leave, it’s a huge risk not to have a strong bench to fill those roles,” says Caitlin Duffy, research director in Gartner’s human resources practice. “That’s because it cascades down and impacts all the levels below and can be difficult to manage.”

Read the full story here: https://hrexecutive.com/why-mandated-rto-could-lead-to-massive-executive-departures/?oly_enc_id=4235F9720301H5Y

While many jobs still offer hybrid- or remote-working patterns, more bosses are mandating their employees to return to the office on a full-time basis.

But for some of these companies, getting workers fully back on-site comes with a high price tag. This is particularly the case in the US, which has seen the most dramatic shift to flexible working – by January 2024, around 29% of all paid workdays were still worked from home. “Employers who cannot compete on flexibility will have to compete more aggressively on pay,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, based in California. 

The result is that US wages for fully in-office roles are surging. According to ZipRecruiter data, seen by the BBC, companies were offering on average $82,037 (£64,562) for fully in-person roles by March 2024 – an increase of more than 33% versus 2023 ($59,085; £46,499). The trend is cross-sector: compared to hybrid ($59,992; £47,211) and fully remote ($75,327; £64,320) roles, workers appear to be more likely to increase their salaries by returning to pre-pandemic office schedules. 

Part of this is compensating for the loss of flexibility that workers have prioritised for the past few years – the greater the push to relinquish that autonomy, the more employers have to offer to compensate. The ZipRecruiter data shows that workers who swapped from fully remote to fully in-office set-ups in the US through 2023 received a 29.2% pay bump – nearly double that of those moving the other way.

Read the full article here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-higher-in-office-jobs

That’s right – another buzzword has entered the mix.

‘Coffee badging’ may sound a bit peculiar, but it is essentially when an employee comes into the office very briefly, taps in with their identity card, then grabs a coffee and mingles with colleagues for a short stint before leaving to work the rest of the day from home.

According to a recent survey of 2,000 full-time workers in the US, more than half (58%) of hybrid workers admitted to coffee badging.

The trend seems to be rising in popularity in conjunction with the increased return-to-office mandates we seem to be seeing. As companies continue to try and force their employees back into the office full-time, employees seem to be revolting against this by poking their heads in for a quick coffee and then slipping back out again.

A huge reason for this is that many employees enjoy having hybrid and remote working privileges; one in five workers dread working from an office, and less than one in ten (8%) want to be in an office every day. One study even discovered that companies that issued return-to-office mandates experienced no improvement in financial performance, and 99% of them saw a drop in their employees’ overall job satisfaction.

The tug-of-war between employers wanting their employees in the office and employees wanting to work from home has been going on since lockdown ended. And whilst some solutions are being trialled – hybrid working where everyone comes into the office the same days, a 4-day working week entirely onsite – we are not seeing any that seem to stick.

What employers need to do is reverse engineer the problem in order to find the solution; in this case, workers are dissatisfied with coming into the office because all the work they do in the office they can do just as easily from home (except at home, they can save money on travel, work more comfortably, and lessen commuting time). It’s no wonder many of them don’t want to come into the office, because there is not a clear incentive to.

This is where companies need to focus their efforts. Demanding employees return to the office without a real reason insinuates a lack of trust in your team. Instead, employers must consider the fact that the role of the office has evolved in the modern working world, and therefore focus on optimizing the areas of onsite working that cannot be mimicked at home.

The most obvious one is face-to-face collaboration. It can be creatively stifling to attempt to exchange ideas over a Zoom call, but in a meeting room you can bounce off of each other. In this sense, the office has taken on the role of an ‘idea hub’ whose purpose is to encourage cohesion and the exchange of innovative ideas – all the while strengthening the interpersonal bonds between colleagues and leaders.

So, if you would like to discuss how we can help assist you in optimizing your organizational effectiveness when it comes to hybrid working, and ward off the coffee badging mindset, please get in touch with us.

