In the summer of 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, everyone across the globe waited to see what would happen next. The employment world was no different. In my role as a workforce futurist, I help organizations anticipate and prepare for near-future disruptions. As part of ongoing work with the US government, I produced a summer 2020 forecast for 2022-25. I asked: what impact would the pandemic have on employment two to five years forward? Futurist professionals use a combination of methodologies to make our forecasts, including environmental scanning for emerging changes, trend an ..read more

All good things must come to an end. My syndicated WSJ column, The Workplace Report, is coming to an end. The last 20 months have involved an unprecedented amount of change in the workforce and human resources spheres. I'm leaving it with five major predictions for the near future world of work, featuring Workplace Report highlights from the last year and a half of coverage. The demand for skilled workers will reach a crisis point due to demographic shifts and falling fertility rates. According to Manpower Group’s 2023 Talent Shortage Survey, 77% of global employers say they are already strugg ..read more

Workforce futurists have been predicting mid-twentieth century labor shortages for some time now, but many forecasts seemed unduly alarming – until the pandemic. Now, a confluence of factors is rapidly decreasing the global worker supply. Employers have noticed. According to Ceridian’s 2023 Executive Survey, 66% of the global leaders surveyed have experienced a labor shortage in the past 12 months. And 88% said it’s at least slightly likely shortages will continue over the next year. The surveyed leaders aren’t wrong about the likely continuation of labor shortages. And many executives I ..read more

  Experts have long predicted that baby boomer retirement would decimate global workforces, leaving employers with untold numbers of positions to fill and significant losses of organizational knowledge. But for nearly a decade, the bigger story has been baby boomers unretiring and returning to work. Since a 2015 RAND Corporation study showed that 40% of retired workers over the age of 65 had returned to work, there has been a steady stream of data illustrating the unretiring trend. Many seniors simply don’t have the money or the inclination to leave the workforce and stay out ..read more

Communicating with the passive candidates whose email addresses you’ve stored in your CRM isn’t a new idea. Taking a page from the marketing team’s playbook and segmenting those candidates into groups based on a common qualifier (location, career stage, etc.) isn’t necessarily new either. What has changed in recruitment segmentation, however, is the power of technology to help talent professionals do it more effectively. First of all, since recruitment segmentation came onto the talent acquisition scene as a popular strategy, the ability to automate email campaigns and customize their cadence ..read more

Now that we’re into the second quarter of 2023, we can see that the talent acquisition (TA) world has a different tint. Despite the specter of recent layoffs and a looming recession, widespread skills shortages and a low overall labor force participation rate (LFPR, or the number of people in the workforce or actively looking for work) mean that organizations have had to deploy more innovative recruitment strategies. These trends are reaching critical mass: Internal Mobility When it comes to lateral moves and internal opportunities, most organizations have always talked a good game. However, i ..read more

The world is at a societal and technological inflection point. Business leaders cite talent recruitment and development as top challenges due to talent shortages, long hiring times, and high turnover. Meanwhile, key challenges for engagement and retention include managing employee expectations in line with post-pandemic norms. We know from research and experience that nearly 50% of top talent leaves within two years, but also that most individuals would happily stay if given the right learning and growth opportunities. But as companies grow and gain thousands ..read more

“Quiet quitting” and “quiet firing” are the latest buzzwords to take the world of work by storm. But while the terms themselves may be new, the concepts aren’t. And they illustrate a troubling trend taking place in the post-pandemic workplace. Quiet quitting refers to employees who show up to work and seemingly do the bare minimum to meet expectations. Quiet firing happens when employers actively seek to make work conditions less favorable by taking away attention, resources, or opportunities from employees with the hope that they’ll resign. Both quiet quitting and quiet firing are passive agg ..read more

For about a decade, donning my workforce futurist hat has required ongoing dialogue about employee monitoring tools and their inevitable march toward greater sophistication. Often, the question has not been “Will we monitor our employees?” but “What will we monitor about our employees?” Today, employee monitoring is routinely making headlines. Stories abound of employers using monitoring software to track the location of their staff, detect signs of quiet quitting, record how much time employees spend on different activities, and take screenshots of their devices – sometimes without emplo ..read more

While business is generally stabilizing and neighborhood institutions are finding innovative ways to stand their ground against larger competitors, concerns including inflation and stubborn supply chain disruptions continue to dog many owners. According to the November 2022 Small Retailer Report from American Express Business Class, which surveyed 300 small business retail decision makers, most small retailers currently operate in both online and brick-and-mortar settings, and retailers view their brick-and-mortar stores as a place for customers to discover and try products, as well as for boo ..read more