Despite trends ranging from quiet quitting to quiet firing to quiet hiring, the talent side of human resources will anything but slow heading in 2023. 

While whispers of an economic downturn hover around the water cooler and news of downsizing in the tech sector lingers, most executives aren’t planning massive layoffs. At least, not yet. 

A recent survey by PwC of 4,410 chief executives in 105 countries found that while 73% expect global economic growth to decline this year — the most pessimistic business leaders have been about the economy since PwC started asking about it 12 years ago — 60% don’t intend to cut their workforce in the next 12 months.

Instead, companies likely will be more strategic in their hiring, human resources executives say. Paul Lewis, chief marketing officer at Adzuna, an employment website company, characterizes this as “purposeful hiring.” Long gone is the explosion of hiring in late 2021 and early 2022, a time when candidates fielded multiple job offers and companies vied for talent. 

“Companies will focus on quality candidates rather than scrambling to fill a plethora of open positions,” Lewis told HR Dive via email. 

Recruiting: Candidate experience is key

Finding those high-quality candidates will involve creating a better hiring experience. 

“Companies should foster more transparency throughout the hiring process, be that improving salary transparency or stopping ghosting candidates. This is essential to make sure you get the right candidates in the door and to establish trust right from the beginning of the hiring process,” Lewis said. 

He recommended businesses find ways to streamline the hiring process and cut the time to hire to both save money and keep candidates engaged. 

Albert Galarza, global vice president of human resources at TELUS International, an IT and customer service provider, said his company has reduced the time from application to offer to two hours for front-line workers. 

“We still have a lot of candidates who are interested in evaluating the company’s efficiencies just by the interview process,“ Galarza said. 

Some candidates, Galarza said, see a slow hiring process as indicative that a company itself moves slowly. 

Galarza expects the hiring market to be about 95% as competitive as it has been the past two years. Despite major layoffs at tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Facebook, the U.S. unemployment rate remains low, he said. 

“We expect some softening but not a lot given how low unemployment is overall,” Galarza said. 

That’s why, he said, a company’s No. 1 job is to retain employees and not get complacent about their existing workforce. 

Retention: Build trust and focus on who is present

Jennifer Shewan, vice president of people at Wonolo, an on-demand job marketplace, said it’s most cost-effective for a company to invest in the employees they already have to prevent disengagement and quitting — quiet or otherwise. 

Internally, Wonolo invests in learning and development and has created career pathing to help employees gain new skills. 

Carmen Bryant, workplace expert and VP of marketing at Wizehire, an online hiring platform for small businesses, expects to see companies hoarding labor this year, afraid to have layoffs after experiencing recent hiring challenges. 

Bryant said companies will need to work on building trust with their employees in 2023, especially as economic concerns arise. 

“Employees will have questions about the health of the business,” Bryant said. “It’s important to invite them to share their concerns and use it as an opportunity to be transparent to foster a sense of trust, address challenges and brainstorm solutions.”

Companies with high levels of employee engagement are much more likely to have well-defined internal DEI policies, a report has suggested. Research firm Aon surveyed more than 1,200 HR professionals in the compensation and benefits arena, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion leads. 

The report sums up findings gathered during Q3 2022 — more than two years after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd rekindled conversations about anti-racism in the workplace.

For context, 82% of companies with high levels of engagement have a clear definition of diversity, equity and inclusion, compared to 65% of low-engagement companies that said the same.

A notable finding was that most DEI policies address gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age and ability, but neurodiversity, parental and veteran statuses, and religion are largely sidelined in DEI policies.

The companies that lead the pack in Aon’s survey are those that have a “broadly defined” DEI strategy, “covering six or more of the categories that are commonly included” in these definitions.

Noting the oft-narrow scope of diversity programs — limiting efforts to racial and ethnic diversity, or the advancement of women — Aon researchers encouraged HR managers to think bigger.

“Broadening diversity analysis to consider other potential candidates and existing employee categories can benefit companies, and the communities where they operate,” researchers said, suggesting that “individuals with varying levels of education and experience” should also be considered for diverse hiring practices.

