You have arrived to the first official day of the year 2024.
Perhaps you’re anxious about the future of your profession in the next year and what it holds in terms of salary, perks, schedule, and employment opportunities.
We asked a variety of advisors and specialists in the field of workplace trends and developments to help us make sense of it.
Your salary: Trails to conquer, several workers may anticipate pay increases that match or above inflation, which was 3.1% as of the previous measurement.
In December, workplace advice business WTW surveyed US companies about their compensation budgets and discovered that, on average, they are aiming to boost salaries by 4% in 2024. While it’s lower than the 4.4% rise they promised for 2023, it’s still better than the 3.1% average growth from 2020 and prior years.
The projected hikes are significant according to WTW, who attributed them to inflation and worries over a tight labor market.
Just under 10% of workers anticipate a promotion this year, according to a different poll by Mercer, a consultancy business. The salary of those who are promoted will significantly increase: An average of 9.2% salary gain is what workers can anticipate from a one-level promotion, according to Mercer.
Additional financial aid and additional leave alternatives are at your disposal.
In order to help their workers with their health, families, and finances, many companies are required to increase the range of benefits they provide.
For example, Mercer points out that organizations are beginning to broaden the scope of their paid bereavement leave policy beyond the death of a parent, spouse, or child to include the death of a close friend, selected relative, or extended family member.
The habit of businesses providing bereavement leave to workers after a loss of a pregnancy, whether it be a stillbirth or a miscarriage, is also on the rise, according to Rich Fuerstenberg, a senior partner in the health and benefits practice at Mercer.
Another group that businesses will strive to be more supportive of is female workers going through menopause. This involves removing barriers to talking about menopause at work, ensuring sure managers and employees are aware of beneficial advantages like work-flex alternatives, empowering women to make decisions about their work environment, and, in certain cases, providing paid time off.
More and more companies will likely start providing financial wellness benefits to their employees in 2024. About a third of businesses surveyed by Mercer in September want to provide discounts, basic money management tools, tuition help, investment instruction, and financial planning seminars to their employees. Furthermore, approximately 40% want to include debt and financial counseling services. And one-third have stated their intention to begin providing financial help for education.
In addition, as of this year, elements of the retirement legislation Secure 2.0 are in place, which means that your company has the option to provide you with additional advantages that will allow you to save more for retirement, reduce your student loan debt, or establish an emergency fund.
Timetable: Additional four-day workweeks might be in the works
A four-day workweek has been mooted for quite some time. But according to Emily Rose McRae, who heads up the future of work practice at consulting and research firm Gartner Inc., which is set to release its workplace predictions for 2024 later this week, some employers across industries may finally act on it in 2024. Or at least, they will take incremental steps toward making it a reality.
“Some companies will ease into it,” McRae added, pointing out that this may include implementing little, early steps like instituting half-day Fridays or Fridays off every other week.
Some well-known brands, she says, may even make a splash in the next year.
Not gonna back down, UAW!
Why? “Two forces are acting upon it,” McRae said. One is the universal challenge of attracting and retaining top people in all sectors. Another concern is that they should be fair to front-line employees who must be physically present at all times, even if their desk-based coworkers may have some leeway to work remotely.
Researchers have shown that a four-day workweek may increase productivity because workers receive more rest. McRae brought this up as an example. However, this can only be achieved by carefully planning out a team’s 4-day work week and giving careful consideration to the location and method of work so as to avoid exhausting staff.
How about a combination of the two? To begin with, it will remain. It seems that [work from home] has steadied after three years of upheaval, and 2024 will resemble 2023 to a large extent. Nick Bloom, an economist and workplace researcher from Stanford University, said that overall levels of WFH in the US have remained very flat since the beginning of 2023.
The average number of days that employees who are able to work a hybrid schedule spend working remotely is around 1.5 days, or 30% of the week, according to Bloom. The 7% reported before the pandemic was less than half of that.
The possibilities for employment that you face
Those without a bachelor’s degree or even relevant work experience may find a plethora of new options this year, regardless of the state of the labor market overall. That is because of the expected increase in hiring based on skills and the growing usage of AI to evaluate applicants’ abilities and potential.
According to McRae, it used to be that a candidate’s degree or years of experience might stand in for the actual talents that an employer was seeking. However, firms are beginning to remove degree requirements from job ads in order to access a larger talent pool. This is due to the fact that there is a general talent shortage, fewer individuals receiving degrees, and the need for new abilities in previously unimaginable occupations, such as artificial intelligence.
According to Anthony Reynolds, CEO of AI-driven hiring company HireVue, most workers nowadays need a foundational understanding of technology, regardless of how people-centric their job description may be.
With the use of games, quizzes, and interviews—the majority of which are graded by an AI algorithm—HIREVue assists companies in hiring recent college graduates, hourly workers, and professionals.
Reynolds emphasized the main advantages that, in his opinion, this strategy offers to job searchers. They must first settle on a time and method to take the examinations. Someone whose work schedule is hectic, for instance, may choose to have them on a Sunday morning over text or phone conversation, he said.
Next, according to Reynolds, HireVue gives clients the option to use an app called Find My Fit to inform candidates about their suitability for other open roles if they don’t get the job they applied for but their test scores suggest they would be good fits.
