Workplace Culture Archives - The Future of Work Exchange

The Four Trends That Will Shape the Future of Work in 2026

Uncategorized by Christopher J. Dwyer on 01/13/2026

The holiday decorations are in storage…hopefully (:: looks away nervously :: ). The outdoor lights are nestled snuggly in their appropriate storage totes in the garage. Well, not yet. Fine. I admit it: I haven’t taken down anything holiday-related quite yet.

But, that being said, we’re nearly two full weeks into 2026 and it’s about time for the Future of Work Exchange to make some BIG predictions for the year ahead.

The hype and prioritization of artificial intelligence will continue to increase mightily, however, true adoption and deployment (and utilization) will remain at a surprisingly low rate. If 45% of your workforce is actively leveraging generative AI within their respective functions, does that equate to “45% of the business is actively utilizing AI”? Well, technically, no. The most interesting facet of AI is that it is truly transcendent; it’s omnipresent in nearly every facet of our lives, be it personal or professional. We can ask Siri to send text messages while we’re driving or task Alexa with recipe support when we’re in the kitchen. It’s only a matter of years before over 90% of the average organization’s workforce is leveraging AI in some capacity. However, that is much, much different than saying “XX% of our workforce is actively utilizing ERP software” or “XX% of our company actively leverages a VMS platform.” AI is enterprise tech and it also isn’t in that regard; it behaves less like a system you implement and more like an atmosphere you operate within. It’s a paradox that business leaders will wrestle with throughout the year. Adoption metrics will become increasingly misleading because AI doesn’t follow the traditional rules of technology rollouts or deployments.
The staffing market bounces back…kind of? 2025 wasn’t a great economic year, that we know. A new presidential administration, some tariff havoc, a shaky global financial situation, etc. all contributed to this very weird feeling around the job market. Businesses couldn’t contend with market disruptions and unfortunately moved to layoffs as a lever; this destroyed much of the post-pandemic growth of the Biden administration and caused so many executive leaders to head into 2025 with a supreme modicum of caution. This caution, in combination with the continued impact of AI (job displacer or not?), led to a flat staffing market that saw some verticals contract (like manufacturing and hospitality). 2026 brings some optimism, though, with inflation at a comfortable rate and The Fed cutting interest rates into Q4 2025. A 2026 rebound won’t follow a classic “snap-back” feel but more of an uneven “thaw” that will permeate throughout the year. Specific pockets of talent, like IT (specialized IT, that is), healthcare, engineering, etc., will see higher demand in Q1 and Q2 with other sectors hopefully following suit in the second half of the year.
When hiring appetite returns, new recruitment and talent acquisition approaches will be front-and-center. There’s an old adage in business regarding “appetite before behavior.” Organizational leaders want to plot their hiring plans carefully before diving into a full-on recruitment spree in 2026, which means several things: 1) they’re not reckless and this is going to take time to shake out (think Q2-ish), 2) our old superhero, the extended workforce, will be as vital as ever during the first half of the year as businesses continue to rely on project-based engagements, SOW-heavy initiatives, and agile talent, 3) don’t be surprised to see direct sourcing-esque hiring models reign throughout 2026 as enterprises hedge their bets and play it safe by building up talent communities, 4) AI-fueled recruitment and hiring strategies will play a pivotal role as these leaders digitize manually-heavy processes and ensure that they are optimizing skills-based and progressive hiring approaches, and 5) the definition of “recruitment” itself will stretch in ways many organizations aren’t prepared for, as the traditional linear funnel (post, source, screen, interview, hire) continues to erode as talent expectations shift and technology accelerates. What does this mean? Skills-first matching, community-based talent pipelines, and orchestrated, “always-on” talent engagement with AI supporting decisioning.
Work and workplace culture face an era of recalibration. Constant fears over AI displacement. Economic whiplash. Remote and hybrid work tension and arguments. Many (too many) of today’s workers are more disoriented than disengaged, which, to be honest, is worse than mentally unlinking from their roles. There’s too much change without a clear and constant investment in clarity, connection, and purpose. Leaders have (and they had to be given what 2025 was) had to focus on cost-cutting, efficiency, and overall “work transformation” due to AI’s hype and impact. Workers will require more of a renewed emphasis on structured career pathways, opportunities for upskilling, and other measures that can boost the feeling of “belonging” and physiological safety within the workplace.

Leaders are Human…For Better or Worse

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 08/05/2025

The kiss cam heard ‘round the world a couple of weeks ago was more than just an opportunity for memes and commentary on spousal affairs. When two not-so-innocent adults are caught on a live concert cam in an embrace during one of the biggest bands in the world’s stadium shows, there is bound to be an incredible amount of fallout.

Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot, were in the middle of enjoying Coldplay’s Foxborough, MA (Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots) set when a routine “kiss cam” moment sent him off-camera and her with her face in her hands…caught live, on video, for the world to soon see.

The problem is that Byron is married, but not to Cabot. And, they are two very high-ranking executives conducting an improper relationship in a rising tech company in a hot industry (AI). And, this improper behavior has illuminated some of Byron’s past leadership issues, with several former employees (from Astronomer and other organizations) recalling his harsh leadership style, rigid culture, and toxic management style.

Byron is certainly a dodgy person and both his past and present paint a picture of someone that is untrustworthy and toxic. Even in a high-intensity, breakneck space like tech, bad workplace culture will eat the company alive.

Push away all of the memes, the humor, even the sympathy for Byron’s wife, who scrubbed her married surname from her social accounts, and let’s look at this for what it is: a pure example that all leaders are human…for better or worse.

A pendulum swing the “other” way just a few years ago proved how humanity had a major role in the Future of Work movement. As the COVID virus swept across the globe, everyday workers faced insurmountable challenges ranging from a lack of daycare, newfound remote work setups, general fear of the times at hand (who wasn’t worried about the economy or their finances in 2020?), and, for far too many of us, a foreboding sense of uncertainty over what a new virus could do to our bodies or our family members.

During those times, true leaders sparked humanity through empathy-led leadership and new, brighter strategies that prioritized the human spirit. Executives “with heart” put themselves in their workers’ shoes, understood their perspectives, and provided the necessary support and flexibility for their teams to survive and thrive during uncertain times.

As workers, we trust our leadership teams to guide us through good and bad, through crisis and calm, and with transparency and transition. We expect our leaders to be guiding lights, not a source of emotional darkness and negativity.

The Astronomer even is more than fodder for tabloids and social media; it’s a reminder that, yes, Peter Parker…with great power comes great responsibility. Leaders are expected to uphold principles, set examples for their teams (AND their brands), and, most importantly, be f—king human.

Byron’s past leadership woes ultimately came back to haunt him, but they would have never popped up if he held the proper balance of self-awareness and integrity that are needed for Chief Executive Officer positions. Byron blurred professional boundaries and jeopardized several careers, the Astronomer brand, and the company’s overall organizational culture.

Our leaders are inherently human, emboldening both the “gifts” and “liabilities” of what humanity brings to an executive role. For all of the powerful, transformative leadership shifts during the post-pandemic era (empathy, creativity, resilience), there are also the darker elements like ego, misjudgment, and moral failure.

As generations exit the workforce and new generations enter, it is critical for all current and potential executives to truly understand what is at stake as they either hone or learn key management styles: balance the humanity at hand, rally a positive workplace culture, and foster an environment that is attuned to the values of the organization.

The Future of Work Is a Humanized Workplace

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 11/27/2024

Mental health and wellness have unfortunately long been neglected attributes of the corporate world. However, in a business climate that places the utmost emphasis on talent retention and a focus on becoming “destination of choice” workplaces, this concept is changing quickly. As awareness of the importance of mental well-being grows (and employee burnout continues to rage), enterprises are beginning to realize that managing employees’ mental health is not just a moral imperative, but it also benefits the greater business in multiple ways.

The World Health Organization has found that one in four people globally will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives; and, the cost of untreated mental health issues to the global economy is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars. Poor mental health, from a workplace perspective, often results in disengagement, increased absenteeism, a lack of productivity, and more frequent turnover.

The movement towards focusing on corporate mental health and wellness seems to be evolving, though. Recent research from Ardent Partners and the Future of Work Exchange discovered that 93% of business leaders actively prioritized mental health (and mental health awareness) as part of their leadership styles, a far cry from years past when this critical issue was near nowhere to be found.

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Employee Engagement Still Lacks Execution

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce General Insights HR Technology and Innovation by Christopher J. Dwyer on 11/20/2024

Today’s enterprises can be characterized as fast-paced, ever-evolving to effectively respond to a more dynamic marketplace. Within the hustle and bustle lies a critical workforce need that is often overlooked: employee engagement. The concept can be confused with simply offering employees certain monthly perks identified from a quick survey. However, it goes much deeper than that and reaches beyond permanent, full-time employees to those in the extended workforce, as well.

A well-rounded definition of employee engagement comes from Engage For Success: “Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organization to give of their best each day, committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being.”

Powerful, Yet Underutilized

It is that commitment toward oneself and the enterprise that makes employee engagement such a powerful workforce approach. Yet, as a Gallup survey indicates, only 36% of U.S. employees are engaged in their work and workplace. The number is even lower on a global scale, with only 20% of employees engaged at work.

