Workplace Mindfulness & Gartner’s Top 2 2023 HR Trends

By The Mindful Leader Team

As we’re preparing for 2023 at Mindful Leader we’re trying to take a look at trends across HR, business, mindfulness, and mental health. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top two trends in a white paper put out by Gartner, 5 HR Trends and Priorities for 2023, and explore how these trends may affect our work.

“This annual report is derived from the Gartner HR Priorities Survey, which polls chief human resources officers (CHROs) and HR leaders on common challenges and asks them to rank their top priorities for the year ahead. This report is designed to offer HR leadership teams a better understanding of emerging HR trends and insight into what their peers are focusing on in the year ahead to help drive strategy for the HR function. This year, Gartner received responses from more than 800 HR leaders across 60 countries and all major industries. Forty-one percent of participants were CHROs or heads of HR.”
- Gartner

Let’s dive in.  

Drivers

The first section of the report helps to identify the three factors that are driving HR leaders’ 2023 priorities. They can be summarized in three categories: uncertainty, HR leader trade-offs, and new employee expectations. 

 1. Uncertainty

• Economy
• Talent
• Global supply chain

2. HR Leader trade-offs

• Cost Savings vs. Talent Investment
• Business Needs vs. Employee Need

3. New employee expectations 

• Flexibility
• Shared purpose
• Well-being
• Person-first

These are not surprising to our community. The uncertainty is something we have all grown accustomed to with the level of global instability across economic, political, environmental, and social issues. The world is unstable and business leaders who are responsible for forecasting, predicting results, and providing a sense of certainty are challenged. HR leaders are reevaluating the balance between the needs of the business and its people. It is exciting to see well-being, shared purpose, and person-first approaches becoming more and more the norm with what new employees expect. 

Top 2 HR Priorities

What are the priorities? The priorities are ranked by the percentage of HR leaders surveyed who considered it a top priority. They are listed in descending order with the percentage included. For each, we provide a summary and how we believe this will impact our field. 

#1 - Leader and Manager Effectiveness (60%)
“24% of HR leaders say their leadership development approach does not prepare leaders for the future of work.”

This comes as no surprise to our community. The exciting shift is that the idea of being a more human-centric leader is becoming the norm, and we know the benefits of mindful leadership in becoming a more human-centric leader. There are many practices to cultivate authenticity and empathy, and increase adaptability.  There may be more opportunities to incorporate mindfulness and compassion practices into leadership development 

Change in leader responsibilities

• Enable safe self-expression at work
• Support teams’ life needs
• Manage tailored flexible workflows

The human-centric leader

• Authentic
• Empathetic
• Adaptive 

#2 - Organizational Design and Change Management (53%)
"45% of HR leaders say their employees are fatigued from all the change."

Burnout, the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and moral injury have all been in the headlines. Engagement is low, as is trust. Now, we are seeing increasing skepticism toward capitalism as people pay more attention to systemic issues. This is all leading organizations to take a harder look at change management and the process by which change is implemented. In the past, this was a top-down approach, but now organizations are learning how to incorporate what is referred to here as “open source change” - essentially a community-based approach in which the employees can co-create and co-implement changes. This is an opportunity for a cultural shift and one that workplace mindfulness can be critical in supporting. 

Change fatigue

• 43% of employees who experience above-average change fatigue intend to stay with their organization, compared with 74% of employees with low levels of fatigue.

Work Friction 

• 74% of employees experience three or more work friction points.
• Hybrid and remote employees are 40% more likely to experience high levels of work friction.

The other trends include: 

#3 Employee Experience (47%)
#4 Recruiting (46%)
#5 Future of Work (42%)

You can read the full report here.

What are your thoughts?