The storm of the global pandemic brought with it waves of disruption, innovation, and a new reality in the workplace. The workplace impact of Covid was often sudden and disturbing, with some employees being furloughed and many even losing their jobs. The lucky ones, whose job was deemed essential, also struggled to stay relevant and adjust to new protocols such as working from home, even as the offices remained shut to ensure that cases don’t flare up.
On one hand, this chaotic, once-in-a-generation shift in workplace dynamics offered flexibility to several employees, however, for many others it was also a doorway to boredom and many an introspective moment about their personal and professional lives. The resilience of humanity ensured that life went on and people adjusted to a transition that one had even imagined a year ago.
However, even as vaccines emerged as humanity’s shield against the pandemic’s disruption, the change in work dynamics was now inevitable as the efforts to save livelihoods and businesses led to irretrievable changing of gears to reshape work culture as we had known it.
Two years after it all started, the year 2022 proved to be a transition year, with employers backing up a hybrid work model, moonlighting coming to the fore, and employees opting for career cushioning. Several exciting trends emerged at workplaces, keeping employers vigilant in their dealings with employees even as the employees examined ways to shield themselves from such chaotic disruptions in the future. Here are some of the most popular trends that swept the workplace this year.
Moonlighting
Moonlighting, the practice of following a second career path beyond the usual business hours, became the most trending buzzword this year. The phenomena dominated the headlines as major IT companies took cognizance of the now rampant trend and seriously questioned the dedication of their employee towards their jobs and the company. It became the prime focus of the most heated debates in the corridors of modern corporate HR as firms cracked the whip on their employees for moonlighting.
Corporate giants such as Wipro fired 300 employees for the practice. Infosys followed suit and asserted in unambiguous terms that dual employment or moonlighting was not allowed through an official email to its employees, clarifying "no two-timing - no moonlighting!" and issuing a clear warning about disciplinary action "which could even lead to termination of employment" in response to any violation of contract clauses. The company doubled down on its stance when it fired employees who had indulged in the practice during the last 12 months, even as it chose not to disclose the actual number who faced the axe. More firms joined in the corporate crusade against the practice and in September, tech giant IBM denounced moonlighting as an unethical practice that was not supported by the company at the workplace.
The corporate moves sparked a major debate about the freedom of the employees and their productivity while also raising pertinent questions on the legal and moral aspects of moonlighting. The government made its stance clear during the winter session of parliament when the Minister of State for Labour & Employment, Rameshwar Teli, highlighted that ‘a worker shall not take any type of work against the interest of the employer in addition to his or her job as per legal framework’ in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
Quiet Quitting
After the phenomena of ‘Great Resignation’ swept through the job market last year, 2022 saw the buzz phrase getting replaced with ‘Quiet Quitting’. Both phenomena were products of the more permanent impact of COVID and the concomitant shift in mindsets and perceptions towards life and work. While the first trend referred to the mass resignations by workers in several industries like hospitality and healthcare, 2022’s trend was more relevant for the large swathes of society who could not really afford to resign from their source of livelihood and thus resorted to 'Quiet Quitting', the trend of doing just about the bare minimum at work.
The concept encapsulates the tendency among workers to perform only the duties which are explicitly prescribed in their job description and shrug off any additional responsibilities beyond that. Employees also have begun to reject longer work hours and prefer to stick to the basic timings mandated by their role.
Like the pandemic that sparked it off, the ‘Quiet Quitting’ movement was also birthed in China. A netizen in China criticised the country’s mindset of prioritising work over personal well-being in a viral post in April 2021 and created a trend called ‘tang ping’ (meaning ‘lying flat’). The trend soon expanded beyond borders and was rechristened as ‘Quiet Quitting” in the Western world. Social media played its part in expanding the phenomena with a large userbase recounting their own personal experiences and many Reddit threads dedicated to sharing hundreds of user testimonials about adhering to the principles of what was a counterculture movement in the workplace.
Deloitte even carried out a dedicated study for documenting and analysing the phenomena and concluded that “young people are increasingly seeking flexibility and purpose in their work, and balance and satisfaction in their lives." Experts examined the trend and many even gave it a positive spin, claiming that 'Quiet Quitting' has not only been more effective than ‘Great Resignation’, it actually improves one's mental health and work productivity significantly.
Career Cushioning
A logical evolutionary step up from ‘Great Resignation’ and ‘Quiet Quitting’ trends is the phenomenon of ‘Career Cushioning’, where the average employee spends a lesser amount of time and focuses on their actual work, instead concentrating on upskilling themselves while searching for fail-safes in case of economic downturns and threats of unemployment.
LinkedIn found that its members have been busy adding skills to their profiles – with 365 million added over the last 12 months, up 43 per cent from last year, signs of the trend being worldwide and prevalent across workplace roles.
Unlike moonlighting, ‘Career Cushioning’ and ‘Quiet Resignation’ are merely pre-existing trends that have gone mainstream and viral, while remaining very much within the limits of legality. While the trend is obvious, post the disruption of the pandemic, the actual impact on employee productivity and company performance is still to be quantified.
Proximity Bias
Even two years after it first began, Work From Home remains the dominant workplace trend caused by the pandemic. Over the last year, the workforce started to return to the physical workplace in batches, a reverse trend powered significantly by the desire of bosses to be hands-on with their teams and tasks. This led to the first warnings about the negative impact of “proximity bias” on those who continued to work from home. Simply put, the ones who were closer to their teams and bosses enjoyed the benefits of their proximity and allegedly even profited from a bias in their favour as compared to those who performed similar functions from home, even though they presumably could match up in terms of any workplace effectiveness metric.
In a comprehensive study carried out in September among US employers, most executives (96 per cent declared that they valued work produced in the office far more than work done from home. Annette Reavis, Chief People Officer for workplace platform Envoy, which carried out the survey, explained to CNBC that “managers and employees need to be very intentional about including their peers who aren’t there in the office culture.”
Thus, even as the lasting impacts of the pandemic continue to be examined, the pressures to return to the old ways have already spiked. It seems that the ease of working in your pajamas seems to be coming to a not-so-glorious conclusion in the near future.
Productivity Paranoia
Linked with the trend of ‘Proximity Bias’, a new buzzword referring to the eternal dichotomy between an employee’s self-analysis and the employer’s detailed assessment of work productivity has become trending. ‘Productivity Paranoia’ refers to the gap in perspective, wherein the employer is simply not happy with the productivity of employees who continue to work from home, who tend to rate their work at the same levels as they did in pre-pandemic times in physical workplaces.
This gap is one of the main findings in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Pulse Report, published in September. “Productivity paranoia risks making hybrid work unsustainable. Leaders need to pivot from worrying about whether their people are working enough to helping them focus on the work that’s most important,” says the report.
Microsoft’s Chief Executive Satya Nadella had the definitive word on the subject when he highlighted that homeworking has sparked “productivity paranoia” over whether employees are doing enough at home. He told the BBC it’s time to get past the paranoia because “all of the data we have highlighted that more than 80 per cent of the individual employees feel that they’re very productive even though their management thinks that they’re not productive enough”.
These trends continue evolving as the larger impact of Covid is fully understood. Will 2023 double down on the trends or bring new ones remains to be seen.