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

He may have achieved fame as a country music singer in the 1960’s, but Jimmy Dean’s observation could easily have been about the current state of organizational change.

The winds of change have been howling through the working world; the disruptive forces of new technologies, generative AI, the broadening scope of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the assimilation of hybrid and remote working have created a HR hurricane.

These changes are all potentially positive for business, but they are happening at a pace that has been exponentially accelerated by the pandemic. What would have been a gradual integration of the hybrid working format became a sudden and forced shift to remote working which companies either had to adapt to or be left behind.

And yet, although lockdown posed a situation where employers were forced to adjust their sails, the changes that we are seeing now can be best navigated not just by responding to the direction of the wind – but also by anticipating its patterns so to be one step ahead of it.

Here lies the big question: is your organization ready for change?

A recent report from Gartner discovered that 82% of HR leaders believe their managers are not equipped to lead change – and this is exacerbated by the fact that 77% of employees are suffering from change fatigue.

Change fatigue occurs when the volume and pace of change becomes overwhelming for employees. This can have detrimental affects on employee wellbeing and productivity, but despite this only 8% of workers feel confident in their plan to manage their fatigue.

The pace of change in the working world is not predicted to slow, so for those organizations looking to keep in stride – and get ahead of – this new pace, they need to be building change fatigue prevention strategies into their equation for organizational transformation success.

Currently, most employers will integrate change through clear communication paired with good training. But as we watch the corporate world evolve, so do our approaches to how change is implemented. Weaving change fatigue management into this equation ensures that managers are better equipped to coach their teams on how to effectively identify fatigue drivers, fix any that arise, and start to look at how they can be prevented altogether (this looks like normalizing rest, microbreaks, employee involvement, creating a psychologically safe space, etc.).

What is critical to these prevention strategies being successful is understanding that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to mitigating change fatigue. Different types of employees are going to need different wellbeing support – and if employers are able to look at wellbeing needs through an intersectional lens, then they will be able to efficiently support their people through the intensity of these changes.

An example of this is midlife workers; many of our established wellbeing programs are centred around younger workers (parental leave, childcare support, etc.) whereas older workers will have entirely different needs to this (menopause support, working carers support, etc.). Bridging the wellbeing gap will strengthen your efforts when managing change fatigue and ensure that the other 92% of employees feel confident in their ability to manage their change fatigue as they will have the right support in place.

This will see your business set sail on the high seas of profit, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

If you would like to discuss how we can help implement strategies around wellbeing and change fatigue, please get in touch with me at david@orgshakers.com

David Fairhurst is the Founder of OrgShakers. He is widely considered to be one of the world’s leading HR practitioners and is a respected thought leader, business communicator, and government advisor.

Working in a remote or hybrid setting has entered the mainstream for the world of work.  Navigating applications like Zoom and Teams has become routine, water cooler chats rely on DM, and family members or pets are a common sight while working. That said, there are still the occasional mishaps. For example:

A few years ago, a group of legal workers were discussing a civil procedure over video call when their colleague Ben rose from his seat to reveal that he was, in fact, stark naked. In a similar and more recent blunder, a Social Democratic councillor from Romania thought his camera was off and that he was muted when he took his laptop into the bathroom and began to shower…but he was sadly mistaken.

I found myself dealing with a similar instance not too long ago where an individual was in a team call, accidently switched his camera on, and revealed he was taking nude photographs of himself. While these instances may seem amusing and are sometimes laughed off, it does beg the question for employers: How do we respond? Is policy applicable? And if none exist, do we need to create one?

Since remote work was introduced on a mass scale in 2020, it has become much more normal for employees to dress comfortably and casually for work.

A poll from People Management confirms this, as it found more than half of respondents (56%) wore jogging bottoms or leggings while working remotely, and the average employee spends 46 days a year working in pajamas. 29% of employers surveyed, however, stated they had enforced a strict dress code in response to this change or would if they could.

