Start with RTO mandates. The media loves a scary back-to-office headline. From the point of view of clicks, a strict five-day-a-week policy is gold. Even better? If that policy applies to tech dweebs. Full points if it’s a company that once promised to work remotely forever, like X when it was still Twitter.
These headlines gain attention because they play to some readers’ anxieties—and others’ schadenfreude. But the reality is that most firms do hybrid work. Even Elon Musk had to back off his declarations of full RTO at X; shortly after his initial demands, he conceded there’d be exceptions.
He also shuttered some of the company’s offices, meaning that all staff in those locations had to go fully remote.
I expect this duality to ramp up in 2025, with more companies announcing returns to the office even as most quietly shrink office space and retain hybrid arrangements. The bottom line: Badge-in data in the US has been close to flat for the past two years. Among workers whose jobs can be done remotely, hybrid arrangements remain the most common.
On to Generative AI. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene two years ago, we’ve seen endless speculation about what such technology could do and how workers might use it. Or how general artificial intelligence (AGI) might take over the world and destroy us all.
In 2024, 75% of employees used GenAI at work, according to an EY survey; that’s much higher than the 49% who said, in 2023, that they anticipated using it in the months to come.
But if the last two years have been a “bullet train,” for AI, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Parmy Olson wrote recently, we may be heading for a “slowdown at the station.” (By the way, her book on the subject, Supremacy, was just named the FT’s ‘Business Book of the Year.’)
That slowdown could presage the next, more realistic phase in the “hype cycle,” a phrase coined by Gartner to describe technological change. First, a new technology triggers a surge in “inflated expectations,” which is followed by a “trough of disillusionment” as the technology’s limitations become apparent.
Gradually, people figure out how the thing can actually be used, and people’s expectations settle somewhere in between. We may be heading there with text-based generative AI in 2025. But if the new year brings more measured coverage of AI, I expect the opposite is true of DEI.
In the last couple of years, right-wing activists have made a punching bag of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I don’t think President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House is going to convince them to hold their fire.
But the reality is messier than the DEI-doomer headlines suggest. Yes, some very large companies, intimidated by activist shareholders and legal threats, have announced changes to diversity schemes.
But despite the backlash, many companies remain convinced that it is still important to do the core work associated with DEI programmes: recruit from the largest possible talent pool; assess workers accurately and fairly, without implicit bias; and foster an environment free of overt racial prejudice, gender hostility or sexual harassment.
Not least because such discrimination remains illegal and generates a far larger number of lawsuits than any “reverse discrimination” claims.
But given the vibes, look for companies to approach this work differently. Some will simply call it something else—as my colleague Beth Kowitt points out, Walmart had hired a ‘chief belonging officer’ rather than a chief diversity officer long before the company was targeted by anti-diversity activist Robby Starbuck.
Others will integrate data-driven DEI practices into core managerial functions— an approach that could actually yield better results for women and minorities.
For example, rather than demanding every finalist pool contain at least one ‘diverse’ candidate (a backlash-sparking practice that has not resulted in more diverse hiring), HR could insist that managers hire according to clear, objective, consistent criteria—including a concrete definition of “culture fit.”
An insurance company that followed this more rigorous approach ended up hiring 46% more minority applicants, according to scholarship by Joan C. Williams.
We might be done with DEI as an acronym. But the practice, whatever we call it, will evolve to fit a new era.
Evolving is something that we all have to do—but we can’t do it skilfully unless we can cut through the hype. ©Bloomberg
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