The world of work experiences a ‘great resignation’ in many countries across the globe. Members of the workforce re-orient themselves at scale. If the 'great resignation' has anything to teach employers, it’s to not take their workers for granted.
Yet many companies risk doing exactly that—by not paying close enough attention to skilled workers who are at an elevated risk of quitting, by failing to support workers who seek personal fulfilment and meaning at work, or by missing opportunities to build the trust that leads to positive outcomes at the personal, professional and even societal levels.
These issues are the focus of this year’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, the third in a series dating to 2019. Power and its distribution is a central theme of the findings in this year’s survey. More than 52,000 workers across 44 countries and territories have raised their voices. It is one of the largest such surveys conducted.
A workforce on the move
For global leaders, some of these results should be a wake-up call. Workers who feel empowered by their current circumstances—i.e., those with specialised or scarce skills—are ready to test the market. More than one-third of respondents plan to ask for a raise in the coming year, and one in five said they are extremely or very likely to switch employers.
The search for meaning
Retaining these employees will require more than just pay; fulfilling work and the opportunity to be one’s authentic self at work also matter to employees who are considering a job change.
Our results also show that sensitive political and social discussions—topics that themselves hinge on issues of power and its distribution—are happening in the workplace, largely without company involvement, and are generating positive dividends for employees. Also, workers want more support in translating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations to their work. And as leaders develop hybrid work models, they need to consider the 45% of the workforce that can’t work remotely—people who do essential work but report feeling less fulfilled and empowered than respondents who can work remotely.
Employees are crucial for success
As companies take on ambitious business and societal goals, leaders must remember that employees can be a force multiplier or a detractor. In fact, PwC research has found that the workforce is the number one risk to growth—and also the principal means by which companies can execute growth-driven strategies. Understanding workplace power in all its aspects can help leaders energise their workforce, tap into the power of their people and accomplish bolder goals.
Politics and social issues: Conversations at work aren’t polarising—they’re a net positive
Conversations are happening
Companies operate in an increasingly polarised world, where political and social issues hold intense power over people. Some managers may fear that discussing these topics in the workplace could create a minefield. But 65% of employees in our survey said they have these kinds of conversations frequently or sometimes. The numbers are higher still among self-reported ethnic minorities (73%) and younger employees (69% among those ages 26 to 41, 13 percentage points higher than for those ages 58 to 76).
The benefits outweigh the drawbacks
Conversations about sensitive political and social issues aren’t the divisive, polarising distraction that managers might fear. Among respondents who have political and social conversations at work, the positives—a better understanding of colleagues, a more open and inclusive work environment, and increased empathy—outweigh the negatives.
Employees who identified as ethnic minorities were more likely than other respondents to say that these experiences have had a positive impact. At the same time, minorities were also more likely to cite at least one negative impact, suggesting that the overall effect of these conversations, both good and bad, is intense.
Employees are discussing sensitive topics at work
Impact of these discussions, % of respondents1
These discussions are happening despite little active effort on the part of organisations to facilitate them. Only 30% of employees said their company provides support to help them work effectively with people who share different views. This is a missed opportunity, given the importance of empathy and openness in building trust.
To be sure, supporting and encouraging sensitive conversations isn’t easy. However, leaders can make progress by establishing norms, offering resources and helping ensure that these conversations happen in safe, no-judgment environments. These environments should emphasise listening—not reaching solutions or generating consensus—and thus represent growth opportunities for senior executives as well, who are often much more comfortable in problem-solving mode. The leader’s role here is to help the company bring meaning, humanity and social impact to the workforce—not to deliver answers.
Two measures of empowerment: Specialisation and scarcity
Employees with specialised training are in demand — and they know it
What makes a worker feel empowered? Specialised training is one element. Among respondents, almost half said their job requires some level of specialist training. This group was far more likely than other respondents to say they would ask for a raise or promotion in the next 12 months. The good news is that empowered workers are also more likely to recommend their company to others.
Specialised training empowers workers
49% of respondents say their job requires specialised training
% likely to take the following actions with their employers in the next 12 months1
Skills shortages give employees more clout
A second aspect of worker empowerment is having scarce skills. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said their country lacks people with the skills needed to perform their job. Countries with the biggest perceived gap in skills include Thailand, India and Brazil. The industries with the highest share of respondents who feel their skills are scarce are healthcare (including pharmaceutical firms), technology, media and telecommunications.
Compared with employees who don’t believe their skills are scarce, this group is more likely to:
- feel listened to by their managers (+25 percentage points)
- ask for a pay raise in the coming year (+20 percentage points)
- ask for a promotion in the coming year (+20 percentage points)
- feel satisfied with their job (+17 percentage points)
- switch to a new employer (+7 percentage points).