As a business consultant and analysis firm, Aon naturally touched on the intersection of DEI and compensation strategy. One area where employers have an opportunity to excel is in crafting inclusive benefits packages — both as a retention incentive and as an enticing perk for job candidates. 

Aon included ideas such as menopause support for those assigned female at birth and prostate cancer screenings for those assigned male at birth.

Avneet Kaur, head of advisory and specialty practice in Aon’s EMEA department of Health Solutions, said in a press release that diligent demographic analysis also helps.

“When employers design their health and well-being benefits, we recommend they first audit their benefits and ensure that the various demographics of their workforce, including previously underserved populations, have access to and awareness of these offerings, which should also be tailored to their needs,” Kaur said.

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As senior leadership teams evaluate their diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) strategies and objectives for 2023, they might consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This fundamental physics principle states that the entropy of an isolated system increases over time. This concept also applies to DEIB programs that fail to become institutionalized despite being launched with great fanfare.  

Fortunately, there is a practical way to avoid this outcome and ensure that DEIB becomes fully embedded in organizational culture, leadership and business processes.

DEIB operating models are being designed and implemented on a weekly basis. While these frameworks necessarily vary by company, the most effective approaches share a common set of “integrated enablers” – components that help ensure that organizational efforts to drive inclusion become embedded in the fabric of daily operations, decisions and communications.

In our work helping companies develop roadmaps for institutionalizing DEIB, we’ve learned how organizations can drive DEIB throughout the company and among external stakeholder groups. The best approaches tend to begin by identifying a handful of key focus areas, such as the workplace, the workforce and the external marketplace.

Each focus area contains sub-components that DEIB policies and practices should address. Common marketplace components addressed in DEIB operating models include community engagement, brand exposure, reputation and third-party relationships. Workplace components often include organizational culture, employee engagement and education. Workforce components might consist of recruitment, retention and advancement.

From a design and execution perspective, an operating model must have enablers in place if it is to succeed in embedding DEIB into the culture. These components include:

1. Leadership: Senior leaders should model DEIB behaviors in all of their interactions and communications. This requires a thorough awareness of, and sensitivity to, DEIB matters, along with a commitment to “walking the talk.” Leaders should continually reinforce DEIB principles and practices – not only when the program or an initiative is being rolled out, but on an ongoing basis. Senior leaders also should note that the head of DEIB’s position in the organizational structure and hierarchy speaks volumes about its importance. That’s not to say that a C-suite title or a direct reporting relationship to the CEO is required. However, many employees and external stakeholders will perceive a DEIB program differently depending on whether it is helmed by a specialist or manager as opposed to a director-and-above level employee.
2. Communications: DEIB-related topics and performance should be woven into regular communication cadences from leaders and human resources functions. When organizations create new employee network (or resource) groups, for example, that news should be shared with employees and mentioned by leaders through existing communications channels. From an external reporting perspective, the vast majority of publicly listed companies share DEIB data and metrics with shareholders and other stakeholders in the human capital disclosures that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) now requires. Investor relations (IR) teams and senior leaders should monitor shareholder responses to these disclosures as well as additional SEC guidance and leading human capital reporting practices as they unfold.
3. Policies and Practices: Policies and practices document how DEIB programs will operate in the organization. As such, these policies should address how DEIB considerations are integrated into numerous capabilities and processes, including the employee experience, performance management, recruiting, retention, advancement, compensation and more.
4. Metrics and Data: The DEIB metrics that an organization measures and manages should align with their program’s strategic objectives. Some companies may emphasize key performance indicators (KPIs) related to gender diversity in leadership roles, while others prioritize KPIs related to racial diversity throughout the workforce. Ideally, organizations should identify three to five DEIB KPIs that help them monitor and continually improve the program’s performance. Tracking one or two metrics may not provide a sufficiently comprehensive assessment of performance; tracking too many KPIs raises questions about the program’s priorities.
5. Financial Investment: The good news is that DEIB programs generally do not require oversized budgets. It’s more important to ensure that the DEIB resources and activities being funded operate in a coordinated manner, thereby generating the most bang for the buck. Hard dollars are probably less important than leaders who support the program and model the right behaviors on a daily basis. That said, human capital investments must be sufficient. A global company with 50,000 employees likely needs more than two specialist-level employees running the DEIB program.

