Into the future: What will the workplace, shaken up by COVID, look like in 2023?

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up what’s normal at work in 2020.

Americans adjusted to working from home in many industries, and, by 2021, were not ready to go back to the office.

Hybrid work options became popular. A few days working from home, the others in the office.

However, as 2022 comes to an end, what will the workplace in 2023 look like?

Amy Zimmerman, Chief People Officer for Relay Payments for more than two years, has spent her career in Financial Technology (FinTech).

“The big, most notable shift, of course, has been everybody going remote,” Zimmerman said of the workplace in the last two years.

Now, as the United States attempts to move on from the COVID-19 pandemic, which birthed the workplace trend of working remotely, a percentage of the workforce is returning to the office.

During the pandemic, companies shifted how and where to work. Customer service- focused industries, such as retail and hospitality, had to keep employees in the workplace, but technology experienced a “constant debate and friction around decisions for employees.”

“I think most of us believed that we would never go back to the way things were,” Zimmerman said.

Companies were encouraged after the pandemic to create environments for employees to want to return to the workplace.

Zimmerman said that companies make decisions based on what makes sense for them. When speaking with leadership teams, she challenges them to ask: “What are you solving for?” If productivity is a concern, will having employees return to the office increase productivity? She challenges companies to create communities for employees to return to in the office.

“Meeting people where they are may sometimes be the better answer,” Zimmerman said.

She said if a company needs employees in the office five days a week, then it should have employees in the office five days a week.

“For me, there’s no one size fits all,” Zimmerman said.

Some leadership teams are not able to manage remote employees.

“I think [2023 is] going to be interesting,” Zimmerman said. Some companies have been scaling back in 2022 and laying off employees across all industries, and she expects more of the same in the new year. After much growth during and after the pandemic, companies are now facing a possible recession which could impact cash flow.

Zimmerman said she expects to continue to see hybrid workplaces in 2023, but employees will have fewer employment options. The smart solution for employers is to think about they are solving for, and to keep treat current employees so that they stick it out through a tough time.

Zimmerman hopes that the workforce will get through a recession and get to the other side “and have another prosperous 10 years,” like the last 10 years.

Gilles Raymond is CEO and Founder of Letsmeet. His top takeaways from the workplace in 2022 are that working from home is here to stay, an increase in productivity tools and an increase in meetings.

Raymond explained that based on Kastle System data, a company managing office access badges, less than one American out of two goes to an office each day. Companies such as Sales Force and Twitter offer their teams opportunities to work from anywhere.

Raymond said his office used to have one generic software tool, but now uses more than 10 in their daily work, including Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Expensify and DocuSign.

While meetings in 2022 were shorter, 45 minutes on average, the amount of meetings, according to Raymond, tripled in 2022 compared to February 2020, especially with the aid of video conferencing.

“We see a passive but clear resistance against the back to office,” Raymond said of the workplace in 2023. “Work from home, or even work from wherever is here to stay, and management will need to adjust to it.”

Adjusting to a work-from-home model will require company leadership to build trustful relationships with teams.

“To construct this, managers will need to share more in terms of quantity and be more authentic. The new tools are supporting this evolution,” Raymond said.

Sensitivity will increase with the intensity of climate disasters, including floods, droughts, hurricanes and fires, according to Raymond, as they hit countries all over the world.

“On the recruitment side, the companies offering purpose and with a positioning closer to the environment values will attract more young talents, on the opposite, energy companies will face challenges in the recruitment of the new generation,” he said.