- “Quiet holidays”, “coffee etiquette” and “ghost work” were part of the corporate lexicon in 2024.
- These are just a few of the trends that dominated our conversations about work.
- Here’s a look back at work in 2024.
Ghost work. Coffee sign. Quiet shooting. Peaceful vacation.
This year’s loudest workplace trends didn’t just become popular tropes, they also highlighted an ongoing power struggle between workers and bosses as the pandemic shook up the way people do their jobs.
The year’s biggest moves reflect “changes in work patterns, technology integration and employee expectations,” says Lauren Winans, CEO and HR consultant at Next Level Benefits.
While some of these are hardly new fads, they all featured prominently in the discourse around work this year. Here are the trends that dominated the cultural conversation in 2024:
Ghost work
Ghost jobs are nothing new, but they got a lot of attention this year.
These are roles that employers claim they are looking to fill even though they cannot actually hire for such positions.
Employers may list ghost jobs for several reasons. They may want to suggest that they are doing well and growing; they may try to prepare a talent pool for current positions that open in the future; or they may want to signal to overworked employees that they’ll be getting extra help soon.
Peaceful vacation
It’s pretty much explained, but just in case: When employees go on vacation without using any vacation time or telling their bosses, they’re said to be taking a quiet vacation.
Some remote workers may take quiet vacations without letting their bosses know. Vasil Dimitrov/Getty Images
RTO
Back-to-office mandates continued to spread at large firms this year. Amazon, one of the nation’s largest employers, became one of the most high-profile companies to announce a full return to the 5-day week in the office. (However, its implementation has been delayed for some employees due to lack of space.)
Silent hybrid
As employers tighten the reins on remote work, some employees have begun creating a new under-the-table work arrangement.
Enter the silent hybrid schedule, in which employees round off RTO mandates by getting their manager’s approval to continue working from home on days when they’re technically required to be in the office.
Managers, for their part, may agree to do this to keep their employees happy (or to keep them, period). They also probably have a more personal connection to the workers affected by a mandate than the managers who implement it. And of course, managers who are themselves opposed to RTO plans may cut employees some slack.
Coffee sign
Another method of avoiding RTO is the coffee badge – although it still technically requires an employee to return to the office.
Practice involves going to work to swipe your badge so your attendance is recorded. But instead of spending the rest of the workday there, you kill some time by grabbing a coffee or showing your face with a quick spin around the office, before heading home to do the bulk of your work. current there.
Coffee marks refer to workers slipping into the office to meet back-to-office requirements before quickly leaving to complete their work elsewhere. kotijelly / Getty Images
slip
Performance improvement plans, or PIPs, usually consist of a set of goals set for an employee to improve in areas where a boss says they are underperforming. If they are not completed in the allotted time, usually a few months or less, the employee will face termination.
PIPs are certainly not unique this year, but statistically they have been issued more frequently in recent years. They received renewed attention in 2024 as part of the discussion about how employers cut the number of employees without warning.
Quiet layoffs, silent layoffs, and secret layoffs
Yes, these are all somewhat different things.
Among the mandates of RTOs and PIPs, the “quiet layoff,” which gained a lot of buzz in recent years, took center stage in 2024. It refers to the unspoken effort of a boss or employer to encourage employees leave by making the role more unpleasant, as opposed to facing the monetary and reputational costs associated with leaving them explicitly.
Related phrases include “silent layoffs,” which refers to giving employees severance packages but asking them to be discreet about leaving the firm.
There are also “secret dismissals”, coined by the Financial Times to describe the dismissal of employees for minor infractions. The newspaper quotes The dismissal of forty staff from Meta for using GrubHub’s $25 food credits to buy non-food items as an example, and EY’s firing of dozens of employees for viewing several online training courses simultaneously.
Other key trends
There were other trends that, while lacking big names, also shaped the way we worked in 2024.
Chief, of course, was the growing adoption of AI in the workplace, the “standout trend” of the year, according to Amy Schabacker Dufrane, CEO of the Human Resources Certification Institute and the Human Resources Standards Institute.
The continued integration of AI into the workplace is this year’s “standout trend,” says Dufrane. Chen
Winans says other trends included an emphasis on upgrading and retraining to keep up with technological advances and changing job demands, as well as increased efforts to organize work.
What can we expect in 2025?
Next year, the integration of AI at work will undoubtedly continue.
“Employees expect training and transparency about the role of AI, while employers navigate concerns about job security and ethics,” says Dufrane.
Other topics to watch include an emphasis on skills-based hiring and employee wellness programs, as well as ongoing changes in companies’ ESG and DEI strategies.
U.S. employee engagement hitting an 11-year low in 2024, coupled with the possibility that it may be easier to change jobs in 2025 means that the revenge of churn may also be the next important workplace trends coming next year, according to a Glassdoor report. .
The phrase refers to disgruntled employees who are vocal about their dissatisfaction and resign, often with little or no notice, knowing that this may negatively affect their employer.
Going into 2025, “monitoring employee satisfaction will be more important than ever,” says Dufrane.
“We may see an increase in trends like minimum attendance or retaliatory dropouts as back-to-work mandates require employees to be onsite more than the post-COVID norm,” she adds. “The advantage of open communication, as well as autonomy, fairness and an environment of high trust, will be critical to the success of organizations.”