It's also good news that embedding DEIB into organizational culture and processes does not require a degree in advanced physics. All that’s needed to operationalize DEIB is the right commitment, planning and structure.

When a local government fellowship program asked more than 100 applicants about their interest in the job, they overwhelmingly cited the opportunity for “meaningful work.”

Applicants ranked mission above pay, location, professional development and more, according to the Jan. 12 results. And more than half said the coronavirus pandemic only increased their interest in public service employment.

In light of the results, the research firm analyzing the findings urged employers to emphasize mission over tasks. “With meaningful work and personal satisfaction so highly rated, a job advertisement that leans more heavily on the results that can be achieved may be more likely to net interested recruits than one that focuses more on formal roles and responsibilities,” it said in a report.

Other research suggests private and for-profit employers may want to take a note from this government playbook: Employees are seeking higher purpose from their work and choosing to work for employers that have purpose baked into their ethos, an Alight executive said in September, analyzing survey results.

Executives say they know this is true — especially younger workers — but a 2022 report from consulting firm Deloitte revealed that many fail to properly integrate it throughout a business.

Those efforts can start at a high level with executives infusing purpose into a business plan and a company’s core values. But purpose also should permeate the aspects of work with which employees interact every day. Managers can be trained to connect daily work to purpose, making clear how individual contributors have meaningful responsibilities and how they’re part of a company’s mission, whether that’s serving a client or advancing an ESG initiative.

Hilton’s CHRO, for example, said at a December event the company strives to connect its massive workforce and inspire them to do great things for their guests and in service of their communities.

Employers with a more obvious social mission may have a somewhat easier path. Those in green technologies, for example, previously told HR Dive they focus directly on candidates with a passion for sustainability. What those businesses lack in name recognition, they make up for in meaningful work, one VP shared.

These findings, however, don’t give employers license to neglect other offerings, the report analyzing the local government fellowship survey results cautioned.

The next generation of talent will demand meaningful work, and those employers that can offer purpose alongside competitive pay, benefits, flexibility and more will be well positioned in the competition for that talent.

Friendship at work can be a magical thing — and, potentially, representative of an organization’s health.

Friendship, sponsorship, mentorship and trust are all aspects of social capital, a force at work that can encourage “stickiness” between employees and their organizations. But as Brooke Weddle, a leader in McKinsey’s people and organizational performance practice explained to HR Dive, it is inherently fragile — and has been deeply depleted by the pandemic, she said.

Even beyond now “table stakes” offerings like flexible work, connection at work can be the differentiating factor that keeps workers from jumping ship, she explained. The top three reasons employees leave, as reported to McKinsey, include a lack of sense of belonging, not feeling valued by a manager and not feeling valued by the organization — all of which represent a dearth of that connective stickiness, Weddle noted.

On the other hand, employees with a strong feeling of social capital were 1.5 times more likely to feel a sense of belonging, 1.5 times more likely to feel engaged and 2 times more likely to have sponsorship at work compared to those who felt disconnected, Weddle said. In other words, these workers felt looked out for and listened to, and, perhaps most importantly to employers, were enabled to do their best work.

But how do employers create workplaces where people feel they can speak together, trust each other and build something together? Keep an eye on your social networks, Weddle said, and learn to see what marks “bridge builder” behavior.

Know your bridge builders

Some organizations are already very good at emphasizing company purpose right at the top of their talent funnels, Weddle said, which is an important first step in creating that sticky web. People want to feel like they are a part of something and they want to know how they fit into the bigger picture. But social capital gets more granular than that.

There’s a reason Gallup, in its workplace polling, asks respondents whether they have a best friend at work, Weddle said. “This is a real phenomenon. Employers can help cultivate that.”

Outside of encouraging employees to find time to talk about nonwork-related things, employers can use data and social network mapping to encourage connection building — and figure out what connection even looks like at their organizations.

