The Best Work Lessons Learned In 2022
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The pandemic has changed the way everyone views their lives. It made us re-evaluate the most important things and what we actually need to be happy. Post-pandemic, everyone has changed, never to be the same. Through the pandemic, many employers learned a number of work lessons, mostly that employees could be just as productive at home as in an office setting.
While everyone is wiser and in tune with how work can be more flexible than it once was, it hasn’t been solidified how that will look for everyone. The power struggle over how flexible everything should be is still ongoing, even with the unstable economy. So over 2022, what work lessons have we learned, if anything, about working in a post-pandemic modern society?
The buzzword has become a phenomenon in 2022. Since 2021, when Anthony Klots coined the term “The Great Resignation,” used to explain the mass exit of workers during the pandemic, many copycat terms used by the media have surfaced to describe other events about the movements of the labor force. Many copycats include “The Great Reshuffle,” when employees, rather than leave their jobs, switch positions in the same company, and “The Great Regret,” when employees have moved companies only to regret it later.
This also happened later in 2022 with the buzzword “quiet.” Everyone loves a buzzword in 2022. During 2022, a massive shift in pay transparency happened. American companies are not mandated to display salary expectations during the recruitment process of an employee.
This is something that America is behind in compared to Europe and other countries. But in 2022, New York City, California, and Washington made pay transparency legislation legal. This legislation will make way for companies to reduce pay gaps and discrimination against women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Coming to a middle ground concerning hybrid working still hasn’t been resolved this year. Through the pandemic, employers and employees alike realized that hybrid working might be the future of employment. Since then, many companies have been trialing this new way of working, most commonly using the setup of two/three days in the office and two/three days working from home.
But it seems no one has found a middle ground, as it is dependent on what suits the employee. Some employees would like to work from home permanently; some would like to be in the office five days a week, and some like both. It is hard to cement a working rota with so many voices to be heard, and this is causing tension in the workplace.
From these work lessons, employers are taking an ad-hoc approach, while others have employed “remote leaders” to tackle these issues with hybrid working. So as we leave 2022 to enter 2023, we have learned quite a few work lessons. Mostly that while working has still not found its middle ground since the pandemic, there are still positive moves in pay transparency.
Hopefully, when the new working system has relaxed, we will have a new set of positive buzzwords to use; oh joy. We enter 2023 with an open mind and hope it will be a better year.
