What do you need to look out for this coming year? In this episode, we discuss the five biggest business trends in 2022 that you should be focusing on if you aren’t already. It all boils down to one thing: leadership. We break down the five trends and how they relate to leadership, along with practical tips you can implement. Tune in for more insights that will help you navigate your business better.
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Intro 5 Biggest Business Trends In 2022
The Great Resignation
Welcome back to The Five Biggest Trends in 2022 that we’re seeing here at the Talent War Group. We’re going to do a short segment. Every once in a while, we like to do these short segments and bring you up to speed on what we’re thinking, seeing, and doing. No surprise, the number one trend going on is the Great Resignation. Now, as much as it comes with the Great Regret, the latest data tells us that the percentage of people who said they’re going to stay in their current roles has dropped from 70% in 2021 to 65% in 2022.
That’s a little bit worrisome. It seems to run counterintuitive with the Great Resignation and a lot of people are having trouble finding great talent, especially in the service industries. We’ve been helping a lot of top companies find great senior leaders and talent, but it goes to show that one of the emphasis that we drive home, or an emphasis that we make to all of the executives and companies that we talk to, is that even though you improve your hiring processes, the number one thing that you can do right now is double down on leadership.
Are you training your frontline, mid-level, and top leaders on how to better invest in your people through coaching, mentoring, and training? Are you doing the things necessary to build the culture to give people what they want? That sense of ownership, autonomy, growth, learning, and the ability to impact. Are your leaders facilitating those things?
As much as there is the Great Regret out there and we’re going to do an episode on that, the fact that only 65% of the workforce surveyed says they intend to stay with their same employer, is a five-alarm fire to employers who were pushed to deliver results to their clients, customers, and shareholders. Leadership is everything. It’s not your product. It’s not your service. It’s not any one of your departments. It’s the ecosystem, how it works together, and the leadership that drives that culture forward to deliver results.
A lot of companies that we talked to are seeing very alarming rates of attrition and it’s voluntary attrition. When we talk about attrition, we are not talking about involuntary where you’ve had to reduce your workforce, you’ve had to drop a certain department, or realign your company. We’re talking about people who leave voluntarily for another opportunity. The number one talking point, the thing that we see, whether we’re taking polls on LinkedIn, talking to our clients, or keeping up with the latest news and trends through a number of HR and business publications, is that this Great Resignation is going to continue.
What it is for me is not just a call for companies or to advise companies to double down on leadership. It’s reemphasizing the point that leadership always matters. It is the one difference-maker. In my last Vice President job with this company, there were always more tools than we wanted. There was always more marketing and advertising. There were always new processes. There are always things that we wanted to add to the budget, be that headcount or software tools, new marketing campaigns, new laptops, new monitors, and all kinds of things that we really could have added to the operating expense of the company.
One of the great reasons for our team’s success is we realize that leadership, at every level, is down to the individual contributor. I think it was Jocko Willink that said, “We start by leading ourselves,” and codified that in extreme ownership and dichotomy of leadership. It’s absolutely brilliant and spot on. Having the basics of good leadership means that even if we didn’t have the most up-to-date software, the best laptop, if some of our tools and our internet weren’t the best, that leadership, the communication, the collaboration, the focus, the direction, the mission, making it clear and defining success, those things mattered.
Leadership always matters. It is the one difference-maker. Share on XWe managed to have the highest retention rate of any department and I give all the credit to my subordinate leaders who understood that teamwork, ownership, and humility were the cornerstones of what we were trying to build. As the headline remains with us, the Great Resignation, and 65% of workers saying they are going to stay in their jobs, leaving 35% open. It’s time to be looking at your leadership and your culture. The Talent War Group certainly can help with that. It’s always time to look at leadership. The stronger you make your leadership team, leadership training, all of your coaching and mentorship and career management, talent management processes, and ecosystem, the better off you’re going to be to ride through these up and down cycles of the economy.
Hybrid Work Is Here To Stay
The second headline is Hybrid Work is Here to Stay. In the speeches that I give, there’s always a Q&A session and people worry about fairness. People worry about, “Should people be working from home? Should they have a flex schedule? Should they be in the office?” Even with all my experience in the field, the answer is always the same. It depends, but I do want to reiterate. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but I hope it sinks into some frontal lobes of leaders that before COVID, that was our normal.
I hear a lot of executives that we speak with saying, “Now, we’re going to return to normal.” No, you’re not. When we went to more of a work from home and we went to maybe flex and the social distancing, the masking and all of those things, what people had to do was rework, rewire their whole lives. Now, they didn’t have the commute. They had to set up a home office. They had to figure out whether their children be homeschooled. How do I tend to that when it’s right next to my workspace or possibly sharing the workspace?
Over the course of the pandemic and post-pandemic, we created a new normal and we got used to it. For those folks out there who think, “We’re going to return to normal. We’re going to come back to the office.” Now you’re unwinding what people have built and asking them to change yet again within a 24 to 36-month period, and that’s very difficult. When people ask me about hybrid work and I say that it depends, it means your HR team, your human capital team, and your leaders should get together and take a really hard look at what your mission is.
