The pandemic has forced organizations to change the way they operate. Many companies have had to shift their operations to a remote-first or hybrid model in order to stay afloat. The pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of digital technologies that enable remote work, such as video conferencing, chat, and project management tools.

What will the future of work look like? This is a question that has become all too common, asked by business leaders, managers, and employees like never before.

The future of work will be different from what we're used to, but there are a few things we can expect. In this podcast, we unpack the future of work and discuss how companies and organizations can prepare for the changes ahead.

The use of information technology within a company can be applied in various ways. One way is to unify the different Human Resources systems used by a company. Doing so can have benefits for both the company and its employees. In this podcast, we discuss the benefits of unification and how it can help improve HR processes, provide examples of successful implementations, and offer thoughts on why more companies should consider doing the same.

In the past two years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way we work. COVID-19, along with advances in technology, has allowed more and more people are able to work remotely, from anywhere in the world.

So what does this mean for the future of work? The Ivanti survey results and what they tell us about the rise of remote working. We'll also explore the benefits and challenges of this new way of working, and offer some tips on how to make the most of it.

Creating a sense of urgency at work isn't always a bad thing. However, it becomes a bad thing when people in leadership roles wield it like a sword and use it to the point that it now becomes counter-productive. When applied in strong collaboration to speed up a project (think Covid-19 vaccine), it can have a beneficial outcome. However, when everything is served up as a priority with merits as urgent as the tasks before it, people will become confused about prioritizing and completing a task successfully. This scenario will bring about lower production and double the mistakes. 

When looking at this from a mental well-being perspective, it can cause burnout, disengagement, lower production output, and ultimately a total disconnect between people and production. 

There's no doubt that security is important in the workplace. But what happens when the measures taken to ensure security start to have a negative impact on employee welfare and productivity? That's where the challenge lies for employers - finding a balance between the two. There are a few ways to achieve this, and it ultimately comes down to creating a healthy workplace culture, one where employees grasp the concept of security in all its fullness. This podcast discusses what security really is all about, and how it can work alongside employee experience.

Workplaces need innovation in order to remain competitive. But you can’t order innovation like a spare part. You need the right culture to inspire innovation and leadership among your employees. That comes down to a courageous culture, where employees feel empowered to speak up on behalf of their organization and take leadership roles, even if they’re not in management positions. In cultures like this, employees are willing and able to share their ideas, and your whole company reaps the benefits. 

As technology has advanced, the way we conduct interviews has changed. No longer are we bound to a physical space, sitting across a desk from one another. Video interviewing has become a popular option for many companies and candidates alike, especially during COVID-19. There are many benefits to using video interviews in the recruitment process and many myths as well. 

For businesses facing serious hiring challenges as part of the Great Resignation, there’s an untapped talent pool that would allow them to surpass diversity and inclusion goals while introducing critical problem-solving skills: veterans. In fact, veteran candidates introduce several critical skill sets that are hard to find among civilians while offering a clean slate for employers to re-skill a talented employee. The key is learning how to overcome hiring obstacles and use veteran hiring to strategically fill your talent gaps. 

In today’s workplace, the pressure is on—to be a perfect employee, to always be available, to exceed last week’s exceeded expectations. In short, the modern workplace is a pressure cooker. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, stress and pressure are both critical motivators at work. Without a little pressure, you can’t perform at your best. 

The key is leveraging pressure as a tool of success rather than a weight on your shoulders. The first step is mindset, figuring out how to think of pressure in a way that serves you. From there, you have to learn how to build up your resilience and learn how to use pressure as a structuring tool when you’re facing uncertainty.

With more employees able to work from home than ever before, and the coronavirus pandemic still dictating the terms of where and how we work, employees are settling into work from home. Just...not their current home. These days, more employees are considering the possibility of relocating to a cheaper area if work from home options become permanent. That introduces new challenges for employers—beyond remote work functionality. Companies have to consider how the trend toward relocation will impact their recruitment and retention, how they can educate employees, and how they can set up managers and employees for realistic, fulfilling remote work experiences. 

