Plenty of companies like Amazon, Walmart and Dell, are asking their employees to come back to in-office work, which in return are making employees panicked and upset. With employee pushback occurring, I don’t think all companies will budge on RTO mandates. However, I do think companies and their employees will find a middle ground with hybrid work, whether that’s three days a week or a couple days a month.

Caregiving & child care

As a result of Dell’s return-to-office mandates, working parents began to panic. "The biggest thing I saw from just being in the office that day was parents freaking out," one Dell employee said to Business Insider. "It's one thing to already have child care set up and already having to pay that crazy amount, but having a weekend to figure it out," he said.

A new survey reveals parents missed 21 days of work over the last year due to child care and caregiving challenges. What’s more is 79% of respondents from that same survey said that child care is essential for them to work. Family caregivers are also struggling in the workplace. According to a survey from ComPsych, more than 1 in 10 leaves of absence are taken to care for a family member which takes a large mental toll on the caregiver.

Parents and caregivers are looking to their employers to help fill in some gaps to take off the stress of being a working parent. Because of the harsh realities of caregiving and child care, I think employers will listen to their employees’ struggles and become more flexible with their employees in terms of PTO and hybrid working schedules as well as broadening their child care and/or caregiving benefits packages.

Diversity, equity & inclusion rollbacks?

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action programs in colleges and universities. Many thought this decision would ripple into more than just schools, but workplaces and social aspects as well. Their prediction was not far off. Many companies cut down their DEI initiatives in 2024, including Boeing, Ford, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson.

In the month of January alone, Meta, Amazon, and McDonald’s all say they are rolling back their DEI initiates. Further, on Jan. 20th, President Trump ended all federal DEI programs which were considered “radical and wasteful”. While some companies are doubling down on their programs, like Costco, Apple, and Microsoft, I think there will most likely be more big companies rolling their programs back.

However, companies like McDonald’s are not necessarily rolling back their initiatives, but giving those initiatives more of a rebrand. The company sent out a memo to franchise owners saying they will introduce a new “‘Golden Rule’ - treating everyone with dignity, fairness and respect, always”. The note also said they are “evolving how we refer to our diversity team, which will now be the Global Inclusion Team. This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.”

While we don’t know what the year will bring, I think it will be full of surprises. I’m excited to see if these trends will be more apparent by the end of the year or if my predictions will be left in the dust. More importantly, I’m excited to see where HR and employers will go in the coming year.