Debunking hype: Three workplace trends that aren't what they seem

By Sarah Green Carmichae

 

From a quick glance at 2024’s top business headlines, you’d think all companies were pushing return-to-office policies, embracing artificial intelligence and banishing diversity, equity and inclusion programs. But as we head into 2025, let’s remember that headlines don’t always reflect reality.

 

Start with RTO mandates. The media loves a scary back-to-the-office headline. From the point of view of clicks, a strict five-day-a-week policy is gold. Even better? If that policy applies to liberal tech dweebs. Full points if it’s a company that once promised to work remotely forever, like X when it was still Twitter.

 

 

These headlines gain attention because they play to some readers’ anxieties — and others’ schadenfreude. But the reality is that most companies have accepted hybrid work. Even Elon Musk had to back off his declarations of full RTO at X; shortly after his initial, well-publicized demands, he conceded there’d be exceptions. He also shuttered some of the company’s offices, meaning that all staff in those locations had to go fully remote.

 

I expect this duality to ramp up in 2025, with more companies loudly announcing returns to the office even as the majority quietly shrink their office footprints or continue to embrace hybrid arrangements.

 

Hybrid Work Keeps Chugging Along

  The bottom line: Badge-in data has been close to flat for the past two years. Among workers whose jobs can be done remotely, hybrid arrangements remain the most common.

 

Hybrid Work Remains the Most Common Arrangement 

On to generative AI. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene two years ago, we’ve seen endless speculation about what such technology could do and how workers might use it. (Or how general artificial intelligence might take over the world and destroy us all.) In 2024, 75 per cent of employees used generative AI at work, according to a survey by EY; that’s much higher than the 49 per cent who said, in 2023, that they anticipated using it in the months to come.

 

But if the last two years have been a “bullet train,” for AI, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Parmy Olson wrote recently, we may be heading for a “slowdown at the station.” (By the way, her book on the subject, Supremacy, was just named the FT’s Business Book of the Year.) 

That slowdown could presage the next, more realistic phase in the “hype cycle,” a phrase coined by Gartner to describe technological change. First, a new technology triggers a surge in “inflated expectations,” which is followed by a “trough of disillusionment” as the tech’s limitations become apparent. Gradually, people figure out how the thing can actually be used, and people’s expectations settle somewhere in between. We may be heading there with text-based generative AI in 2025.

 

But if the new year brings more measured coverage of AI, I expect the opposite is true of DEI. In the last couple of years, right-wing activists have made a punching bag of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I don’t think President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House is going to convince them to hold their fire.

 

But the reality is messier than the DEI-doomer headlines suggest. Yes, some very large companies, intimidated by activist shareholders and legal threats, have announced changes to diversity programs. But despite the backlash, many companies remain convinced that it is still important to do the core work associated with DEI programs: recruit from the largest possible talent pool; assess workers accurately and fairly, without implicit bias; and foster an environment free of overt racial prejudice, gender hostility or sexual harassment. (Not least because such discrimination remains illegal and generates a far larger number of lawsuits than any “reverse discrimination” claims.)

 

But given the vibes, look for companies to approach this work differently. Some will simply call it something else — as my colleague Beth Kowitt points out, Walmart had already hired a “Chief Belonging Officer” rather than a Chief Diversity Officer long before the company was targeted by anti-diversity activist Robby Starbuck. 

Others will integrate data-driven DEI practices into core managerial functions — an approach that could actually yield better results for women and minorities. For example, rather than demanding every finalist pool contain at least one “diverse” candidate (a backlash-sparking practice that has not resulted in more diverse hiring), HR could insist that managers hire according to clear, objective, consistent criteria — including a concrete definition of “culture fit.” An insurance company that followed this more rigorous approach ended up hiring 46 per cent more minority applicants, according to scholarship by Joan C. Williams. 

We might be done with DEI as an acronym. But the practice, whatever we call it, will evolve to fit a new era.

 

Evolving is something that we all have to do — but we can’t do it skillfully unless we can cut through the hype.