HR: What workplace trends will be left behind in 2024?
Workplaces have been hit with a multitude of trends over the past years – from coffee badging and corporate accents to upskilling and return-to-office mandates.
But trends come and go – and HR leaders can expect some of these trends to either lose some steam or pick up more traction in 2025.
Josh Millet, chief executive officer of Criteria, said upskilling and skills-based hiring will be trends that will likely remain relevant this year.
"I think skills-based hiring and upskilling are one of the trends that we're going to be hearing about for years," Millet told HRD.
Skills-based hiring refers to the recruitment practice in which organisations put more emphasis on skills over other criteria during job applications.
In Australia, research from TestGorilla last year found that 91% of employers are already using skills-based hiring in their recruitment practices. In fact, the country leads the rest of the world when it comes to the adoption of the practice, which has been around for years.
Millet acknowledged that progress in skills-based hiring had been a "little bit slow in certain respects," but noted that it is advancing.
"Upskilling goes hand in hand with that," he said. "You know, if you really come around to a skills-based approach, one thing you're going to think about all the time is: 'Does my employee base have the right skills and where do I need to upskill?'"
The growing attention to artificial intelligence will also likely continue along with its impact on hiring, according to Millet.
"The way I view it specifically as it relates to hiring and the workplace is that it's really going to accelerate trends that are already existing, more so than creating entirely new trends," he said.
The majority of HR professionals in Australia recently said they have no plans to use AI for screening and shortlisting applications, or on other recruitment stages, amid discrimination concerns.
But this isn't the case for jobseekers, as research has found that they are already using AI to polish their résumés.
"I think the long-term impact of that is that resumés are going to become less important," Millet said. "Because if everyone's feeding their resumé into ChatGPT or resumé-writing or doctoring type of platform, then everyone's resumés are going to start to look more and more the same and the great resumés will be harder to separate from the average ones. It kind of makes the resumé more useless as a tool for selecting employees."
Meanwhile, another workplace trend that has been gaining steam over the previous year is return-to-office mandates.
Various employers in Australia and around the world have been announcing and implementing them – Amazon, Tabcorp, and Grab – after years of allowing remote work.
But Millet doesn't think this trend will pick up further steam this year. Amazon, for example, has reportedly been postponing its full-time return-to-office policy in several U.S. cities due to incomplete office spaces.
"Return to office is so in flux," Millet said. "We've gone through a couple of iterations of hybrid and returning to office and I feel like that is one I don't have confidence will be like… durable."
The other trends that Millet thinks would be left behind in 2024 are the so-called "TikTok trends," such as coffee badging and corporate accent, that were popular on the social media platform.
"I think I view them as more like interesting commentaries on what's going on in the workplace," he said.
Millet noted that these trends act as "little windows" into the perspectives of Gen Z and early-career jobseekers after they experienced "delayed immersion" in office culture because of the pandemic.
"And so often, if you think about the corporate accent or coffee badging, those are both sort of commentaries on like the inauthenticity or the hypocrisy of office culture," Millet said.
"They're healthy things. But I think as Gen Z gets more and more immersed in actual in-office culture and once that becomes the norm again, you'll probably see those things not being commented on so much anymore."
Millet, however, noted that he will be watching further to see how Gen Zs get integrated into the workplace this year.
"I think you can definitely say that the pandemic has sort of like had an adverse impact on their entry into the workforce because it was a strange time," he said. "We don't know the long-term consequences of coming of age and entering the workforce in this strange time when it was hard to be in-person and it was hard to build social connections and harder to get mentors through work."
These employees also have higher levels of AI literacy than older generations, which he noted will be one of the most important skills in the workplace.
"AI literacy will become increasingly one of the most important skills to have and that it will really dictate someone's employability," he said. "I think that's going to rise to the top of things that employers look for."
