On Aug. 4, 2020, eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning COVID-19 journalist Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic: “Normal led to this.”

Mr. Yong wrote a lot more, but those four words succinctly describe how the social patchwork we had built came apart so easily in early 2020.

We didn’t just experience a societal earthquake two years ago – we saw all changed utterly, to borrow from a Yeats poem. And we had to adapt quickly to survive.

Employers didn’t escape without struggle, either. The working world had to navigate as well. To better understand the impacts of the pandemic on the workplace, we surveyed hundreds of businesses in June 2020. The result was the New World of Work survey report published in August 2020 with numerous insights on what the work world looked like at that point and what it would look like going forward.

And now, we at Workable conducted the same survey again in June and July 2022 – with a few updated questions. We now understand what anticipated developments from 2020 turned out to be true, and what were way off mark. And what threads from that patchwork remained intact from before, and what new threads are being sewn.

This new report has two parts: first, what we learned from this new survey, and second, how the new survey results compare with those from two years ago. Enjoy the read, and reap whatever takeaways you gain from it.

Major takeaways include the following:

Flexwork is here to stay – especially in location. More than four out of five businesses have some form of location flexibility in their work, whether it’s fully or partially remote, or a hybrid working environment.
Partial remote is booming. Fully remote operations are on the downswing from the early days of the pandemic (52.4% of businesses now, 62.6% two years ago) – and partial remote has nearly doubled since then (59.2% now, 32.3% two years ago).
Remote isn’t as sustainable as people initially thought it was. Two years ago, one third of businesses said 75% of their workers could work fully remotely without disruption – only half that number think so now (17.5%).
For those working remote-first, comm tech is a huge unifier. Three quarters of businesses say they’re using communications technology now compared with 52.6% in 2020.
Employee monitoring is on the rise. Right now, 22.5% of businesses are using time-tracking and / or employee monitoring tools – up from 14.6% two years ago.
But there’s one benefit of remote: larger talent markets. 53.3% of businesses are now expanding their job postings to other locations compared with just 30.1% in 2020.
If your in-house recruiting team is strapped for resources, you’re not alone. Reduced in-house capacity to recruit is much more of a challenge to hiring today (27.5%) than in 2020 (14.9%).
Self-starters are in vogue now. Seven out of 10 businesses (69%) now consider a self-starter mentality hugely value when hiring compared with just over half two years ago (54.2%).
Money is becoming a more significant driver now than before. 56.2% of employers say compensation is growing in importance now compared with 33.3% in 2020.
Return to normal? What even is “normal” anymore? Just one in 25 respondents (3.9%) in 2020 said their industry wouldn’t return to normal – that number’s since grown to 22.7% now. And, in 2020, only 3% said their business and operations wouldn’t return to normal at all – that number is now nearly 20%.

CHAPTER 1

The COVID-19 response conversation

— The business response

— The long-term response

CHAPTER 2

The remote work conversation

— The trend of distributed teams

— Remote employee engagement

— Changes due to remote shift

CHAPTER 3

The hiring conversation

— How did hiring change?
— Biggest hiring challenges
— Remote hiring challenges

CHAPTER 4

The change in candidate
value prop

— DIY on the rise
— A surge in creativity
— Growing thirst for knowledge
— Adaptable and resilient? Meh

But now, as pendulums are wont to do, we see organizations swinging back to the other direction – workers are now being urged to return to in-office work. We’ve seen this in aggressive commentary from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk (“They can pretend to work somewhere else”) and British business magnate Lord Alan Sugar (“... most who work from home watch more TV than work. There are a few exceptions but the majority are lazy gits.”).

With such emphasis on the push to and from remote, we’re seeing a new standard coming to the surface: the hybrid work environment. And our data shows it, too.

Gartner’s Senior Director Analyst, Sandy Shen, had this to say:

“The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now…this is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

And Kate Smaje at McKinsey Digital notes: “COVID-19 has only made digital more relevant as companies … have undergone their own massive, overnight experiment in agile, and remote ways of working.”

In that spirit, let’s take a deeper look at what our survey respondents say about DX in the workplace.

What does all this tell us?

In short, it isn’t so much about connecting your employees socially or personally, or making sure your employees are actually working on the clock. It’s more about minimizing disruption to overall workflow by ensuring that employees are well-informed (as seen in the popularity of regular all-hands) and are working together seamlessly. Businesses are also ensuring that the lines of communication are open and free-flowing regardless of the environment they’re working in.

Grief expert David Kessler – best known for his collaborative work with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the book Grief and Grieving – said in 2020: “We’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”

We covered mental health extensively in our last survey, and shared numerous insights in the resulting Mental Health in the Workplace survey report. So this insight comes as no surprise. And we learned in this new survey that there’s a continued anxiety that impacts both employers and employees at work.

What does all this tell us?

There are several conclusions we can draw from this: either employers aren’t doing a great job of reassuring candidates and employees of the safety of their workplace, the fluctuation of guidelines and recommendations regarding COVID may be affecting the confidence of workers, or the mounting friction between executives and employees on a return-to-office strategy may be adding stressors to employees’ lives. Also, of course, there’s the consistent undercurrent of economic uncertainty through it all.

What does all this tell us?

Check out those latter two insights: there’s dwindling optimism that remote work could really go as well as originally anticipated for overall business processes. While businesses and employees become more accustomed to working in distributed teams, engagement is not as pertinent an issue as it was two years ago.

But at the same time, the experience of the last two and a half years have made it clearer to employers that remote work may not be as feasible in the long term as it was initially seen to be. And more so, the specific challenges of remote work are now rising to the surface.

What does all this tell us?

