2019 BRINGS CHANGES TO THE OFFICE
HERE are five trends you may see when you’re back in the office to start the new year.
BENEFITS
Family leave for non-parents will become more common.
In recent years, extended parental leave – even a promised year off at some companies – has become all the rage for new mothers and even fathers, as companies try to recruit and retain millennial workers. But Carol Sladek, who leads Aon Hewitt’s work-life consulting programme, believes more companies in 2019 will start to extend “family leave” to non-parents who want time off to care for an ageing parent, grieve for a lost family member or help with a sick spouse.
“More companies may decide to broaden family leave coverage out of a sense of equity, as employees sense that ‘I’m sitting here trying to care for my 83-year-old father, and Jane, sitting next to me, gets 18 weeks of paid maternity leave. That doesn’t feel right’,” she said.
A benefit of paid leave for family care may not “explode” in 2019, but she expects global growth.
COMPENSATION
A wage gap between old and new workers will create new headaches.
As the labour market remains tight and people switch jobs more often, there’s a different kind of wage gap forming, said Brian Kropp, the group vice-president for Gartner’s human resources practice. Companies have to dangle more to lure in new workers, making pay disparity grow between workers who’ve been in a job with a company for years and those who’ve been newly recruited.
“In today’s labour market, the best way to get a raise is to go find a job at another company,” Kropp said. Employers are “not as willing to pay more for the people they’ve got. It’s a really interesting dynamic”.
But Laura Sejen, managing director with Willis Towers Watson, said the increased focus on the gender pay gap and pay equity should help address gaps that occur between incoming and existing workers.
“If not all, a large majority of organisations, as part of their annual pay-review cycle, are now including a gender pay equity analysis,” she said. “Whether they did the initial analysis two years ago or five months ago, they’ve been moving fairly systematically.”
PRIVACY
Workers will demand that employers do more to insure their personal data.
A “global awakening” about threats to the privacy of our data as consumers will spill over into concerns about the personal data we give our employers, predicted Kristina Bergman, the chief executive of Integris Software, which helps organisations manage the personal information they store and meet compliance mandates.
“There are an increasing number of protections in place for consumers – things like the ability to opt in and opt out or needing consent to use their data,” she said. “Employees, however, have less control over how their employers use their data.” Yet plenty of data is at risk.
Bergman predicts more pressure for employers to provide some of the same options to their workers that customers have, such as being able to request access to information that companies have about them.
“I think what they’ll start to demand is that employers specify a certain duty of care when it comes to dealing with their data,” Bergman said. “I think it will become part of their marketing pitch in the same way benefits packages are, as employers start to disclose how they treat employees’ data too, and use that as an indicator of the moral and ethical fabric of the company.”
OFFICE DESIGN
The office phone booth will become a workplace staple.
People may hate the open office design – and there are plenty of reasons to, including their stifling of collaboration and the incessant noise and lack of concentration – but it’s probably here to stay, albeit with design tweaks around the edges: more small conference rooms and collaboration areas for people to find some privacy or host a meeting. Furniture designs that allow people to put up barriers around their desk.
And increasingly, said Jonathan Webb, vice-president of workplace strategy at the design firm KI, office “phone booths” or “privacy pods” for people to have private conversations, without taking up an entire meeting room.
While they’ve already begun showing up in some workplaces, such booths are poised to become commonplace in 2019, Webb said.
“People are going to start to figure out how to make these things more efficiently” – lowering the high price for companies to purchase them – “and make them a little more flexible in their design”, he said.”