“Bring some data to the table,” Weddle said. “Imagine having a map of connections across the organization. How often am I working outside my function? How deep are those ties?”

These social network maps may reveal an organization’s bridge builders — people who are very connected within the organization, even outside their function’s typical circles. Akin to enlisting change champions to help an employer communicate new benefits at work, for example, bridge builders are likely people who are naturally good at or primed for making connections with others, and thus can be enlisted to encourage further connection throughout the workplace — or at the very least, understand it, Weddle noted.

Find the influencers and encourage trust

So what does that data look like?

While employers likely have tools that can track how often workers are in meetings or emailing, Weddle’s organization uses a tool that asks employees a simple question: Who do you go to in the organization for advice?

The answers to this question can reveal who is influential in a company — not through hierarchy but through trust, Weddle said. “For whatever reason, people trust what they’re saying,” she said; people like that are valuable.

To make trust valued across the organization, employers — especially of knowledge workers — can make connection an element of a worker’s performance review, Weddle said. 

“We are evaluated on our followership,” Weddle said. “How many people do I have in my network who said ‘yeah, I want to follow her to the next project’? I am evaluated on that.” Particularly for contract or project-based work, she said, “If I don’t have followership, what is the point?”

Be aware of who has access to connection

The pandemic especially depleted social capital for women, McKinsey’s study noted. While 28% of men felt more connected to their networks and organizations over the past two years, only 16% of women said the same. Similarly, only 12% of women said they had more contact with their networks over the course of the pandemic, compared to 24% of men.

If social networks represent the stickiness that keeps workers happily engaged within their organizations, this spells bad news for employers concerned about the diversity of their workforces.

“We didn’t go into other demographics, but I would have the hypothesis that, with socioeconomic status or race, you would see similar differences,” Weddle said. “It’s deeply troubling because we know people are leaving the workforce.”

Similar disparities can be witnessed between front-line workers and senior leaders in organizations, Weddle added.

Employers can engineer the building of social capital to encourage diverse maps of networks, she said. “You don’t want women only talking to women,” and front-line workers only talking to front-line workers, Weddle said. “You are creating a mix.”

For example, employers can map their organizations’ sponsorship networks to see who is sponsoring who. “When you map those, you can see people have their mini-mes set up as their sponsorees,” Weddle said. Employers can incentivize change in that regard, she said — and perhaps help workers feel more valued by their organizations overall.

Add engagement to employer concerns for 2023.

A recent Challenger, Gray & Christmas survey found that more than 80% of HR executives were concerned about talent leaving their organizations, with many citing a lack of engagement with off-site workers as a pain point.

A Conference Board survey found similarly declining engagement levels, although the organization noted little variation among remote, hybrid and on-site workers on the subject.

Whether on-site presence truly factors into engagement, it’s clear that many employers are thinking through how they can improve retention — of which engagement is a crucial component — in a pandemic-driven environment of flexibility.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and extended reality technology firm Reality Labs, believes the answer to that question could lay in the metaverse. The term describes a proposed, immersive version of the internet that would incorporate virtual reality, augmented reality and other technologies.

The company has already demonstrated potential use cases for its tech, perhaps most prominently through its Horizon Workrooms product. To the uninitiated, Workrooms may be thought of as a video game-like simulation of an in-person meeting in which team members are represented by digital avatars.

Meta published the results of a targeted sample business survey it said had been conducted with more than 2,000 employees and 400 business leaders across the U.K. and U.S. Among the findings, 74% of business leaders said they had a dedicated budget to invest in AR, VR or the metaverse in 2022. Additionally, 65% of employees said they were more likely to stay in jobs in which they had access to AR or VR.

The results show that employees have expectations not only of their employers’ technological investments, but also in terms of building inclusive communities within an increasingly virtual work environment, Ade Ajayi, head of global sales at Reality Labs, said in an interview. But current remote and hybrid work processes, like video calls, may not be enough.

“One of the findings is that we see that employees feel happiest when they are included at work, and these employees are saying that video calling is stifling that,” Ajayi said. “They’re not getting the same experience of feeling included in the workplace.”

