In Pursuit of Profession: Workplace trends of 2017

Much like fashion does year in and year out, workplace trends change as time marches on. While I’m pretty sure we won’t see anyone wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress to the weekly staff meeting in the coming months, we will see some other interesting trends this year that may have been a long time coming or they might be something that’s a complete and wonderful surprise.

Experience matters

Companies are continuing to expand in 2017 and that means they need more employees. With unemployment already at historic lows, that means a tight labor market will become even tighter and companies will be competing more fiercely for talent. While higher pay and better benefits will always be attractive, companies are finally realizing that they must offer a better experience for not only their existing employees but also for job applicants. In their recent study entitled, “The Candidate Experience Study,” Future Workplace, a research firm preparing leaders for disruptions in recruiting, development, and employee engagement and CareerArc, a global HR technology provider of social recruiting and outplacement services, found that nearly 60 percent of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience. Ironically, the root of this new applicant experience needs to be focused on those people who didn’t get the job. In an era where people can review almost any product or service online, applicants are now doing the same thing with potential employers. In fact, whether the applicant got the job or not, the study also revealed that, “72 percent reported having shared that experience online on an employer review site, such as Glassdoor, on a social networking site, or directly with a colleague or friend.” With more and more people using reviews to influence their decisions, companies cannot afford to ignore the applicant experience in 2017 and beyond.

The experience formula is just as important if not more so when it comes to existing employees. This doesn’t mean that there needs to be free dry cleaning and on-site espresso bars. It means that employers need to show their employees that they value them. And perhaps the best way to accomplish that is by showing them that they care about their careers. In another recent study by Future Workplace and Beyond, the Career Network, “only 50 percent of job seekers say that their most recent employer has helped them advance in their career. Job seekers reported that employers could best help advance their careers through project assignments (48 percent), promotions (39 percent) and leadership development programs (35 percent).” The good news is that it seems that employers are catching on to this need in 2017. The same study stated that, “56 percent of HR professionals say they seek to enhance their employee experience by investing more in employee training and development.”

Technology rules!

Heads up parents of high schoolers and college students, the same Future Workplace and Beyond study above found that 14 percent of job seekers surveyed are liberal arts majors, yet only 2 percent of companies are actively recruiting those majors. 15 percent of job seekers are engineering and computer information systems majors yet 30 percent of companies are actively recruiting those majors. Do the math and that means that tech is still king when it comes to getting a job. One of the most explosive new areas in tech in 2017 is virtual reality (VR). KZero, a VR consulting firm, estimates that VR hardware revenue is set to reach over eight billion in the next two years. By that time, they estimate that 25 million people will be using VR. As VR becomes more popular with consumers, that will drive demand at our workplaces as well. Industries like gaming are obvious benefactors of the VR experience, but there are countless other applications in nearly every industry. From giving virtual tours of offices to job applicants to training new hires to resizing virtual blueprints of buildings while being inside them, the power of VR in the workplace, it seems, is only limited by our imaginations.

Other trends

While ratcheting up our experiences at work, whether in real life or virtually, is an exciting topic to watch as it progresses, changes in other trends are just as important. Making sure that long-standing benefits like healthcare and retirement plans are able to evolve with our needs are a must in 2017. But other benefits are picking up steam as well. The two that top the charts are flextime and student loan repayment.

One of the biggest challenges with a world that is “always-on,” is finding a way to keep work from seeping into our personal lives. Fortunately, more and more companies are realizing that flextime is an important benefit for most workers. In fact, Kathie Lingle, National Director of Work/Life at KPMG LLP, recently stated that, “flextime is the number-one driver of employee retention.” A recent survey conducted by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) stated that 55 percent of companies surveyed offer flexible work scheduling. A good start, but look for that number to go up in 2017.

Because there are so many different definitions as to what flextime is, we need to understand how it is defined in our organizations and the ones where we’d like to work one day. For some, it means a four-day workweek that consists of four 10-hour workdays. Others define it as allowing workers to choose their own starting and quitting hours. Still other companies define it as the ability to work a certain percentage of hours a week from home. If you’re a manager considering making flextime an option in your workplace, there needs to be some ground rules put in place. Trust needs to be at the heart of any flextime plan; management can’t be too controlling and workers can’t abuse the system. Also, the functionality of the business can’t be compromised under a flextime plan. If business functions do start to suffer, then management should have the right to tweak the plan as needed.

Finally, if you’ve been living under a rock or perhaps on some sunny island somewhere far from anyone who had to use student loans to pay for college, you may not know that we’re in the midst of a student loan crisis in this country. Consider these statistics from a recent Money.com article by Mark Kantrowitz, “Student loan debt exceeded credit card debt in 2010 and auto loans in 2011, and it passed the $1 trillion mark in 2012. In 1993-94, about half of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt, averaging a little more than $10,000. This year [2015], more than two-thirds of college graduates graduated with debt, and their average debt at graduation was about $35,000, tripling in two decades.”

If you guessed that college loan repayment benefits are attractive to people with college debt, you would be correct. A recent American Student Assistance (ASA) survey stated that, “76 percent of respondents said that if a prospective employer offered a student loan repayment benefit, it would be a deciding or contributing factor to accept the job but according to SHRM only 4 percent of companies currently offer such a benefit.” Could that mean that the student loan repayment benefit could be the hottest workplace trend in 2017? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

This story was originally published February 17, 2017 at 4:24 PM with the headline "In Pursuit of Profession: Workplace trends of 2017."