Employees are demanding hybrid work. Managers are stressed about hybrid work. And since the confusion often comes from a lack of cohesive hybrid work planning, it’s time to take the stress off everyone’s plates and start planning for the future of hybrid work. For managers, mastering the art of hybrid work is all about communication, learning how to maintain productivity, sustaining your workplace culture in a hybrid environment, and, of course, safety.

COVID-19 changed the world of work--and the world of hiring--forever. And in today’s digital-first recruiting environment, recruiters have challenges unlike anything they’ve faced in previous decades. Fortunately, modern recruiting technology also offers tools to mitigate those challenges. Because the recruiting landscape is now built around finding the right candidate in a sea of options, recruiting technology equips hiring managers with smart analytic tools so that they can make informed, data-driven decisions to improve hiring. 

As of March 2020, HR managers and company leaders have been laser-focused on COVID-19. As of January 2022, the federal vaccination mandate for all businesses with 100 or more employees brought COVID-19 back to the center of your business discussions. But the more time you waste arguing about the mandate, the less time you have to focus on staying competitive. To address this, you have to address misunderstandings about vaccine proof, tackle fears about the vaccine, get smart about storing employee data, and always stay focused on the employee experience. 

Americans are leaving their jobs (and not coming back) at historic rates. And that means the pressure is on talent acquisition to deliver much-needed manpower and help businesses stay competitive. For businesses with an eye toward the future, it’s time to learn from the mistakes of 2021 (like why employees aren’t in a hurry to come back to work) and use that knowledge to stay ahead. When you’re vying for the same talent in a seller’s market, reaching the right candidates and making the right offers once you find them are critical to your success. 

Managers want in-person work. Employees want hybrid work. And in the Great Resignation, when employees are more willing than ever to leave behind lackluster jobs, hybrid work is no longer a perk—it's a competitive advantage. And employers need to catch up to the curve. By focusing on tools that enable the same success factors in in-person environments (like communication, agility, and innovation) employers can reimagine the future of work and ensure their future success. 

As COVID-19 leads more employees to demand hybrid workplaces, the pressure is on employers to innovate and provide long-term hybrid solutions. The good news is that modern technology is ready to provide the answers. The key is to focus on elements that drive success in in-person environments: communication, collaboration, innovation, agility, and the democratization of technology access. And with the right tools, employers can innovate and reimagine their own workplaces—and stay competitive in the process.

Today’s employees don’t want to just collect a paycheck. They want to grow in their work. That’s great news for managers and HR departments, who can capitalize on the hunger to learn through self-driven skills development. That way, employees can learn skills that are valuable to them while also motivating themselves to pursue it—the better to make sure they’re genuinely interested. 

That said, employers still play a big role. Today’s companies need to provide well-sourced, well-considered content and help drive motivation to ensure that employees gain truly valuable skills. Then, employees take over from there. 

Frontline workers are burned out and scared, and many are thinking of quitting their jobs. Yet their organizations still rely on them to do essential work. And if workplaces want to avoid a brain drain from the front lines, it’s time to invest in frontline employees. 

Among other things, that means recognizing the unique struggle of frontline employees, providing support to push back against burnout, skills training to help adapt to the future of work, and a targeted effort to drive better performance. That way, you can continue to support the communities who rely on you. 

In today’s workplace, respect is not just a kind gesture or a tool of civility. It’s a necessity for a high-performing workplace. The problem is that many workplaces still struggle to find the right balance of respect and meeting employee expectations. 

The key to respect is understanding what respect means in today’s work environment and the role leaders play in it. From there, leaders can craft their organizational standards of respect, accountability, and appropriate handling of disrespectful conduct. The net result is a happier, healthier, and culturally rich work environment.

Technology will change the way business is run—and with rapid adoption in the COVID-19 era, those changes are happening faster than ever before. Your workplace needs to be ready to evolve with the times. But first, you need to establish the right mindset for technology adoption. 

