There will be a rebalancing in workforce realities as “years of disruption have propelled employers and employees into distinctly different worlds of priorities, pressures, and prospects,” according to the EY 2023 Work Reimagined Survey.
According to Fast Company, the three key findings of the survey are the following:
• Thirty-four percent of employees are likely to quit in the next year: Specifically, 38 percent of Gen Z and 37 percent of millennials say they want to leave. These employees point pay as their top concern, while employers rank it as third, behind attracting new talent and retaining existing talent. In addition, 61 percent of companies say they are under profit pressure while only 47 percent of employees agree.
• Work from home is still contentious, as 47 percent of companies want employees in the office at least two or three days a week, but half of employees said they only want to come in once a week, and 34 percent would like to be fully remote.
• While 49 percent of employees expect to use artificial intelligence (AI) at their jobs in the next month, 84 percent of employers expect AI to be a staple. However, only 22 percent of employers and 17 percent of employees consider training in AI to be a priority.
The survey also found that 57 percent of employers believe a more challenging economic climate will reduce employee likelihood to seek new jobs, compared to 47 percent of employees. And pay continues to be the primary concern for employees, but most employees (80 percent) and employers (79 percent) agreed that there is a need for moderate to extensive changes to total rewards programs.
Among knowledge workers, both employers (47 percent) and employees (37 percent) showed the greatest preference for two or three days of remote work per week. Given a choice, half of employees would prefer no more than one day in the office per week, and 34 percent would like to be fully remote. Just a fifth of employers prefer fully remote work for knowledge workers.
“Cyclical and structural pressures have revealed stark and persistent differences between employer and employee priorities,” the report’s authors wrote. “Navigating the way forward will rely on leaders seeing this Great Rebalance as an opportunity to re-energize their workforce strategy to be technologically evolved yet inherently people-centric, agile and resilient.”
EY conducted its fourth installment of the Work Reimagined Survey between June and August 2023 in order to better understand the continued changes in new ways of working around flexibility, talent retention and turnover, and the balance of power between employers and employees. The anonymous online survey was conducted by a third-party vendor, of 17,050 employees and 1,575 employers across 25 different sectors and over 20 geographies covering the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and EMEIA (Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa).