Organizations are no longer purely driven by the lingering consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers now see their challenges through the cyclical lens of economic, labor, and geopolitical pressures, requiring workforce strategy to fully move beyond any one business function.
Hybrid work has evolved to require more thoughtful considerations for how technology, office space, and amenities influence productivity, culture, and trust, but also consideration of the risks involved with a more mobile workforce.
Employees, meanwhile, are guided largely by structural workforce realities, retaining more perceived power in the labor market and being willing to change jobs to get what they want.
Many employees are driven by a need for better total rewards packages amid high inflation and cost of living, by their desire for better well-being, and by a need to have the skills to succeed in a world of continued work flexibility.
The Survey Reveals
- 34 percent of employees say they’re willing to change jobs in the next 12 months, with employers being more likely than employees to think economic challenges will reduce likely employee turnover. Pay remains the primary employee concern, keeping focus on comprehensive total rewards programs.
- Employers and employees believe the power balance has slightly shifted back toward employers in the last year, although employees have gained 8% in perceived power since 2019.
- Cultivating trust and having a people-centric leadership model is linked to significantly better organizational outcomes, including perceptions of better culture and productivity.
- Skills-building and training are top priorities for employers looking to upskill and reskill their workforce and for employees looking to remain competitive in a still strong labor market.
- Both employees and employers show enthusiasm for Generative AI (GenAI), with a net positive 33% expecting benefits to productivity and new ways of working, and 44% net positive for impacts on flexible working. However, both groups see GenAI training as a low priority.
- Among knowledge workers whose work is traditionally based primarily on using analysis or subject expertise in a professional office setting, more than a third prefer to work fully remote, with stronger preference shown among women than men.
- Just a fifth of employers prefer fully remote, with a majority wanting employees to work at least two or three days per week in an office.
- Better quality commercial real estate is not enough to attract employees back to the office on its own, but organizations with higher-graded workplaces are also more likely to report better productivity, culture, and a decreased likelihood of employees wanting to quit.
About the Research
The EY 2023 Work Reimagined Survey reveals employers and employees have distinctly different perspectives in the “next normal” of work. Between June and August 2023, EY conducted the fourth installment of the Work Reimaged Survey to better understand the continued changes in new ways of working around flexibility, talent retention and turnover, and the balance of power between employers and employees.
An anonymous online survey was conducted by a third-party vendor, of 17,050 employees and 1,575 employers across 25 different sectors and over 20 geographies covering the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and EMEIA (Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa).