2024 HR trends: ‘Hybrid work backlash could damage companies’

Two international business organisations have sounded warnings over emerging trends among leaders as 2024 nears.

Business consultancy Gartner says its research has found that many leaders mistakenly feel that a return to the office is the only way to promote productivity, visibility and loyalty, and are planning to take their moment – as turnover slows during the slowing economic conditions – to mandate a more office-centric workforce strategy.

Meanwhile, Cpl Talent Evolution Group has warned that companies are de-prioritising diversity and inclusion and introducing AI software that risks increasing or perpetuating bias.

Gartner said leaders who were calling for a return to the office had failed to recognise the full benefits of hybrid work. It said its research found that 69% of business leaders had concerns about collaboration, culture, creativity and engagement and 54% of HR leaders believed their employees are less connected to their organisations than they were before the pandemic.

However, it had also found that more than half of employees with “radical flexibility” reported a high degree of connectedness, whereas just 18% of those with low flexibility did so. Additionally, employees who were allowed to decide when they work were 2.3 times more likely to achieve higher performance than employees without autonomy.

Caitlin Duffy, director in the Gartner HR practice, said mandating an office-centric approach to working was “a mistake” that overlooked the numerous benefits of hybrid work. These included “greater opportunities for employee flexibility and rest, advantages for underrepresented and neurodiverse talent, opportunities to reduce overheads on physical premises, and the important fact that many employees are significantly more productive and more engaged in a hybrid workplace”.

She added that a weakened workplace culture was not the result of having fewer employees on-site, but a failure to intentionally build culture connectedness into the hybrid workplace.

She said organisations that resisted implementing flexibility would find themselves experiencing long-term reputation and attrition risks and “hindering their long-term competitiveness in what will inevitably be a more virtual society in future”.

Cpl Talent Evolution Group warned that its research found that “shockingly”, diversity, equity and inclusion was likely fall down the list of priorities in the year to come with 42% of executives now seeing it as of little relative importance. The key reason for this was lack of leadership commitment, lack of resources and a misalignment of culture and values.

It also found that 71% of leaders had encountered discrimination issues in AI-driven recruitment with the report stating: “As women and ethnic minority talent are typically underrepresented in certain roles and sectors, AI poses a challenge to diversity and inclusion and will require an increasing amount of vigilance as its use continues to become standard practice in 2024.”

Managing director of Talent Evolution Group, Áine Fanning, echoed Gartner’s findings that leaders were increasingly in favour of return to office polices and warned: “Consideration for remote and in-person employees within a blended workforce is vital for building a strong employer-employee relationship, boosting engagement, reducing turnover, and fostering business growth. In today’s remote and hybrid work environment, a well-structured plan for integration is crucial for the success of employees.”

She also noted that negative employee reviews on platforms such as Glassdoor were on the rise with more than two-thirds of ex-employees sharing public-facing online reviews. This trend emphasised the importance of actively engaging departing employees to improve employer branding and avoid potential reputational damage.

Further growing challenges identified by Talent Evolution Group included accessibility to recruitment processes for underrepresented groups such as neurodivergent people and the difficulties for companies in classifying workers given the lack of clarity in employment law over who exactly were employees, contractors, workers and self-employed.

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