Look into your facilities, look at your people, look at all the departments and understand that one size doesn’t fit all. It’s about leading and looking at the totality of your workforce and going team by team and asking yourself, “How do we get the best results out of this team? Does that necessarily mean that they need to be at home to get the best results? Do they need to be in the office? Can they be both?”
You have to systematically go through your entire workforce and say, “These are the restrictions, the challenges, and the opportunities. These are the environmental conditions that we’re dealing with but at the end of the day, we still have to deliver results, so how do we best do that with the talent that we have? The leadership, the management structure that we have?
Most companies these days have good technology and people can work from home. All of the video conferencing like Microsoft Team, Zoom, or whatever it is you’re using, certainly allow for you to maintain 75%, 80% of the connectivity that you have in the office. I’m one of those people. I’ve been coming to the office even through COVID and I love to drive by. I like breaking bread. I like the impromptu discussions or being able to have a quick chat with somebody versus doing it over Teams or some form of instant messaging or phone text.
Look into your facilities, look at your people, look at all the departments and understand that one size does not fit all. Share on XI do like being together. With that said, it’s not a requirement for me to produce results. For many of the people on our team here at the Talent War Group, it’s not a requirement for them to produce results. We have to look at what our mission is, what results we expect, the environmental constraints, and the challenges that we have. We go person by person.
I share the same advice with companies. How do you look at your workforce and how do you deliver results? It isn’t one size fits all. If your leadership is fearful of losing control, you’ve got an entirely different problem that you have to solve. Because if those leaders are fearful of losing control and not being able to manage, or lead in a remote or flex environment, your problem is not the environment. Your problem is the leader. Going back to the first point, it’s why we’re doubling down on leadership training and workshops here at the Talent War Group of Companies.
There are a lot of old-school thinkers out there like, “I want to see them working.” If you have to see them working, then you have a trust issue, which means you have a deeper issue in your relationship with the people that you lead. There are certainly people out there who absolutely are going to take advantage of the situation, but there’s nothing worse than managing to the exceptions or managing to the worst case. You should be managing and leading to the results.
We’re here to tell you that hybrid work is here to stay. There are a lot of people that want to come back into the office. There are a lot of people that don’t want to and are getting far more work done. I know at my previous firm, easily 90 to 120 minutes a day that I would lose productivity on a commute. My personal thing was, I would put one-to-one and do phone calls while I was in the car. Generally, people lose their full productivity. They can’t answer emails. They can’t work on slides. They can’t work on a project. They can’t do coding. They can’t do programming. They can’t interface with clients while they’re trying to pay attention in 1 hour, 1.5 hours, or 2 hours, and in some cities, 3-hour commutes.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, And Belonging
The next big trend and this has been interesting for me to be a part of it because I certainly am part of the Baby Boomer. I’m right on the cusp. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging will continue among companies to see the greater and greater push of companies to make stronger and stronger efforts to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Interestingly enough, the employees expect progress, but there was this interesting statistic that came out. Qualtrics does a ton of surveys and they have some amazing products. I’ve used them for client experience, customer satisfaction, and internal engagement.
They have a survey that says 70% of employees have made sufficient progress but interestingly enough, there’s a perception gap. Eighty percent of businesses believe their actions show they’re generally committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but only 58% of the individual contributors see the same. I was trying to make sense of that statistic. I don’t think it’s leaders inflating what they’re doing and their egos.
I do think it’s a perception issue. When we talk about leadership, when we talk about diversity and inclusion, if everybody’s thinking alike, nobody’s thinking. Diversity of thought and thought leadership are what you’re looking for in our view. People with different experiences and different backgrounds of all sorts come in many shapes, sizes, forms, and backgrounds. There are so many different ways you can divide and categorize that. The more diversity in thought that you get, the better ideas you become.
Culture is not built in a day. Culture is not destroyed in a day. Share on XIf you’re a great leader that operates under the best idea wins, diversity is something that you should look forward to. Diversity is not quotas. Inclusion and equity are not quotas. Those people who are just over-rotating on the issue, you’re doing more harm than you are good, but it comes down to leadership. As it’s been said by somebody much brighter than me, every problem is a leadership problem, but diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are here to stay, and all leaders need to be aware of that.
They need to be participants in that and they need to be influencing that. They need to be driving the construction of their teams and their collaborative circles work teams to represent as much diversity of thought as they possibly can. Now on the flip side, because we certainly call it straight, culture is not built in a day. Culture is not destroyed in a day. Those companies that are homogenous or lack diversity, and you’re an employee of those companies, you have to be patient because change takes time.
You can’t just say, “Plug in a diversity and equity program,” and expect within the next quarter that you’re going to be seeing the most amazing results. It takes time. Those people that are focused on them, give them the time to implement those programs, drive those programs and processes through, and be patient. It’s important that when your company says, “This is our mission, and here are the things we’re doing to follow through,” to allow those things to mature, to improve, to change, and to make a lasting impact.
It is one of the things that I found as a leader. Again, I don’t think it’s a generational thing. I think it’s more towards technology. It’s that our patience level has dropped generally. We want instant information, even if it’s not accurate. We want the latest opinion on it. We stomp our feet in front of the microwave because it’s not reheating something fast enough. There are plenty of people that I would watch before the timer went off on the microwave, even in the office workspace where they would stop it.