Ideally, an organization’s dress code can be applied across a variety of work situations and locations. Companies that have embraced remote or hybrid work can mitigate risk and inappropriate behavior by ensuring their workforce policies make sense in multiple settings. Rather than having separate dress code policies for different workers, for example, an organization can have a single comprehensive policy that applies to different situations.

The way we dress to work has always had a big influence on personal brand, company brand, and productivity. It’s the old adage that dressing smartly makes you think and act smartly. Dress helps someone differentiate when they are in work mode and when they are not. Post-pandemic saw these lines blur; the home, which was typically a place for comfort, merged with the workplace. And while dress code expectations may have been clear for working in the office, have employers been clear in what the expectations are surrounding working from home?

When reviewing dress code policies for use in remote or hybrid settings, start by defining what a company deems acceptable as ‘working attire’ when working from home. Consider how ‘dressed’ a remote employee needs to be. If someone on a zoom call is clad in a shirt, tie and even blazer from the waist up, but wearing pyjama bottoms from the waist down, is this unprofessional?

It’s important for employers to partner with HR when determining employee dress expectations. Appropriate attire doesn’t necessarily mean forcing workers to wear business professional clothing at all times, as contextually this may not be beneficial for the desired result.

For example, if a team is brainstorming ideas, an imaginative and innovative process, some individuals will do their best creative thinking when they can dress (and feel) comfortable. In part this is because, psychologically, what we wear can have a huge effect on how we think. One study found that wearing a suit or smart attire made 52% of people feel more productive, 59% act more decisively, and 78% felt more authoritative. And yet, a different study at the University of Hertfordshire asked a group of people to wear a Superman T-shirt, and concluded they believed they were stronger as a result.

Context of the desired result is therefore key when it comes to creating policies around dress codes and video call etiquette. Having a set of standards on what is acceptable – and what is unacceptable – will help mitigate the blunders mentioned earlier. There also needs to be an element of flexibility incorporated into these standards based on the task at hand; creative tasks may require more comfort. After all, if wearing a Superman shirt makes you feel strong, being comfortable can make you feel comfortable, too – and this can encourage some of the best and most honest thinking.

It all comes down to being intentional with the dress code, which will help to ensure clarity around those blurred lines of remote working and home life, while also taking into account the fact that the way someone dresses can have a real effect on their work results.

If you would like to discuss how we can help your company create and optimize these policies, please get in touch with me at amanda@orgshakers.com

What is the office actually for?

What was once seen as a logical and efficient way of working has now been brought into question by the sudden and mass shift to remote and hybrid work.

So, to work out where we’re going – we first need to rewind.

The ‘office’ has always been in a shifting state, all the way back to its conception in the 15^th century, where medieval monks created ‘scriptoriums’ to copy manuscripts. From that point onwards these proto-offices slowly evolved as the introduction of artificial light, telephones, typewriters, elevators, and computers eventually spawned sky-scraping office buildings which defined the urban landscape.  

Then BOOM! Lockdown. And everything changed.

What had been a slow and gradual evolution was jolted in a radically different direction. Those that could, worked from home. And for many of these individuals, working life became more productive, and more rewarding, to the point where today nine in ten jobseekers say hybrid work is now as important as financial benefits.

These new expectations mean that employers now need to be considering how they can most effectively use their office space to optimize the productivity of their people when they are in work – while also meeting their wellbeing needs when they are working remotely.

The best way to do this? By focusing on policy, place, and purposeful leaders:

Policy – Clarity is key when it comes to creating policies for hybrid and remote work, and so is the consideration of time. Your policies will outline when you expect people to be in, and when they are permitted the freedom to choose whether they use the office or work from home.

How flexible are your working hours? Are there core working hours that everyone needs to be available for? Being clear about what your policies are and why you have chosen them is important when it comes to building trust and loyalty with your staff, as well as lending to your attractiveness as a company.

