What election results can teach us about the future of work

Voters turned out in record numbers on an off-year election.

👉️ Ohio voted to protect the right to abortion up to 23 weeks.

👉️ Virginia flipped the House of Delegates.

👉️ Kentucky elected a Democrat as governor in a deep red state.

Gen Z had something to do with it

I called this about a year ago. Gen Z gives a sh*t when it comes to their rights:

They are the most diverse generation by far, and largely mischaracterized by other generations (🙋🏼 Millennial here).

The beauty of Gen Z — they don’t seem to care what we think.

Aside from giving me pure hope for our future, I’m inspired by a group of people who don’t participate in mainstream activities, ie, traditional polls, but still show up when it counts.

They’re called The Activist Generation. They organize. They speak out. They just do it on their own terms.

Some quick facts:

• Since 2020, around 16 million members of Gen Z have turned 18

• Gen Z turns out at a higher rate to vote than Millennials

They will impact workforce dynamics drastically in years to come, and they already are shifting how organizations think about work.

What this says about the future of employee sentiment

💡 TLDR: just because you don’t hear about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue that’s cared about.

Organizations are going to have to get smarter about what their employees care about and find better ways to collect information about it.

Prediction: because of this, surveys are on the way out.

Surveys, similarly to polls, do not provide an accurate representation of employee vibes. They represent a point in time and need to be deployed frequently to track changing sentiment. This means survey results from Q1 will be outdated by the time your initiatives roll out in Q4.

Looking beyond traditional surveys

Qualtric’s 2024 Workplace Trends alludes to organizations using social listening to understand employee sentiment–and that more people are comfortable with this than you’d think.

If they haven’t already, organizations will need to find alternative ways to “listen” to their employees and provide real-time feedback that shows they’re taking action on the results.

While I hate the idea of an organization pulling sentiment about the workplace from online sources, I do think this is the future. Any tool you use for work (Slack, Notion, AI tools even), will be a data source for internal teams to understand how you really feel about your job.

A few companies doing this already:

PeopleLogic uses AI to collect real-time sentiment. In their own words: PeopleLogic leverages existing systems, platforms, and communications to identify people and process improvements while even providing warnings of potential attrition.

The Know is developing a way for internal communications teams to respond to news in a way that reflects what your employees care about. This one is still early, but watch the space.

What other organizations should I be looking at? How are you tracking employee sentiment at your organization?

Note: Transparency is key. Any company using tools for employee listening should have an easy-to-discover policy or statement about it. What tools they are using, why they are using it, how they will use the data. Maybe something the folks at Open Org can open source?