Encapsulating 52 weeks' worth of news into one end-of-the-year recap is rarely so easy as it is this year. The year's biggest story was the still-unsettled return to office (RTO) debate. On one side, a slew of studies connecting improved productivity, employee engagement and fiscal health with flexible and remote work. We covered this multiple times:
January 2024: Research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that return-to-office mandates have no effect on a company's bottom line -- but can negatively impact company morale.
June 2024: A study by workplace insights firm Leesman surveyed workers who were in the office two to three days a week, and workers who were in the office four to five days; the number of employees in the latter group who say they feel connected to their company was only one percentage point greater than the group that was in the office two to three days.
October 2024: An A/B study of RTO and hybrid workforces found there were quantifiable differences in both productivity and employee retention between the control and hybrid work groups. There were also cost savings that favored the hybrid groups.
And America's workforce remains resistant to commuting, demanding that their employers demonstrate why workers should actually lose time and money to come into an office.
The announcement that the incoming presidential administration intends to banish remote work for all federal employees will likely reignite the debate over the RTO practice and what we all lose when we ignore the data.
There were two other stories that persisted through the year: the workforce's grappling with AI, and an increasing willingness to discuss how much current workplace culture was contributing to ongoing disengagement and burnout at work.
Workers' ambivalence about AI seemed to unfold over the year, with initially bullish sentiment changing over the year:
June 2024: AI assistants are supposed to help with the tsunami of information we are often swept away by -- but you have to make sure their work is actually accurate.
July 2024: Legal, tax, and risk & compliance professionals -- three occupational areas where work can be rote yet needs to be accurate and consistent -- are feeling pretty good about AI making their jobs easier and saving them time.
August 2024: we see the beginnings of an AI sentiment gap as Upwork research uncovers executives’ expectations of AI’s ability to improve efficiency are high, as their reports say AI may make their jobs harder.
September 2024: Slack further identifies the workplace ambivalence toward AI and says it's largely driven by employees' current experience in their job.
November 2024: Further Slack research finds that the adoption rate for AI has stalled out in the U.S.; from March 2024, 32% of desk workers had tried AI; that grew by one percentage point over five months to August 2024. The two biggest obstacles to AI adoption are the fear that AI will change someone's job for the worse, and the fear that AI will take the job, period.
And the workforce is also signaling that our current models are not sustainable for long-term workforce management:
May 2024: For all the benefits that remote work offers, there's one distinct downside -- a rise in burnout. 77% of workers are experiencing burnout at their current job, and over 50% cite more than one occurrence. For further clarity, 86% of remote workers are experiencing burnout, 70% of in-person workers report the same feelings, and hybrid workers sit somewhere in the middle at about 81%.
May 2024: Seventy percent of organizations surveyed by HR Acuity cited mental health challenges as the driving factor behind a rise in behavior-related HR cases.
May 2024: MetLife research finds that employees are now more likely to experience negative feelings at work, including stress (12% more likely) and burnout (17% more likely) than they were pre-pandemic (2019). Employees are also 51% more likely to feel depressed at work than they were pre-pandemic as they face a complex macro environment and permacrisis state.
September 2024: Workhuman's most recent Global Human Workplace Index survey discovered that a whopping 37% of managers reported "faking" productivity at work. The managers who admitted to fauxductivity all cited a need for better work-life balance as their number one reason for faking their work habits; they also said they suspected reports who were faking productivity were also doing so out of a need to address something gone wrong with work-life balance.
September 2024: Hewlett Packard's 2024 Work Relationship Index found that the percentage of knowledge workers who reported having an unhealthy relationship was greater than the percentage who reported a healthy relationship, and the sentiment gaps between management and the rest of the workforce were huge.
October 2024: Wrike's 2024 Impactful Work Report saw knowledge workers reporting a 31% increase in their workloads over the past year, while business leaders see an even larger increase at 46% for their teams. Less than two-thirds of workers epxressed happiness in their roles.
So what can we take away from 2024? The modern workforce is sending up flares -- it's tired and overworked, and there are sentiment gaps between worker perception and management perception. And while vendors are positioning AI as a way to ease workflow, the people most likely to use these tools regard them with suspicion and worry the tech will only add to their workloads.
And powerful players in society are still pushing for a full return to office despite abundant evidence that alternate models for working serve everyone from the worker to the company very well.
Keep these stories in mind as 2025 exists. How and where people work -- and how they feel about it -- will continue to shape what they produce.
This will be the last WorkSpace Connect weekly newsletter for 2024. We will resume coming to your inbox on Wednesday, January 8. Happy holidays and a happy new year!