Place – Different people are going to want/need to use the office for different reasons. For some, they may want to be in everyday as they cannot find a quiet space to focus at home. For others, they may only want to come in once a week, as they can do their individual work from home but enjoy face-to-face contact for more collaborative tasks. The point of this is that you have to be able to offer a place that can accommodate for both.

Will you have a Superdesk in one area to encourage collaboration and cubicle spaces for those who need to concentrate? Or will you try and adopt a more creative approach, with nap pods and sofas scattered about?

There is no ‘best way’ to do it – a recent study found that actively trying to make creative office spaces could be stifling creativity, whilst another discovered that changing from cubicles to open-plan saw a 70% drop in face-to-face interactions.

It all depends on your people’s needs; let them guide how your office space takes shape, and this way, it will ensure the optimization of their productivity.

Purposeful Leaders – Your leaders will play a huge role in bringing these policies to life –  as well as ensuring that the office space you have is delivering a return on your real estate investment.

If you decide that you want all employees to come in once a week, then it falls to team leaders and line-managers to highlight why people should adhere to this. If you force your staff to come in only for them to do the quiet, concentrated, individual work they can, and would most likely prefer to, do from home, then you are not optimizing the space around you. These days should be dedicated to collaborative tasks, to nourishing the company culture and strengthening the relationships between colleagues. If this is done correctly, people will stop viewing coming into the office as a chore and actually start wanting to be there, but your policies can only be as good as your managerial facilitation.

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Employers need to accept that hybrid and remote work is, for the majority of workers, desirable and beneficial, and begin leveraging this opportunity to optimize productivity rather than seeing it as an obstacle standing in the way of ‘the old way of work’.

The purpose of the office is changing, so now it’s a matter of leading this change rather than being led by it. And this is where we can help – we can assist in optimizing your organizational effectiveness when it comes to hybrid work, helping to craft policies and coach leaders to ensure that your company’s individual needs are met, and simultaneously align with the needs of your workforce.

To continue this conversation, you can either head over to our contact page, or reach out to me directly at andy@orgshakers.com

It might be a new year, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the ever-growing importance of effectively navigating hybrid and remote working. That’s why this month we have been reading Remote, Not Distant: Design a Company Culture That Will Help You Thrive in a Hybrid Workplace by Gustavo Razzetti.

Being the creator of the Culture Design Canvas – a framework that helps organizations map, assess, and design their culture – it’s no surprise that Gustavo’s latest book aims to explore the secrets behind successful remote workplace cultures.

After spending years studying businesses like Amazon, Volvo, and Microsoft, Gustavo addresses the multiple key areas that are crucial for organizations to be able to operate effectively in remote and hybrid settings. This includes examining culture, how to keep a team connected, asynchronous communication, facilitating conversation, and finding and defining the right hybrid model for your business.

Gustavo outlines the five key mindset shifts that companies need to make in order to reset their workplace culture and optimize their remote working environments:

1. Intentionally design workplace culture – this will see the active involvement of employees in this design process, and will require employers to be open to experimentation. If they are finding that something isn’t working, they shouldn’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and adjust. Involving the team in the process means you will create a culture that works for everyone – and highlight how valued your employees’ opinions are!
2. Prioritize impact over input – working long hours and being readily available at all times are not the defining factors of an employee; performance should be measured on the results achieved! This shift in mindset will see employers encouraging employees to showcase their accomplishments rather than perpetuating the outdated ways of presenteeism.
3. Forget traditional work-life boundaries – remote work blurs the lines between home-life and work-life, and in order to successfully operate remotely, employees need to be allowed to embrace the messy reality it can sometimes bring. Normalize interruptions from children or furry friends, and be more lenient to dressing down when working at home. This helps ensure the home remains a sanctuary that still symbolises comfort and rest.
4. Collaboration doesn’t have to be synchronous – in hybrid workplaces, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone works according to their own timetables. Embracing this flexible and autonomous approach allows individuals to optimize their productivity and discover their peak working hours.
5. Delegate decision-making to empower teams – get your teams involved with creating their hybrid working policies and empower them to have a say in how and where they work. This solidifies the culture of autonomy that threads through all these mindset shifts and helps to create a more fulfilling workplace experience.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the book, Gustavo explores why the ‘office’ doesn’t equal ‘culture’, and how to build psychological safety in a hybrid working world.

