Last summer, I stood in front of a packed room of talent acquisition, procurement, HR, and recruitment professionals (as well as many, many friends running contingent workforce programs!) and stated a phrase that I’d repeat ad-nauseum through 2024 and into 2025.
The Future of Work is human.
While it’s hard to believe that we are nearly five years (five years!) removed from the beginnings of the biggest health crisis of our collective lifetimes, the fact remains that the ramifications, both personally and professionally, of the COVID-19 pandemic affected all of us as humans in a deeply profound way…a way that sticks with us even in these early weeks of 2025.
When life (and business) returned to “normal” in late 2021/early 2022 (depending on when you would define “normalcy,” right?), many business leaders and their teams kept that sheen of humanity in how they managed and how they worked, choosing to embrace empathy, diversity, inclusion, equitable treatment, emotional intelligence, and other human-led factors that wore woven into the very fabric and dynamics of “work.”
Somewhere between now and then, though, these amazing attributes began to fade for too many enterprises. Remote and hybrid work, perhaps the most famous of all non-technological Future of Work ideals and probably the centerpiece of the movement’s rapid acceleration during the pandemic, started a rift between workers and executives, who, respectively, yearned for continued flexibility and its rigid counterpart of return-to-office (RTO) mandates (which dismiss the proven benefits of remote and hybrid arrangements that supported and continue to support work-life integration).
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