Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Three predictions for tech companies surviving the Great Resignation

By Alice Farrell, VP of People Ops at Grafana Labs

The Great Resignation has continued to dominate headlines and stun businesses as turnover has reached new highs. In November, a record 4.5 million workers left their jobs, according to the Labor Department's latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report. In 2022 we will expect to see more employees quitting work and leaving their jobs.  According to ResumeBuilder, it is estimated that as many as 32% of U.S. workers will leave not only their jobs but their careers behind to start afresh in new industries, especially in IT.

As Covid-19 finds ways to stick around with its new variants, and employees start to enter their third year of managing family and work under stressful conditions, it is inevitable that they have started to reevaluate their lives - and of course work is a large part of that.

There is certainly no going back to pre-pandemic times, so what can we learn from the Great Resignation? IT managers, tech companies, and HR people managers are anticipating big changes next year in the labor market. Here is a breakdown of the top three predictions for the new world of work we are managing in 2022.

1. Hybrid working environments will be the norm, not the exception.

The freedom to work from anywhere will continue this year as companies are forced to recognize that employees value flexibility as much as pay raises, according to a recent study from the WFH Research Project. More companies will embrace this change to attract and retain talent in such a competitive talent market. Employees clearly want work to fit in and around their personal lives rather than vice versa, and the need for flexibility is not going away.

The hybrid model with flexibility between home and work will establish itself as the norm, but unfortunately the future of work is unlikely to be as radical as we've seen throughout the last two years.  Some organizations truly embrace 100% remote and understand that to work that model successfully you need to be all in and set the whole team on a level footing. Hybrid models often represent the worst of both worlds and usually reinforce the office as the decision-making center. 

For smaller companies - especially tech startups - we anticipate a much greater transition and perhaps see close to most of the staff remaining remote. More people will demand that flexibility, and the smaller companies will become more attractive to workers who will continue to expect a flexible and balanced work environment. Perhaps we will finally see a real transition from the draw of the big tech companies.

2. Employers have to realize it's about how people work, not when.

Culture is cited by workers as one of the primary reasons they decide to join and stay at a company. Implementing a culture of real trust in the workforce is critical. Although businesses have talked about that for a long time, they have not actually applied it. If employees are doing remote work, then a culture of trust is a must. Remote work requires a wholesale kind of change in thinking. If you trust your team to perform, you actually have to trust them to control their own time and not be measured by hours at their desk, but rather by the deliverables and the results. Again, that's not exactly a new thing. But many businesses have not truly understood what a real culture of trust demands of its leaders.

Employees need to be able to do the work when it suits them. I'll use myself as an example. I quite often get up early, and I do some work. And then I do things with my kids, or I get them to school. Then I'll do work again; stop to pick them up from a playdate or school; and I'll have a bank of time where I'm doing work late into the evening, or even on the weekend. My organization has a culture of trust, and it allows me to work when I want, how I want - as long as the work gets done.

3. Working mothers will be coming back strong.

A 2021 survey found that the pandemic has had a devastating and disproportionate impact on women's lives and careers. Women in the workforce were an early casualty of the pandemic. As the world, and in particular schools and daycares, closed down, countless studies have demonstrated that overwhelmingly it was mothers who stepped in to fill the void, attempting to work, educate children, and maintain homes in a very stressful internal and external environment. Most organizations failed to evolve their structure and operations to truly embrace remote work or provide the support required to retain talented workforces. For many, that extraordinary pressure has been too much, as evidenced, in part, by the Great Resignation. 

These high-performing mothers are professionals who chose to put their family first during the pandemic, and they will be reentering the workforce with a passion. Smart technology companies will celebrate their return.

Organizations that fully embrace remote work will help move the needle on workplace diversity and equality of opportunity. Remote opportunities and remote cultures have the power to transform work lives, work-based experiences, and work opportunities. Working from home, with real autonomy and flexibility, helps working mothers better manage the personal and professional demands on their time.  Without a long commute and the traditional 9-to-5, they can spend more time with their families that is otherwise borrowed, rushed, or a stressful part of the morning and evening routine. That time is higher quality and built around their own schedule. It helps to blend work and life rather than forcing a separation and a priority choice. 

Deliver what you said you would, when you said you'd do it, and ensure its high quality, and the rest is for you to figure out. Suddenly you can be assessed purely on the quality of your work and your delivery. Building online relationships and virtual networking force a quality interaction and remove a lot of the traditional barriers, stereotypes, and biases that center around offices and the dynamics of in-person meetings and social events. The focus is less on who you are and more on performance.  Fully remote organizations will not only help break that glass ceiling but also lead the diversity charge at all levels of seniority.

Conclusion:

Companies are as good as the people who work there and contribute to not only the bottom line, but also to innovation and culture. The changes afoot in 2022 will allow employees to reset and assess what they want out of an employer, and also give companies of all sizes the opportunity to reset and determine what they want to be, what they want to be known for, and what their legacy might be.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Farrell is VP of people ops at Grafana Labs, which provides a monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. In 2021, the remote-first company was named to Otta’s Rocket List, Inc. Best Workplaces and the Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers.