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Workforce planning and execution post-pandemic has felt like running on a hamster wheel for many HR executives.
“Our talent practices, like how we do performance management and succession hiring, are still built for another era. They’re exhausting for the HR population to distribute, and they take a long time for managers to get up to speed,” says Kate Bravery, a partner and global advisory solutions and insights leader at HR consulting firm Mercer. She’s also the coauthor of Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age, which examines the changed employee-employer relationship.
One of the core challenges HR leaders face is a lack of unity with CEOs on talent priorities. According to data from Mercer’s upcoming 2024 global talent trends report, HR leaders view work-life balance, belonging, and fair pay as most important for employees, while CEOs are prioritizing short-term issues, like combating inflation and flexible work, over long-term strategic planning.
“Our strategic thinking has atrophied so much in the last few years. And it’s really worrying because executives don’t seem to see that they are in this react and respond [mindset], which is really not good for our futures,” says Bravery.
This rat race isn’t just in the C-suite—employees are experiencing a similar phenomenon. Eighty-two percent say they feel at risk of burnout, according to Mercer’s newest global talent trends data, well above pre-pandemic levels (63% in 2020). Workers identified financial strain, exhaustion, and too-heavy workloads as the biggest drivers of their burnout. But, thanks to quiet quitting, these burned-out employees aren’t leaving.
“I actually think the biggest risk at the moment is not the people who are leaving your organization; it’s the people who are staying, who are not engaged, de-energized…and fear they can’t get another job,” says Bravery.
This burnout also affects bigger talent initiatives, such as AI implementation in the workplace. Employees who are quiet quitting or disengaged at work are less likely to feel motivated to learn new skills.
“Just telling people, ‘You need to do this, you need to prioritize more,’ [or] telling HR, ‘You need to optimize more talent and diversity’…clearly, that hasn’t worked. Because the sense of burnout has gone up, not down,” says Bravery. “We have to take a different approach. And I do think that technology is a big part of that new equation, but we need to think intentionally about how we introduce it. Otherwise, we just add to the noise.”
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
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