As hiring teams become more seasoned in a remote function, the engagement, evaluation and onboarding of candidates is now easier. This is likely due to the adoption of new digital tools in the hiring process, including one-way video interviews, online assessments, digital signing, text messaging, and other standard features of recruitment that became more digitized from 2020 onwards.

But: as companies jump onto the digital train, there will be some who run into challenges – including for hiring teams. On the other side of the recruitment coin, candidates actively looking for work may be exposed time and time again to the varying digital setups of different companies and consequently, more comfortable working with a range of tech stacks. Tech adoption isn’t always going to be universal.

Most of all: technology is a great optimizer of processes. Remember what we wrote above about additional investment in hiring to address the reduced in-house capacity to recruit? Perhaps hiring tech itself is the solution – and specifically a user-friendly software with a high rate of user buy-in.

CHAPTER 4

The change in candidate value prop

One thing that’s changed significantly over the last two years is the kind of skills that boost the net worth of a candidate when they’re trying to land a job. The standard skills and background aren’t wholesale different than pre-pandemic, but due to the changing nature of the working environment (i.e. remote, hybrid, etc.) and shifting values of work (i.e. work-life balance), soft skills have risen in value for employers.

Let’s have a look at what skills employers want now and how that’s changed since 2020.

What does all this tell us?

The overall working world is more unpredictable and perennially changing than it was in pre-pandemic times – and subsequently, businesses need to be more agile to survive and thrive. And now that employers are operating in an agile environment as a rule rather than an exception, they need employees to be more creative and willing to learn in order to stay relevant.

But after two and a half years in this working environment, employers have developed best practices in management, and are identifying what works best in this new world of work. They’re no longer putting the onus on their teams to drive by night without the necessary guidance and leadership – but at the same time, providing just enough information for self-starters to thrive.

2020: This question is about your candidates and the criteria your candidates use to consider job opportunities or offers in your business. It's possible that their criteria has changed as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.So - for each option below, please indicate whether you think the crisis has made it more important to candidates, less important to candidates or has had no impact.

vs.

2022: This questionis about what your candidates value when considering job opportunities or offers in your business. We know those values may have changed since 2020. So - for each option below, please indicate whether you think the experience of the last two years has made it more important to candidates, less important to candidates or has had no impact.

CHAPTER 6

The next world of work

A core theme of our report from two years ago was about the anticipated paradigm shifts in the new world of work resulting from the pandemic and its many ripple effects. We have that in spades.

In 2020, at the inaugural World Economic Forum Pioneers of Change summit, Christine Lagarde was quoted as saying: “If we get the policy mix right, hopefully we will protect the economy in the aggregate, but we will not prevent it from being transformed. We need to focus on that so that those transformations are not scars but transformations for the better,” she said.

She was referring to digital transformation specifically – but she might as well be talking about overall transformation of the world of work.

What does all this tell us?

This tells us that the initial shift to remote was a snap reaction to the pandemic, and while predicted to be the biggest change in the workplace, it may have instead been a longer-term stopgap towards a hybrid working world as the ultimate paradigm shift.

Perhaps the development of hybrid is a result of the nuanced changes that came with having employees distributed across different locations – including working with someone who you may never meet or with someone in a wholly different time zone.

But ultimately – yes, the work world has transformed.

In the turbulent early days of COVID-19, many organizations shifted to a fully remote model – which was labeled then as a bold and new experiment. It was also described as something that was bound to happen sooner or later and merely expedited thanks to the social impact of the virus. The short-term rise in productivity and performance was experienced by many in the remote working environment.

But as the pandemic dragged on, productivity started to suffer. Mental health issues also rose in remote work – and we’ve seen the rise of anxieties in this new survey. We also see that asynchronous work is a mounting issue.

What also became evident are challenges connected with on-location work. When we saw conversations rising about a return to office as the pandemic loosened its grip on society, the pushback from employees was emphatic. Many workers – according to our Great Discontent survey report last year – want to retain their flexibility in work, primarily due to family commitments and personal lives, as well as having more time in the day.

In short: people just don’t want to go back to the way things were, and likewise, industries and businesses – which are irrevocably transformed – don’t see a return to the previous status quo.

In the midst of all this, candidates very much have the upper hand now that talent is at a premium for employers. They’re not afraid to leverage that to their benefit – be that in terms of compensation or working environment.

The ‘agreement’, if we can call it that, that seems to be developing seems to be a third road – the option of hybrid work.

Hybrid work, for all its definitions (i.e. two days in office and three days remote, office space availability for those who want it, etc.), is rising as one of the major new standards in this next world of work. Perhaps it’s the best of both work worlds. Perhaps hybrid is an agreement – whether that’s temporary or a new standard.

This speaks broadly to the old axiom that for every retaliatory adjustment or new solution, fresh challenges and problems are going to reveal themselves. This happened with in-office and on-location – a centuries-long standard – and happened again with the opposite extreme of distributed teams and remote working. Now we have hybrid.

The more things change, the more things will change – that’s been our experience of the last two and a half years. Is hybrid the next world of work, or is it just the next experiment or the next stage in the ongoing negotiation between employer and employee? It’ll be a bit of both.

Methodology and Firmographics

We received 422 complete responses to our survey, primarily in the 1-500 FTE size range (83.4%), with 26.3% in the IT / Technology / SaaS industry and the rest roughly evenly distributed across other industries. 59.4% are US-based companies, and 22.4% are based in the UK, Ireland, or continental Europe.

The survey was live during the period of June 27 to July 21, 2022. It was distributed via Workable’s newsletters, partner distribution, and social media channels. It included a total of 32 questions.

The New World of Work, two years on: A 2022 Worker Survey

We identified four major themes in the dataset:

Hybrid is the new agreement

Jobseekers have the upper hand

Nothing is ‘normal’ anymore

Long-term remote problems

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