It has been a bumpy ride, these past couple of years, for the working world. In 2022, the workplace has faced massive economic changes, an explosion of technological developments, automation, globalization, and with lingering pandemic constraints. As leaders in our industries, it’s important to know what workplace trends having staying power, as we walk into 2023.
Now, let’s take a glimpse at a few of the most agreed upon trends. All agree that the hybrid work schedule will remain a reality in 2023. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, working remote became most people’s reality and a remarkable 73% of people globally say that it is the new normal. Some organizations have smoothly transitioned into remote work, some have chosen a hybrid combination of remote and office work, and some have chosen to require their employees to return to the office. This scheduling creates an entirely new set of challenges for the entire work-life model. The push for a 4-day work week is building serious steam, as well as breaking free from the 9-5 workday. The key word for employers to remember here is FLEXIBILITY. More than ever, employees are seeking flexibility in ‘where’ and ‘when’ they work, which reflects the proper balance of services transaction, versus corporate slavery. The shifting toward a proper balance of transactional power is trending in the positive, with much higher rates of employee engagement, productivity, and reduced stress levels.
We have already seen globally how advancements in Artificial Intelligence have helped industries across the board scale up comfortably and efficiently but expect to see an exponential increase in such technologies in the coming year. AI even played a key role in the development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. It is said that AI will gain “multiple senses”. This means that artificial intelligence systems will process audio, visual and language data in combination with and in relation to each other. This is referred to as multi-modal AI (a few examples of such programs include DALL-E, ALIGN, CLIP, MURAL). In November, ChatGPT was launched, which is a chat bot that can answer follow-up questions, reject inappropriate requests, and even challenge incorrect premises.
Ransomware has been a hot topic the past two years and for more reason than just extortion. With ransomware threatening our national security, we could be looking at the first Ransomware War in 2023. This would mean interruption in energy supplies, compromised military intelligence, disruption to business and government activities, sky-rocketing cyber insurance premiums, and so much more. We anticipate a more tech-savvy workforce within several sectors of national defense, as we wrap our heads around combating rival ransomware ‘gangs’ in countries like Russia and Iran.
In conclusion, 2023 will bring new trends with new challenges. With greater global distribution, entrepreneurship is more accessible than any other time in human history, and the harvest is ripe with opportunity. For it is always in times of crisis, when everyone’s hair is on fire, that brilliant surges of creative genius are produced, and the world is made better because of it.