Companies are investing in their people—but not enough
To close the skills gap, companies are investing in the current workforce through upskilling and increasing wages—focusing on the elements they can control most easily, an important means of responding to periods of uncertainty. By contrast, automating, outsourcing and recruiting appear to be lower priorities. But in absolute terms, the share of companies taking these steps is still low. Only 40% of employees said their company is upskilling, and only 26% said their employer is automating or enhancing work through technology. Both numbers are low enough to imply considerable room for improvement.
The same holds true for supporting workers’ physical and mental well-being—a critical issue given the mental-health crisis now affecting so many workers around the world. It’s encouraging, then, that employees cited the support they receive on well-being as the third-most-likely way in which companies address skills and labour shortages. But again, in absolute terms, the proportion is low: only 29% of respondents said they received this support. Given the scope of the mental-health challenges that workers face, this finding suggests that companies could be doing much more to support worker well-being.
Employers are focusing on internal measures to address skills and labour shortages
Actions employers are taking to address skills and labour shortages, % of respondents1
Technology: Existential threat or upskilling opportunity?
30% of respondents said they’re concerned about their role being replaced by technology in the next three years. Meanwhile, 39% said they’re concerned about not getting sufficient training in digital and technology skills from their employer. That proportion is even higher among younger respondents.
Retention strategies: Meaning is as important as money
Pay is necessary but insufficient
When it comes to retaining employees, money is the top factor. That’s understandable given the historic increases in inflation that were occurring while our global survey was in the field and that are projected by many economists in the year ahead.
Equity
Men were more likely than women to say they’re fairly rewarded financially. Men also were 9 percentage points more likely than women to say they planned to ask for a raise. Both of these findings appear to reflect longstanding problems in wealth inequity, and they highlight the need to advance the gender-equity agenda, including pay transparency and higher female participation in the labour force.
Positive Contribution
Yet money isn’t enough by itself to retain workers, who were almost as likely to cite intangible factors related to meaning. Job fulfilment and the ability to be one’s true self at work were ranked second and third among employees considering a job change. These findings align with our 2021 survey results, in which 75% of employees said they wanted to work for an organisation that makes a positive contribution to society, and fully half reported experiencing discrimination at work.
Meaning matters to employees
Most important factors when considering a change in work environment, % of respondents1
Five factors make up the ‘resignation equation’
Our analysis also broke out the cohort of employees who said they’re extremely or very likely to look for another job. This is a critical group for managers to understand, and their responses point to clear warning signs that companies need to monitor. Amid the great resignation, these are the biggest factors in determining whether your people are at risk of leaving.
Risk Factors for Retention
Compared to people who are extremely or very unlikely to look for another job, people in this cohort are less likely to:
- find their job fulfilling (-14 percentage points)
- feel they can be their true self at work (-11 percentage points)
- feel fairly rewarded financially (-9 percentage points)
- feel their team cares about them (-9 percentage points)
- feel that their manager listens to them (-7 percentage points).
Managers who sense that these elements are at play—or even starting to emerge—can take steps to reshape the employee experience. It’s rarely second nature for leaders to focus on making jobs fulfilling.
Doing so requires deep empathy on the part of managers and the ability to translate the company’s overall purpose into specific actions and behaviours, so that employees can see how their work contributes to that purpose. It also requires organisations to identify and eliminate gaps between their words and deeds. Managers can create the right work environment and leadership model, and they can remove the most burdensome aspects of employees’ lives—excessive bureaucracy, points of friction, administrative tasks that sap the joy from work. Managers can also invest to upskill their people, give them greater autonomy over their work and take other steps to empower them.
Establishing an environment in which employees feel they can be their authentic selves calls for training leaders, eliminating cultural barriers and blind spots, and holding managers accountable for creating—and modelling— the organisation’s culture and behaviours. Finally, leaders should pay much closer attention to the employee experience they offer relative to that of competitors and be able to name their strengths and weaknesses. It should never take the departure of a key employee to remind leaders of the intense rivalry they face from competitors for workers.
Understanding the four forces shaping your workforce strategy
Company leaders must contend with a wide range of disruptions, including inflation, the pandemic, and fast-moving geopolitical and social crises—all of which have profound consequences on their workers and their workforce strategy. Senior managers need a systematic way to think about these disruptions in order to plan for them in the short and long term. To ground leaders’ thinking, PwC developed a framework for understanding the main disruptions that have shaped workforces throughout history, and that are—as the Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey results show—highly relevant today: specialisation, scarcity, rivalry and humanity. Read more about the four forces.
In societal goals, transparency is everything
Employees want companies to take a stand
Employees are demanding that companies look beyond financial performance to broader ESG considerations—particularly regarding transparency.
