Source : THE AGE NEWS
The way we are working is changing fast. In the last half a decade we’ve seen some of the most monumental shifts in generations to where and how we work, and it can be exhausting just trying to keep up with them all.
But when we look into the crystal ball of trends that are likely to sweep through Australian workplaces in 2025, there are three main ones I predict are going to alter our work lives this year.
For most of history, employers have had all the power. But since the pandemic, the paradigm has shifted.Credit: Tanya Lake
The first work trend concerns the ongoing tension inside many workplaces around whether to work from home or in the office. Employees generally want hybrid-style flexibility to choose what suits them best, while many employers would prefer they come into the office as much as they can. These are reactions from a workforce that’s still wrestling with the upheaval of the COVID years.
I predict that more bosses will exert their power, and “return-to-office” mandates are only going to increase in the coming 12 months. This movement will be led by high-profile advocates like Elon Musk and fellow American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who are heading up Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency in the US.
Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in The Wall Street Journal recently that they are going to try to force all federal employees to come back to the office five days a week. As much as I don’t agree with this, any signs of an official US government mandate will only provide cover for other managers around the globe to follow their lead.
My second prediction is that we will see more businesses enact their version of “quiet cutting”. This refers to the process where an organisation’s leadership rearranges resources subtly and without fuss to enact some of their goals instead of making people redundant.
The wider theme behind all this is the attempted wrestling of control back into a more traditional organisational structure.
In practice, this will mean workers this year might notice fewer salary increases and promotions, smaller department budgets, or a downgrading of responsibilities in the hope that employees will simply leave a company of their own free will.
A recent survey by the jobs board Monster found that over three-quarters of workers said they’d witnessed this at their company, with 58 per cent of people saying they were personally impacted by some form of quiet cutting.
In many ways, this is management’s reaction to the employee trend of “quiet quitting”, a phrase that’s now entered the vocabulary of workers around the world to mean committing to do the bare minimum requirements of your job.
Although it first appeared a few years ago, Google Trends data shows the number of searches for quiet quitting more than tripled in the last 12 months, highlighting ongoing strain at work.
My third prediction is that 2025 will be the year of “office peacocking”, a term that describes workplaces that are increasingly redesigned with thoughtful, sometimes even flashy, inclusions to lure workers back in. Think collaborative spaces, rooftop bars, kitchens, gyms and other things that were previously only the domains of large corporations with big budgets.
Just as peacocks have bright-coloured feathers to attract attention, workplaces are going to have to compete with other locations to grab yours. This is an acknowledgment that many offices are not set up in the right way to lure workers back in.
Zooming out from these three trends, the wider theme behind them is the attempted wrestling of control back into a more traditional organisational structure. Management will use every tool they have, from carrots like office peacocking to sticks like return-to-office mandates, to try to claw back their power.
Is it going to work? Only time will tell, but if companies can tackle the cause of workers’ discontentment right at the source and design workplaces that encourage engagement, productivity and connection, then 2025 might be the year that some semblance of stability returns to our workplaces after half a decade of intense upheaval.
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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