Instead, teams could turn to applications like Workrooms to experience virtual interactions in new ways. Ajayi said his team at Reality Labs periodically meets using the company’s Quest VR devices. The experience is entirely different from a video call, he noted, because users can interact with each others’ avatars and use visual aids like whiteboards to communicate.

He compared immersive tech in the 2020s to mobile phones in the early 2000s. “The expectation is not that you’re going to be on your phone 24/7 or during your entire work hours,” Ajayi said. “There are moments when using your mobile phone is the most productive for what you’re trying to do. The same thing is going to happen with virtual reality [and] augmented reality.”

The HR reality

It is important for employers to acknowledge the gaps that exist when using the collaborative tools that make remote and hybrid work possible, according to J.P. Gownder, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. These tools also can have drawbacks. Gownder said psychological researchers have found evidence of a demonstrable user fatigue experience associated with video calls, for example.

Moreover, the advent of 3D spaces where employees can interact with the kinds of tools offered by Workrooms and similar platforms holds promise, Gownder added; “It is designed to solve problems that are not easily solved otherwise.”

But there are a variety of hurdles employers will need to consider before bringing the metaverse into the fold. VR, for example, has already been employed in a number of training-specific scenarios, but Gownder said companies are generally far from the point at which it would make sense to transition employees toward spending a significant portion of their days in virtual spaces.

“For the leap they would have to make from using Slack or Teams or Zoom to using an avatar in a 3D space, whether it’s with a headset or not, there’s simply more of a learning curve and lack of familiarity,” Gownder said. “It’s a fairly exotic idea at this point for most people.”

Metaverse integration could appeal to certain groups of workers, like those with more technological savvy or those who operate in teams that already have a degree of digital collaboration in place, he added.

Ahead of any large-scale workplace integration, however, HR teams will need to ensure that employees are able to familiarize themselves with the idea of digital collaboration generally, Gownder said. They also may need to onboard workers into metaverse solutions and ensure that change management policies are in place to ensure a smooth transition — not unlike those utilized during the move to remote work.

A gradual evolution

While there is a plethora of discussions among employers about the potential of AR, VR and the metaverse, many of these conversations have yet to produce actual strategic plans for adoption, according to John Kostoulas, vice president analyst and HR tech specialist at Gartner. Moreover, Kostoulas said that he expects workplace adoption of the tech to occur gradually through the middle part of the decade, rather than all at once.

The interest in applications like virtual meetings has seen relative growth amid broader adoption of remote work, Kostoulas added, though that interest may not necessarily result in adoption of VR, AR or metaverse technologies specifically. HR teams will need to think through issues such as cost and the time needed to customize solutions to meet an organization’s specific needs.

“Many organizations are trying to make their onboarding processes more virtual, but that does lead to more inquiries about the use of VR or AR in onboarding? Not necessarily,” Kostoulas said.

The in-person component of hybrid work may help to alleviate some of the tension that can occur when employees work off-site. “Sometimes people make it into this dichotomy between fully remote or being in the office full time, and the truth is if you're trying to build a culture of trust, you can do that one day a week,” Gownder said.

In the meantime, employers may find specific use cases for the metaverse that make sense over time. From a sustainability standpoint, for example, employers could allow for virtual meetings rather than having employees participate in resource-intensive company travel, Gownder said. He noted that, like text messaging and email, VR, AR and the metaverse may be viewed as accretive; the metaverse could fill a space similar to Slack or WhatsApp.

Employers, he added, don’t need to be in a rush to adopt metaverse technologies. Instead, they can perhaps start off with a VR or AR training solution, or a similar use case that has seen more extensive study.

From The Wall Street Journal to job advice sites, “quiet quitting” had gone viral – but months later, everyone continues to talk past one another, with little clear guidance for organizational leaders approaching the issue.

Quiet quitting is not just about one’s individual experiences within the workplace, but the larger, shared experience of declining employee engagement across organizations. So, where does it stem from, how can organizations respond, and what can people do avoid the feeling?