The area in which employees say that transparency is most important is the company’s record on protecting worker health and safety. This, no doubt, is related to some extent to the pandemic and the need to recreate working environments with public health in mind. Nonetheless, economic impact, workplace diversity and environmental impact (including climate) weren’t far behind.
In company disclosures, safety and social issues outweigh climate change
Environmental considerations don’t factor into employees’ day-to-day work—yet
Only 23% of employees said their company helps them minimise the environmental impact of their job. The lack of clarity about environmental issues likely stems from a corresponding lack of communication from managers. Most companies are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint, and many are making net-zero pledges, but such measures can feel theoretical and abstract to frontline employees.
The challenge for managers is to make environmental issues immediate and actionable by identifying specific behavioural changes that employees can make. PwC’s 25th Annual Global CEO Survey reached a similar conclusion, finding that climate goals were more likely to be a part of company strategy than to be a part of executives’ individual performance goals.
Part of the solution lies in stronger disclosures and communication about the environmental measures the companies already have in place—and then improving their performance and increasing their disclosures over time. In doing so, leaders can use transparency to build trust within their workforce.
Hybrid work: Meet employees in the middle
Don’t overlook the employees who can’t work remotely
It’s necessary to remember that a significant share of the global workforce cannot work remotely. This group—45% of the respondents in our survey—report less satisfaction with their job than those working in hybrid or fully remote work settings (50% versus 63%).
Empowerment gap
Workers who can’t work remotely are also far less likely than others to say they find their job fulfilling, believe that their team cares about their well-being, feel that they’re fairly rewarded financially or feel they can be creative in their work. As companies revisit their workforce strategies, they must take into greater account these disaffected—and most likely disempowered—employees.
In addition, companies need to consider the role that these in-person employees play in overall community responses to the pandemic, as part of the organisation’s broader social responsibility mandate. After all, these employees often serve a critical role in society, providing services that cannot happen remotely.
Flexible approaches resonate with the workforce
Employees largely believe that their employer will provide work options they like in the coming year. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they prefer some mix of in-person and remote work, and 63% said they expect their company to offer that kind of approach in the next 12 months, compared with 72% in the 2021 survey.
But there’s a disconnect at the extremes: 26% of employees would prefer full-time remote work, but only 18% said their employer is likely to adopt that model. Another 18% said that their employer is likely to require full-time in-person work, which just 11% of employees prefer.
Flexibility makes hybrid work models succeed
Their expectations for their current job roles 12 months from now
- How will you prefer to work?
- How will your employer likely expect you to work?
- Gap
Among full-time remote workers (about 17% of all respondents), more than two-thirds are concerned about missing out on development opportunities. These employees, who are likely to be younger, need a more proactive approach to performance management and career development. For managers, the goal is to distribute opportunities equitably, regardless of whether employees come to the office or work at home.
The future of work is hybrid
In other words, hybrid work is here to stay. The precise ratio of office time and at-home time will vary, but companies need to experiment and adapt. That includes addressing the factors that drive retention risk—including authenticity, meaningful work and pay transparency—all of which become harder when employees aren’t in the same location every day. Companies also must invest in technology to support remote work and put the right governance in place over decisions regarding pay, promotions and other rewards, to fight ‘proximity bias.’
Snapshot of the 18- to 24-year-old employee
Finally, the data leads to a profile of younger workers and how they differ from the overall respondent base. Notably, many of these employees joined the workforce during the pandemic, so they’ve had fewer in-person interactions with colleagues and managers, and their perspective has been shaped by that experience. Specifically, employees ages 18 to 24 are:
- somewhat more likely to work remotely (35% versus 31% for the overall respondent base) and to be more concerned about being overlooked for opportunities
- more concerned about the impact of technology on their jobs over the next three years
- less satisfied with their job
- more likely to ask for a raise or promotion
- more likely to change some aspect of their working life—changing working hours, switching employers or leaving the workforce.
What’s the main takeaway of the 2022 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey for senior leaders?
Our findings are global averages, so each organisation and even business unit will likely have its own variations on the themes we identified. But companies won’t know that unless they start exploring. In other words, they must tailor their workforce strategy to the unique needs of their workers.
Specifically, companies need to gather data on employee sentiment for the topics we’ve identified, segment people with common attributes into personas and develop prioritised action plans for those groups. Most organisations will need to align their purpose and trust agenda, create the right environment for employees to address social and political issues, commit to pay transparency, double down on inclusion and invest in leadership development to make all this happen. They need to align their workforce strategy to their business strategy and to communicate—even over-communicate—their approach to human capital. And, critically, they need to track performance over time.
Companies face a range of challenges, including geopolitical and economic uncertainty, climate issues, social changes and cyber threats. In this kind of environment, they’ll succeed only if their people are fully engaged, motivated and eager to contribute.
