How workplaces will change in 2025
As people leaders across Australia prepare for the holiday break and look ahead to 2025, we're seeing three major trends come together and the most disruptive shifts to the human resources (HR) and workforce management (WFM) industries in a generation.
Compliance
It's been a hot-button issue for some time now, but from January 1, 2025, the game changes for one of multiple industries' major industrial relations (IR) issues: wage theft and underpayment.
Employers will be criminally penalised for intentional underpayments once the new year kicks in, meaning fines of up to three times the value of the underpayments, as well as potential jail time.
Candidly, it's not an issue many employers or even HR teams have had as a top priority, despite the focus on the issue in recent years.
It's a challenge as it involves multiple teams across multiple disciplines - human resources, boards, IT, IR, accounting, and sometimes more. There's a widespread lack of collaboration and leadership on the issue, which is underscored by what we're seeing looking under the hood of some of Australia's largest employers.
The stick approach to underpayment from government will hopefully push companies to move past their inertia and solve this challenge, but doing so will require a lot of work, opening up new communications lines, and building bridges between people, processes, and technologies across the enterprise to ensure people are being correctly paid, and that there's a mechanism in place to measure it.
There are also a number of technology players popping up with compliance point solutions which evidence the need to bring this altogether, but as yet there is no standout.
Productivity
Australia's productivity has been lagging for decades now, as highlighted in a Treasury report which shows Australia has slipped from 1.5 per cent productivity growth over a 30-year span, to 1.2 per cent over 20 years.
Some of the reasons highlighted for the slowdown are reduced dynamism, competitive pressures, and slower technological innovation and diffusion.
The last point is interesting as I'd argue, as a nation that has increased its technology spend from around A$94 billion in 2019 to around A$133 billion in 2024, there should be no shortage of or slowdown in technology innovation.
What is an issue and what we're seeing is a growing disconnect between the technologies being deployed and the people using them, owing to a lack of training, different mindsets and working approaches by knowledge and manual workers, apathy, and a host of other factors that can easily chip away at promised productivity gains.
AI is bringing new hope for tech's ability to solve our productivity woes. Unsure about how to use it but very clear that they should use it, many business, tech and people leaders are looking to deploy AI applications that will help them do more with less.
But if we follow the same pattern we have with technology broadly, we'll have the same issues. AI needs the right systems, data, processes, buy-in, training and - frankly - trust to succeed.
Source: Newcastle Herald: Jarrod McGrath 1.1.25