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Learning from the Past to Build the Workplace of the Future

Business Leadership Talent Acquisition by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/30/2024

I can’t help but be a person that is incredibly nostalgic. As the holiday season approaches, I frequently think of my childhood days and the experiences that shaped me and made me the person I am today. While my memories at this time of year are appropriately focused on trick-or-treating in suburban Massachusetts as a youth, there are also memories that are more, let’s say…business-focused.

I’m lucky enough to have spent the past 18 years of my career at two firms (nearly 12 years with the famous Ardent Partners, the research parent of the Future of Work Exchange), however, before my foray into the world of human capital technology, the Future of Work movement, and talent management and technology research, I spent some time at companies with not-so-empathic leaders.

For example:

A VP who told me that it wasn’t okay to say “How’s it going?” to another person if I hadn’t met them yet.
A company owner who said that if I ever got tired, I wasn’t fit for a career in writing. (Let me know if you know someone that has never been or will never be tired…)
Another company owner (same company, different owner) who said I had a “defeatist attitude” when I told him that I didn’t feel appreciated or valued enough after working 80+ hour weeks for a straight month after two employees quit.
A CEO who said, after finding a single (one!) spelling error in a document that I produced (that totaled over 40 pages), that I needed to spend more time focusing and less time “theorizing” when writing, and;
A certain company owner (twice on this list!) that told me that I “would never find anything out there” when I resigned and gave my two weeks’ notice.

The specific examples above all link back to one key element: a terrible workplace culture. Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research has discovered that, over the past 12 months, 72% of businesses have taken steps to enhance workplace culture to better foster collaboration, engagement, and innovation.

Workplace culture isn’t just a nebulous concept anymore, but rather a true Future of Work state that affects talent acquisition, talent attraction, hiring success, brand awareness, and talent sustainability.

For too many years, I focused on those negative experiences, as well as my own professional mistakes. Sometimes they drove me to be better. Sometimes they hindered my progress. And, sometimes, they affected my mental health.

The mistakes and failures of the past, especially those stemming from poor leadership, can serve as invaluable lessons to shape the workplace cultures we strive for today. Rather than allowing past missteps to hold us back, we should use them to catalyze meaningful, positive change. Two years ago, ten years ago, or even twenty years in the past – the ideal workplace cultures we envision today should be informed by what we wish we had experienced back then. Reflecting on the shortcomings, pain points, and dissatisfactions of the past equips us to actively create the thriving, employee-centric environments we want to see now.

In today’s globalized, competitive business landscape, workplace culture has become a critical component of success. Elements like worker wellbeing, mental health support, employee experience, and overall company happiness are no longer optional – they are essential for retaining top talent, fostering innovation, and driving enterprise-wide prosperity.

Organizations that prioritize cultivating positive, enriching workplace cultures will be best positioned to thrive. By learning from past mistakes and intentionally shaping workplace cultures aligned with employee needs and values, companies can gain a competitive edge in attracting, developing, and retaining the best people.

The key is to let the lessons of the past propel us towards a better future, rather than allowing them to hold us back. With this mindset, the missteps of yesterday can become the catalysts for the workplace cultures of tomorrow.

When a Return to the Office and Workplace Culture Collide

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 07/15/2024

Although it’s hard to believe, it’s been more than four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in that time, several key Future of Work “accelerants” took the business arena by storm. The extended workforce, long a viable source of talent, saw a remarkable increase in utilization as businesses sought true workforce scalability in the face of uncertain times.

Direct sourcing began to take off as a means of nurturing talent communities and developing a near-self-sustaining source of on-demand expertise. Skills-based hiring emerged as a way to look “beyond” costs and pay rates to revolutionize how enterprises innovative and leverage next-generation skillsets.

Empathy-led leadership and emotional intelligence became crucial endeavors to separate the successful leaders from those that would eventually lose their staff to the Great Resignation. And, of course, the most famous Future of Work accelerant of all, remote and hybrid work, drew most of the spotlight and headlines.

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The Next Great Era of the Hybrid Workplace

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 05/20/2024

“We’re not putting that genie back in the bottle” is a phrase I’ve used at least two or three dozen times over the past few months whenever I’m asked about the realm of remote and hybrid work and how return-to-office (RTO) mandates are impacting these attributes. No matter how the economy shifts and no matter how far the pendulum swings back in favor of the employer, the phrase will always be true.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a watershed moment for humanity. And it was also a turning point in the business world.

