1. Lying to Ourselves will change (for the better).
Two significant changes are coming to Lying to Ourselves this year.
The first is this post! Welcome to the first posts sent out from LyingToOurselves.com. This makes it much easier for you to navigate older posts and should bring more people into the community. Check out the Newsletter page where you can reference older posts, and search by category or tags. And many thanks to the very talented Taylor Veino who put the site together!
The second change is that I’m bringing in more outside experts. Over the past month, I’ve reached out to people with deep experience in hiring or building healthy work cultures to learn from their expertise. I’ll be publishing what I learn here and I’m excited to share it with you all! I can read and synthesize all I want, but it’s still just my perspective.
2. The Great Reshuffle will continue.
This is the safest prediction I can make.
It’s not “The Great Resignation,” people aren’t quitting their jobs to sit around doing nothing, it’s The Great Reshuffle, people are leaving to find something else that better suits their needs, including entrepreneurship.
In 2022 this trend won’t go away.
3. Wage inflation will be rampant, particularly in food service, healthcare, and education
Companies are offering their most significant raises in a decade, and minimum wage increases hit numerous states on Jan 1, but I believe the most wage inflation will happen in service industries and healthcare.
Healthcare staffing is in crisis. Nurses, techs, and doctors are all in short supply, and retirements over the next decade or so won’t help.
If you think healthcare costs are high now, just wait until a stressed-out workforce in one of Baumol’s cost disease industries realizes that they just can’t take it anymore and employers start raising pay just to keep the doors open.
4. The trades will bounce back (maybe not next year, but within the decade)
This is my boldest prediction. Industries that can’t offer flexible work will experience far greater wage inflation than those that do. That includes the trades.
Interest in the skilled trades has been waning for years, but rising wages, reduced supply (the decline in unskilled immigration and retirement of boomers), increased demand for skilled workers, The Great Reshuffle, and the increasing popularity of blue-collar creators will make blue-collar trade work cool again.
5. The debate over Remote/Hybrid Work will stay meaningless
Can we just stop it already with the debate over remote/hybrid/in-person work and which one is “better”? It’s as useless as arguing with the weather. That ship has sailed.
1 in 4 workers would quit if they could no longer work remotely, “surveys suggest that [workers] would like to work from home nearly 50% of the time, up from 5% before the pandemic,”
We’re in the hottest labor market in well over half a century. If you want workers, you will have to adapt.
6. A management subgenre focused on developing trust-based (often remote) leadership skills will explode.
See above. Leaders who embrace remote work are likely the same leaders who will realize that managing remotely is a skill to be sharpened. These organizations will make the necessary investments to develop those skills.
Relatedly, I believe that we will start seeing organizations measuring and rewarding employees who hit performance goals AND build the trust of their teams. In the past, many employers rewarded only performance - but as employee engagement, inclusion, and retention become more important to the bottom line we’ll start to see promotions and bonuses follow suit.