Our OrgEssentials team specializes in start-up and transformation, and so if you would like to discuss how we can help bring these remote working practices to life in your workplace, please get in touch with us!

And if you would like to get your hands on a copy of Remote, Not Distant, you can head over here for the UK and here for the US.

Despite the days of in-person client meetings lessening, employees are still finding themselves setting out on corporate trips…just for new reasons.

The pandemic quickly made a lot of businesses see the futility in travelling across countries for client meetings. After being forced to work remotely, it became logical to continue conducting business meetings across international waters via platforms like Zoom and Teams – it was less time consuming, and a much cheaper alternative.

While this initially lead to a huge decline in airlines’ profits due to this drop in business travel, an August 2023 report from the Global Business Travel Association showed that the worldwide business-travel industry is expected to surpass its pre-pandemic spending level of $1.4tn (£1.1tn) in 2024 – two years earlier than some industry analysists predicted.

Data from American Express Global Business Travel may help explain why. In collaboration with Harvard Business Review, Amex GBT researchers surveyed 425 US professionals and found companies are changing why their workers are travelling. Instead of the pre-pandemic focus on sales-driven outings, business trips are now centred on what the report defines as “non-customer travel”: companies are meeting up internally. 

Read the full piece here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240103-remote-work-business-travel

As we counted down to the new year in December, we adopted the theme of looking forwards. What are the essential topics of focus for employers to be considering in 2024?

Well, in case you missed any of them, here’s a summary of our essentials:

• The Disability Pay Gap – an analysis from the Trades Union Congress discovered that disabled workers effectively work for free for the last 47 days of the year due to the sizable pay gap between disabled and non-disabled workers. With 17.8% of England’s population being disabled, working towards closing this gap should be a priority for organizations so to attract new, diverse talent and to plug talent shortages that continue to effect employers – read the full piece here.
• Decision Intelligence – for our monthly reading recommendation, we recommended a book that all employers should get their hands on: Decision Intelligence by Thorsten Heilig and Ilhan Scheer. It acts as a practical and comprehensible guide for professionals who are navigating the decision-making and AI landscape by exploring the intersection of behavioral science, data science, and technological innovation. Check out our full summary here!
• Weaving AI into Learning and Development – Access Partnership’s survey found that 93% of employers expect to be using generative AI in the workplace in the next five years. It has therefore become an essential point of focus for employers to be weaving AI-centric learning and development (L&D) opportunities into their L&D strategies – read the full piece here.
• Leadership Legacy – with the average turnover rate for leadership roles at an unprecedented 18%, now is the best time for leaders to take a step back from thinking about where they are going next and, instead, take a moment to consider what it is they will be leaving in their wake. The impression that they leave, and the legacy of their practices, can make a big difference to the health of a company – so how do they want to be remembered? Read the full piece here.
• The HR Fundamentals – Our Founder David Fairhurst identified four key areas of focus that he believes are essential for HR and employers to be preparing for in order to ensure organization sustainability:
  • The Workforce Cliff – the first is the Workforce Cliff, which predicted that around this time, we would start to have more jobs than we had people to fill them. To avoid the cliff’s looming edge, employers must be expanding their search and tapping into all pools of talent…read the full piece here.
  • Humans and Technology – The second point of focus will be the relationship between humans and technology. As organizations begin to introduce generative AI into their workplaces, HR will play a pivotal role in supporting these new technological co-worker relationships in order to successfully optimize its capabilities. Read more here!
  • Redefining Place and Time – With the mass adoption of remote and hybrid working styles, we are seeing the previous boundaries of time differences and geographical distances evaporate, opening companies up to a new, global pool of talent…and to embracing the concept of asynchronous work. Read on for the full piece.
  • The End of Jobs – in order to successfully respond to the rapid increase in the pace of organizational change, employers will begin to recognize that a more flexible and responsive methodology is needed to keep up. This will take shape in the form of adopting a skills-based approach to managing work and workers – read the full piece here.