Humans inherently resist change, and your employees are no different. However, there are ways to overcome change-resistant mindsets. By driving understanding and reframing the effort, you can change employees minds (and their mindsets) to the betterment of your business.

The future of work is hybrid, but many workplaces aren’t ready for it. In order to make the transition successfully, leadership, HR teams, and IT teams need to create a secure work environment that allows successful (and safe) communication online just as much as in-person. This only happens when networking, security, and collaboration tools come together to enhance health and well-being, safety, and efficiencies. 

The key is to strike a balance—not just tools that get the job done, but tools that enable safe collaboration. That way, your team can confidently work (and innovate) whether they’re across the table or miles apart. 

Workforce expectations are changing — that we know, and that includes benefits. Employees are looking to their workplace to provide more guidance and real solutions on healthcare and wellness — and by the way, employers that step up to the plate aren’t just improving their own work culture. They’re also boosting their own brand as a forward-thinking employer.

Today we’re going to one way a new approach to benefits is changing the game – bringing well-being to the workforce.  Pop-up dental clinics right in your workplace are a proven way to ensure your employees get the dental care they need — despite their busy lives. And this ingenious new way to bring benefits on-site can have an enormous positive impact on financial wellness as well. A Cigna study found that regular preventive dental care over a five-year period reduced annual dental costs by 31% for people aged 18-64. 

Today Meghan M. Biro talks to Jordan Smith, the CEO of Jet Dental, about this groundbreaking model of employee healthcare. It’s a new way for employers to get ahead of employee expectations around benefits and care.

In 2019, a United Minds and Weber Shandwick survey found that one in five employees reported experiencing a cultural crisis within the last year to two—a significant incident indicating troubling workplace attitudes and behaviors. Worse, 30% of employees expect a cultural crisis within the next two years based on their employer’s current behavior. 

It’s more than just a bad attitude. It’s a toxic workplace culture that culminates into a dangerous trend for workplaces. Just look at the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, when workplace culture took an ugly turn. 

It's time for employers and HR professionals to do better. It’s time to revitalize culture and create a work environment that strengthens you. It’s time for managers to develop a plan of action to make sure their workplace culture is engaged, attentive, and positive. That has to happen at all levels, and it starts with commitment at the top of every organization.

Spend any time looking at career and business magazines you’re probably familiar with this term: The Great Resignation. Or as I like to call it, And we thought we were in trouble before. The Great Resignation is the tide of employees leaving their companies — a massive, unprecedented disruption in the labor market. 

What caused it? Upheavals in the workplace, a revelation among workers that they can work remotely and prefer to, a new wave of retirements that opened up new opportunities. Add a general tide of burnout and disengagement as companies undergo rocky digital transformations, and push production to gain traction in crowded marketplaces. And there’s the pandemic’s pressures, bearing down on already stressful roles. 

Recent research from Microsoft found that 41% of employees are considering resigning from their jobs in 2021—compared to 15% voluntary turnover rates pre-pandemic (as reported by Mercer). The Wall Street Journal notes that the actual “quit rate” is four million people per month, the highest we’ve ever seen. 

Today Meghan M. Biro talks to Morgan Chaney, Senior Director of Marketing at Blueboard, about how new approaches to recognition can help employers overcome this wave of departures, catalyze engagement, and turn this resignation ship around.

Gone are the days of working for one company for 40 years. These days, employees change jobs—and careers—all the time. And yet, many of us remain in the same jobs, even though we know we would love a career change. 

The number one myth about career changes is that they’re simply too difficult. We think it will take too much time and effort, or that starting from the bottom in a new field isn’t worth the cost. In reality, changing careers will require some legwork, but it’s not at all impossible. You just need the right toolkit, and enough preparation to guide you through the process. 

For one thing, relationships still matter, which means employees at all levels need to continue networking and cultivating work relationships. Employees also need to change their mindset, especially if they’re transitioning into leadership positions. And we all have a personal and professional brand to draw on—the key is to build it early and continue refining it.