As we completely reimagine how we work and collaborate coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s needs and expectations from employers have been reshaped. And most critically, with this trend going viral as our most diverse working generation (Generation Z) enters the workplace, quiet quitting requires an intersectional, equity-focused lens to find solutions.

So, where should organizations begin? To me, manager support and education is the first actionable policy option in the fight against quiet quitting. Organizations must emphasize a two-pronged approach that helps managers improve their ability to support their teams and recognizes managers themselves are facing unique challenges in the workplace.

Don’t expect support and engagement to look the same for everyone on your team

Gallup research found that from 2019 to 2022, the percentage of younger workers who strongly agreed that someone cares about them, someone encourages their development and that they have opportunities to learn and grow dropped 10 or more percentage points.

Data supports that a lack of connection and mentorship, as well as ongoing experiences of bias in the workplace, create experiences that cause individuals to disengage.

Hybrid work environments can exacerbate inequities, which is why DEI-focused manager support is critical. One study led by Stanford University researchers suggests that remote workers are less likely to be promoted than their in-office peers; despite being 13% more productive, they were promoted half as often. With White men being the demographic most eager to return to office, survey analysis from FiveThirtyEight and Future Forum underscored that “physical offices run the risk of becoming whiter, more male-dominated, and more unfriendly to working mothers than they were before the pandemic” given return-to-office preferences.

Establishing connections early on and building long-term, equitable relationships to mentors and organizations can foster a culture that keeps people invested. For early-career individuals, in-person training opportunities and in-office time can be critical. If an individual has never met their team outside of assignments, disconnection is no surprise. Virtual or in-person, managers should be vocal in recognizing and commending the work of their employees. In the long term, affinity spaces like business resource groups, formal and informal mentorship, and cross-level interactions build lasting engagement.

In the hybrid environment, what is perceived as “all in” will look different. One team member may be visibly putting in hours in the office, but others are doing so virtually. Managers should adapt what “all in” means for their teams – is it about being in the office, the quantity of work, the quality, or some combination thereof? And managers should be wary of implicit biases affecting these perceptions of “all in”: As human resources manager and career coach Mercedes Swan pointed out to The Wall Street Journal, employees from underrepresented groups may not even have the leverage to “quit quietly.” She points specifically to the experience of Black women, perceived as doing less work despite performing at the same level of their counterparts, who could experience backlash if they decided to step back or set firmer boundaries at work.

Because of implicit biases and the reality of who’s returning to the office, ongoing DEI education for managers should support them in equitable decision making around promotion and compensation and inclusive culture-building.

Managers need to put on their own oxygen masks, too

A lot has been asked of managers in the transitions to remote and hybrid work. The pandemic was difficult all around, with unhappiness reaching record highs in 2021. But the impacts of the pandemic were not evenly distributed; many women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals faced socioeconomic realities that differed significantly from their White, cisgender male colleagues. Add in burnout, and disengagement at the manager level isn’t so surprising.

To support work-life boundaries, leaders actively encouraged their people to log off from work. After all, one Staples survey found that Americans were working an average of 6.1% more hours in 2020 compared to 2019, and a NordVPN analysis found that homebound employees in the U.S were logging three more hours per day on the job than before lockdowns. This type of “all in” approach simply isn’t sustainable.

In the hybrid world, energy-saving tools as well as more opportunities for connection should become the norm. At KPMG, we integrated time and energy management policies that gave employees breaks from cameras and moments to breathe between meetings—as well as designated time periods for uninterrupted work.

Importantly, managers should make mental health a priority that goes beyond a talking point. It’s near-impossible to support your team when you’re not feeling supported, too. Taking a hard look at your organization’s retention and attrition, as well as leadership pipelines, will further inform where managers need more support.

Connecting to workplace culture

We have a responsibility to foster environments where all our people feel like they belong and are supported in their journeys. As we assess this landscape of declining employee engagement, the most tangible tactic employers can take is to focus on how managers are supported and support their teams.

So before we pontificate about quiet quitting and what it means for the future of American talent, ask if you’re doing everything you can to be an employer of choice. Recognize your people and the landscape they’ve been working in over the past few years. Embedding a DEI lens into your policies is just the first place to start.