If you would like to discuss the services we offer in regards to these essentials – or wider areas of HR – please get in touch with us.

Last year, we asked the OrgShakers team what practices and ideologies they thought employers should be leaving behind as they ventured into the new year.

Now, as another year comes to a close, we wanted to see what they believe should be left in 2023 in order to help propel sustainability and growth in the year to come:

• Victoria Sprenger believes that employers need to leave behind their hesitancy on the use of AI, and instead begin to channel this tool for positive, impactful and productive work – it’s time to start working smart!
• And with new technology emerging, Sayid Hussein believes employers – especially those in the realm of remote work – must pivot away from outdated technological practices to stay ahead. The key lies in transitioning from multiple communication tools to integrated platforms that merge messaging, video calls, and project management, thereby enhancing efficiency. Outmoded legacy systems should be replaced with modern, cloud-compatible solutions, and the manual handling of data should give way to automated processes powered by AI and machine learning. It’s also crucial to ensure that technology is optimized for mobile use, catering to a flexible and dynamic workforce. Customizable tech solutions are vital in addressing the diverse needs of today’s employees. In the cybersecurity arena, regular, updated training is essential to keep pace with evolving threats, moving beyond traditional physical security measures to comprehensive digital strategies. By embracing these changes, employers can significantly boost the productivity and security of their remote teams, aligning with the fast-paced, digitally-driven work environment that 2024 will definitely bring.
• Speaking of the realm of remote work, Andy Parsley thinks that employers need to stop treating remote and hybrid working as a ‘problem’. Through 2023, countless politicians and senior business leaders have gone public with their unease about remote and hybrid working, urging workers to “get back to the office”. I hope that in 2024 they’ll come to realize that, managed correctly, these flexible working patterns are better for both workers and their employers. Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, estimates that people value the ability to work from home two or three days a week about the same as they would an 8% pay rise. And, if organized effectively, remote working can be good for productivity too. Indeed, there is a growing realization that asynchronous work – work that is done independently from others – is often more productive than synchronized work alongside colleagues in the workplace. So, in 2024 organizations should focus on optimizing the working patterns of their people – and ignore those who are arguing for a retrograde step back to a five-day-a-week, 9-5 culture.
• Amanda Holland believes that organizations need to stop lamenting the workforce shortage. The world of work is undergoing several transformational changes including the dearth of workers, the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the massive shifting of duties and roles across most industries.  Leading-edge organizations and executives are focused on charting new paths that capitalize on the opportunities coming from these disruptions. They have let go of rehashing how challenging the current workforce shortage has become. Instead, they are acknowledging that traditional talent management strategies have become less productive and it’s time to think ahead, rather than continuing to look behind. 
• And speaking of talent management, Brittany Burton thinks that it’s time for employers to leave behind quiet quitting. This can be done by engaging their employees, conducting frequent check-ins, encouraging open communication about concerns and actively listening. To combat quiet quitting employers should also address workload issues, promote a positive work environment, think strategically on career path planning, and stay attuned to warning signs such as disengagement, decreased productivity, increased absenteeism or changes in behavior.
• Finally, Marty Belle believes employers should leave behind the perspective that their organization is colorblind and that differences should be erased. Instead, they must accept the reality that people are diverse, and race, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, and other dimensions of our differences have significance and will all add to greater organizational success.

If you want to get in touch with us surrounding these points, you can do so here.

And from all of us at OrgShakers, Happy New Year!