Our patience for change needs to come up and our perspective as individual contributors and leaders needs to be much more broad, much more over the horizon. Great leaders, great individual contributors, and great talent keep one eye on the horizon, and another eye on the tactical right there on the ground, right beneath their feet, but make sure you’re moving the needle. Make no mistake, diversity, equity, and inclusion are here to stay and they’re maturing. They’re getting better and people are learning how they impact in good ways and bad ways. They’re course-correcting.
Open Communication And Manageable Work Loads For Employee Well-Being
The last interesting two trends. One is that open communication and manageable workloads can help employee well-being. This kind of goes back to the hybrid work. As leaders, you need to be much more cognizant of your employee’s well-being and by no means am I a snowflake, but people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That doesn’t mean giving somebody a blanket and a warm hug. What it means is as an employee, do you believe your leader cares about your development, your performance, and your growth?
More communication, looking at the workloads, making sure that you’re looking after your employees, what their capacity is, what their bandwidth is, especially in times where you might be behind on the hiring curve. The people are trying to double and triple up their workloads. This is a very common problem for leaders that you have to be mindful of. There is an old saying, “You could ride a good horse to death.” It’s very easy to see things getting done and you manage the workload and all the things that you have to get done with a smaller workforce. Leaders out there are going to have to learn to say no or push things off to make sure that their employees are taken care of. Because one of the very tough things for a talented person is to set up boundaries and to say no to people.
Employee wellbeing is something we need to be paying attention to when there's the Great Resignation and talent shortage. Share on XOne of the things that I would coach my leaders and my team on is if you ever say yes to me for a request, a task, or a mission, I assume that you’ve looked at your capacity, your bandwidth, and your ability to accomplish that mission. If you tell me, yes, and it might be as simple as a meeting invite for a certain day and you’ve got twenty meetings that day, and you’re going to find a way to squeeze it in. I, as a leader, take that as you’re ready to go. You can do it. You have the capacity to do it.
I had to start teaching my teams to set boundaries and to say no. To say, “George, I can do that for you, but I can’t get to it the next week with the priorities that you gave me. Does this supersede what you’ve already given me or can I push this out a week?” As an employee, as an individual contributor and you saying yes to everything, doesn’t make you more valuable. It dilutes all the other things that you’re doing.
When you say yes to things, make sure that you can do them. As managers, be mindful that your employees may not have the communication skills to negotiate back with you and share with you. They may take it as a sign while they just may not want to admit that their plate is full. Again, as a leader in this environment where workloads are doubling and tripling, you do have to pay close attention to what’s on the plates of your top talent. Those are the last people to say no and you don’t want to be burning them out. You’re going to put yourself in a much worse position, but more importantly, you want to teach them how to be great leaders. You want to set that example. You want to show them, “I’m checking in with you. How full is your plate? I think you’re doing great work. You’re delivering some great things, but I’m seeing you getting stretched. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how we can mitigate that a little bit.”
Performance Reviews Are A Must
Employee well-being is something we need to be paying attention to when there’s the Great Resignation and there’s a talent shortage. The surprising last trend that we see, and the last topic, is that performance reviews are a must. It goes back to the earlier point of communication as a good leader. We’re not saying that annual reviews are here to stay. We’re not here to say semi-annual reviews are here to stay, but employees want to know how they’re doing.
They want that check-in and as part of managing their workloads, checking in on them, showing as a leader that you care about their development, their growth, their performance, and their success, check in with them and do one-to-one performance reviews. People want to know how they’re doing and don’t sandwich them by, “This is good. This is bad,” and ended up with something good. The praise sandwich is what we call it.
Make sure you’re giving them honest feedback, “I think these things you’re doing well. Here’s where I see you struggling. How can I help you?” Because here’s where the standard needs to be. Everybody wants to know how they’re doing, and when you deliver that feedback if you’re a good leader and they know that you care about their development, they’ll take that developmental feedback as a course correction.
Just because we’re short on talent because we have the Great Resignation, please don’t think that performance reviews are out the window and that this is about pleasing people. It’s still about great leadership. It’s about open communication and course correction. In the environments that I was in, I learned very early to be asking for feedback. “Tell me how this is.” I’ve given hundreds of speeches. My co-author Mike Sarraille, he’s got to be in the thousands of speeches, and both of us still to this day, when we’re done with the speech, we’re sending it to the clients, “What do you want to see that we could have done better? How can we improve? How could this have been more impactful?”
We want that feedback. We know that that’s important to our development. A lot of employees are not going to step up and ask. Some will, some won’t, but if you’re a leader, you want to make sure that all of your folks are getting the appropriate feedback. That’s it for this episode, the top trends to double down on leadership because people are searching for jobs. Be flexible in how you approach your workforce because hybrid is here to stay.
Look at your teams and focus on results first. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are here to stay. How do we make our workforce better? Also, performance reviews and open communication. They’re still one of the best ways to build and invest in your talent. With that, I hope you have a great week. Thank you for tuning in. We will talk to you soon.
