By keeping up to date with employee engagement trends, the HR team in your organization can develop effective strategies to improve engagement levels. It will ultimately lead to a more productive, engaged, and satisfied workforce. In this article, we highlight eight key employee engagement trends and explain what HR leaders should pay attention to when shaping engagement strategies for the year ahead.
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Trend 1: People Sustainability
Do you offer a sustainable working environment in your organisation? Today, this is no longer a “nice to have” but a prerequisite for attracting and retaining talented employees.
When we talk about sustainability, many organizations focus on environmental initiatives such as recycling, reducing waste, or using resources more responsibly. But sustainability must also apply to people. People sustainability means recognising that employees bring their whole lives to work and that their time, energy, and well-being are shared with family, community, and society.
To stay ahead of employee engagement trends, HR must actively work to ensure people sustainability across the organization. This requires commitment from both leadership and management and a shared responsibility for creating a work environment where employees feel respected, listened to, and supported, not only in their roles at work, but also in their ability to function and thrive outside it.
Read this article to learn more about ensuring sustainability among your employees.
Trend 2: Internal Mobility & Talent Flow
Do you have a sustainable working environment in your organization? Today, this has become a basic expectation for employees and an important factor when attracting new talent.
When we talk about sustainability, many organizations think first about environmental initiatives such as reducing waste or reusing materials. But sustainability also applies to how we treat people. People sustainability means recognising that employees are not an unlimited resource. They bring time, energy, and commitment from their lives outside work, from family, interests, and society, and those resources need to be respected.
For HR teams that want to strengthen employee engagement, working with people sustainability is essential. It requires commitment from both leaders and the organization as a whole. A sustainable working environment is created when employees feel listened to, taken seriously, and supported in balancing their work with life outside the workplace.
Trend 3: Skills-Based Organisations
Another employee engagement trend we are seeing is that skills are replacing jobs.
A growing number of organizations are beginning to imagine work outside of the job, turning workforce management on its head by increasingly basing work and workforce decisions on skills – not formal job definitions, titles, or degrees.
Companies are moving towards more skills-based organizations.
To face this growing trend, HR can ask themselves: Do we focus enough on upskilling and reskilling our employees? Do we invest enough in helping people learn new skills to keep up with changes like e.g. digital transformation?
Organizations do themselves a favor by always remembering the importance of letting the employees educate themselves and keep learning new skills to do their jobs. It will keep your employees and thereby the organization up-to-date and growing.
Trend 4: Hybrid Work
We are moving towards a hybrid working environment. Or more precisely: We HAVE moved towards a hybrid working environment. However many organizations are still struggling to create the best setup, making sure to combine effectiveness and employees' wants and needs. Therefore, the hybrid working environment is still one of the biggest HR trends of 2024.
The hybrid working environment also comes with concerns. HR must be aware that this recent shift to remote and hybrid work has created a “visibility” concern for many employees. Proximity bias describes how people in positions of power tend to treat employees who are physically closer to them more favorably and stems from the antiquated assumption that those who work remotely are less productive than those who work from the office.
It is important for HR and the top management to be aware of this concern, and to create a working environment and culture with a best practice for hybrid work. Because this setup is here to stay, and the employees get attracted to organizations that excel at this. In 2023 and the coming years, more and more organizations will embrace hybrid work and learn how to master this setup.
Trend 5: Mental Well-Being
Employees come to work as whole people. What happens outside work affects energy, focus, and performance, even when it is beyond the organization’s direct control.
Mental well-being is therefore a central leadership issue. High workloads, unclear priorities, and constant pressure increase the risk of stress and burnout, and employees are more likely to leave when work consistently disrupts their ability to recover and maintain balance.
Managers play a key role in preventing this. Setting realistic expectations, prioritizing clearly, and noticing early warning signs all contribute to a working environment where people can perform well over time.
To support managers in this role, organizations need insight into where pressure is building. Employee engagement surveys can help identify concrete issues and guide focused action where it matters most.
Trend 6: Cross-Organisational Collaboration
Since COVID-19, organisations have had to rethink how collaboration works, particularly in hybrid settings. Some employees prefer more time together at the office, while others value flexibility. The challenge for managers is to make collaboration work across teams without creating distance, silos, or friction.
Cross-organizational collaboration remains important because it directly affects how teams perform:
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Drives better solutions: When people with different skills and perspectives work together, problems are solved more effectively.
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Strengthens communication: Collaboration across teams improves understanding of priorities and reduces friction between departments.
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Improves efficiency: Clear collaboration helps avoid duplicated work and makes processes smoother.
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Supports engagement: Employees are more motivated when they see how their work contributes to shared goals beyond their own team.
Managers play a key role in making collaboration work by setting clear expectations, aligning goals across teams, and actively supporting collaboration in both hybrid and on-site settings.
Organizations with clear communication lines and where the immediate managers can translate the overall goal and strategy to the lowest operational levels are better at cross-collaboration than units where goals and strategy are blurred. When optimizing cross-collaboration or hybrid working, there is no room for leaders not to be fully aligned with the senior management and top management. These non-loyal leaders are often solid representatives of attitudes and behaviors that ensure a silo mindset in their organization.
Trend 7: The Role of Middle Managers
As organizations have become more complex and diverse, middle managers are more essential in ensuring that different teams work together effectively.
To test yourself on this trend, you can ask yourself: Do leaders in my organization have the skills to work and lead cross-functionally instead of obstructing cross-organizational collaboration?
Organizations must invest in developing the skills of their middle managers to ensure that they can effectively facilitate cross-functional collaboration. This can include providing training and development programs, mentoring, and coaching, and ensuring that middle managers have the resources and support they need to be effective leaders within the organization. By doing so, organizations can leverage the expertise and talents of all team members and drive better outcomes for the organization.
The following are examples of current challenges that are often crucial to face for leaders today:
- Human leadership
- Translating senior management communication about strategy and direction to daily work-life
- Hybrid working and securing culture and avoiding proximity bias.
- Limiting turnover securing continuous learning and supporting employees to achieve their career aspirations.
- Reduce collaborative overload and avoid burnout and stress
- Onboarding new generations (Gen Z)
Trend 8: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Working with diversity, equity, and inclusion is a complex matter. However, the benefits for humans and organizations are undisputable. DE&I is a necessity. Because without DE&I, you create teams of people who think too similarly and end up not making the best decisions in the organization.
In too many organizations, it is still a challenge to work actively toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. We often see that bias in recruitment prevents organizations from having greater diversity - bias is and remains an obstacle to diversity and more bias-conscious recruitment is therefore an important step to take. But more diverse recruitment isn’t enough on its own. It must be supplemented by continuous training of curiosity on the perspectives and attitudes of others, so that our fixed assumptions are challenged, and our decision-making basis is improved.
In the same way that the sustainability area has become an expected matter to employees, a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda has also become a must-have for organizations. Employees are to a greater extent expecting boards and organizations to focus on continually developing this area.
Watch our on-demand webinar about how to work with diversity, equity, and inclusion and get:
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The basics of what DE&I is and why matters.
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How data can help to set DE&I targets and priorities.
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How to get started with DE&I without overcomplicating it.
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What a year 1 DE&I roadmap could look like.
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How IKEA is creating pride and impact, taking diversity beyond gender balance and enabling inclusive leadership.
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