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The Fluidity of the Future of Work

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 03/05/2024

For well over a decade, the “Future of Work” phrase has elicited both excitement and confusion. There is an inherent joy associated with the pathways of progression around the concepts of “work,” yet, complexities remain from defining exactly what is the “future state” of how we work. As the phrase, and its subsequent movement, caught fire in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while the rules of work changed, the “Future of Work” became a foundational piece of business lexicon and we bore witness to an ever-evolving landscape of revolution, innovation, and technology.

Four years ago at this time, many of us (well, let’s be honest: all of us) were focused on the most critical of all Future of Work accelerants: remote and hybrid work. Who could know back then that this would open the floodgates into new and exciting ways of structuring workplace environments?

The Future of Work Exchange has oft-discussed this concept of “acceleration” in that pandemic-era restrictions, and, by consequence, the forced changes of how we work, pushed enterprises across the globe into a new era of work optimization.

With our backs against the proverbial wall, we responded by innovating. And by innovating, we continued to transform how we work, when we work, and where we work.

With nearly a quarter of 2024 in the books (time flies, doesn’t it?), the landscape of Future of Work-led shifts within the workplace (and how we work) represents the true fluidity of this movement; as technology continues to progress and as businesses seek to innovate around the areas of proficiency, efficiency, and productivity, we can anticipate a continuous evolution in the workplace dynamics, such as:

The much-vaunted four-day workweek. The Exchange’s John Yuva wrote about this strategy in 2023, finding that four-day workweeks “lead to lower stress levels as well as a happier and more loyal workforce,” as well as a major increase in productivity. The issue keeping the strategy from adoption, though? The vertical-to-vertical adherence to four days instead of five means that there’s a gap in customer- and client-facing servicing, leaving managers to struggle over another staffing issue in an era when the labor market is already volatile.
“Chronoworking” as a potential workplace disruptor. Chronoworking is innovative as it aligns work schedules with individuals’ peak productivity times, optimizing performance and creativity. However, its adoption can be challenging due to the need for a shift in traditional work paradigms, potential resistance from established routines, and the necessity for effective communication and coordination among team members following varied schedules
The convergence of new workforce generations and the importance of workplace culture. With Boomers mostly out of the workforce and Gen Xers approaching the last decade or so of their careers, it means that millennials and Gen Z workers represent the majority of today’s talent. Although this shift has been happening in some capacity over the past few years, the newer blend of workers means that there’s the utmost pressure on leaders to shore up workplace culture and ensure that the “work experience” meets the evolving requirements and desires of the younger generation.
The impact of AI on the workplace. Artificial intelligence is the next great level of innovation, with generative AI as its calling card. Generative AI is poised to revolutionize the future workplace by automating complex tasks, fostering creativity, and enhancing overall efficiency. Through its ability to autonomously generate content, solutions, and insights, generative AI will free up human resources to focus on higher-level decision-making and innovation. This transformative technology holds the potential to reshape workflows, streamline processes, and create a more dynamic and adaptive work environment, ultimately driving increased productivity and competitiveness in the evolving landscape of the modern workplace.

Optimize Your Workforce with Recession-Proof Strategies, Part Two

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce General Insights HR Talent Technology and Innovation by John Yuva on 08/07/2023

We’re now two months into the second half of 2023 and economically speaking, things are looking positive. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that GDP grew 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023. The labor market remains tight with unemployment at 3.6%, a rate not witnessed in decades. However, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the tight labor market allows the Federal Reserve to continue raising interest rates to fight inflation. Currently, inflation rests at 3%, a percentage point higher than the Federal Reserve’s longer-run goal of 2%.

Does the state of the current U.S. economy equate to a “soft landing” and the evasion of a recession? Maybe, maybe not. Due to the expectation of continued interest rate increases and the potential ramifications, uncertainty remains among executives and their enterprises. Thus, many are considering strategies over the next six to 12 months to recession-proof their critical workforce and their organizations.

With that in mind, the Future of Work Exchange features part two of a three-part series exploring several contingent and overall workforce strategies to achieve a recession-proof enterprise over the next few weeks. Part two explores the next three strategies.

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What Happens When Return-to-Office Mandates Impact Recruitment, Talent Retention, and the Employee Experience?

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 07/03/2023

As I’ve said dozens of times on video, on the Future of Work Exchange Podcast, and during numerous webinars: there is/was no silver lining to a global health crisis that killed millions of people and permanently disabled millions more. Many of us were sick ourselves, and many of us lost people close to use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a dark time in our lifetimes, a period in which everyday routines were altered as lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing became a frustrating (and frightening) norm. While we are three-and-a-half years removed from those scary early days of the pandemic, the ramifications will always be apparent…especially in the business arena. In fact, Future of Work acceleration is now perceived as one aspect that was a positive result of the incredible change brought about by the crisis.

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