May 2025 sees Tap’d Solutions start to celebrate its ten year anniversary. We started Tap’d back in May 2015 in a world mainly recovered from the financial crisis of 2008 and staring into the prospect of a vote in the UK on whether to stay in the EU. The amount of change that has happened in the last 10 years has been immense. This has led to the biggest decade of impact on the workplace in living memory. To kick off our 10 year anniversary activity we thought we would have a brief look back at how the workplace has changed and what are some of the key current challenges when looking to the future.
Changes to the workplace
When reflecting on the changes to the workplace in the last 10 years the most obvious one is the rapid adoption of hybrid and dispersed working activities, accelerated by the pandemic. Yes, some organisations, primarily global ones, had already started to adopt virtual workforces but this became the norm from 2020 onwards for those forms of work that were primarily knowledge-based and some service sectors. This led to line managers having to “dial up” their emotional intelligence, communication and teaming skills. Those who didn’t are often being left with disengaged and apathetic team members with eroding mental health. The Gallup “State of the Global Workplace” report for 2025 shows declining engagement scores, especially in Europe. More worryingly, is that this is now appearing in line management scores as well as teams. Low engagement = low productivity.
The pandemic has also left a scar in the workplace around mental health. The workplace is now seeing more visible mental health and wellbeing issues. HR teams are reporting a shift in need from employees to share work and personal mental health issues. Dispersed working arrangements have blurred the “work, non-work” boundaries to their thinnest levels with leakage of stressors and anxieties in both directions across the boundaries. A dilution of close-knit in-person team cultures has meant that help is expected to come from line managers and organisations more and team mates less.
Workplace technology has been a winner in the turbulent last 10 years with advancements in communication and collaboration technologies keeping pace with the dispersal of teams. Connection to home working is also being fuelled by fibre roll out to most homes in UK/Europe, and mobile working is now more possible with 5G hotspot capabilities. The downside of this has been the loss of the “work from home day” where you could sometimes work away from the office to “get your head down” and resolve a lot of thinking tasks. This time is now being invaded by technology and non-stop meetings. Work seems to be “always on” for a growing significant proportion of the workforce compared to 10 years ago with its associated risks.
The worker mindset
In the 2010s there was a continued push on diversity in the workplace and this was expanded out into inclusion activity, and further into belonging, as evidence grew that attaching intrinsic motivations to organisations and enabling people to be the best version of themselves in work was a great way to further engage people and release their capability and performance. In recent years, however this has had a consequence on many workers expecting more from their psychological contracts from employers. “I am bringing my real self to work so how are you going to satisfy my individual needs in return.” This has resulted in the maintenance of engagement as an ever more complex challenge. For some line managers this can be a source of overwhelm as they struggle to adapt to this while delivering ever more demands on themselves and their teams from the organisation. HR functions can no longer provide “sheep-dip” policies as part of their Employee Value Proposition. We need to be smarter as employers, listen better and give line managers the freedom to engage at a local level.
A great example of this has been the simple looking but actually complex issue of hybrid working: the proportions between the physical office and working remotely. Even considering such things as rising commuting costs, the visceral arguments that have been emerging when blanket xx% in the office announcements have been made have been large distractions for organisations, busy fighting for survival, in recent years. Individuality is here to stay in our workplace cultures. How we best deal with it is still emerging. Finding the sweet spot and engaging individual workers into cohesive teams is a key “holy grail” for organisational success.
The future of the workplace?
The immediate future for the workplace is one of market volatility and technological advancement. Change and transformation activity is going to stay a key activity as organisations try to stay relevant with the rewriting of global trade and the rapid pace of tech deployment into mainstream work.
As I write this in May 2025 it seems that knowledge-based work is being turned upside-down by generative AI advancing by the week into our workplaces. Organisations are rushing to understand the impact of this as employees are using external GPTs to assist them while waiting for many organisations to adapt to this changing world. Anxiety is brewing with many employees who may see their roles at risk if they perceive that they have a substantive proportion of admin in their roles. Organisations need to not only think about the tech they will adopt but also how to take their employees along on the journey with them.
An issue that concerns me is the impending shift in work intensity that will come with generative AI augmenting into job roles. We already have wellbeing issues in the workplace (I was at The Watercooler event in London recently with a hall full of wellbeing solution suppliers). If we remove the rudimentary part of the job (the bit where you get a bit of “headspace”) and replace this with higher order and more complex tasks then the level of job intensity is going to increase. How are we preparing for this downturn in wellbeing and upturn in overwhelm and burnout in our people?
Other tech advancements are silently sneaking up on us as well. 3D printing is a maturing technology. There will be an inflexion point in the near future where parts and objects will no longer need humans in manufacturing. AI is also enabling the shift from human-technology job augmentation into full automation. Examples of this include dark warehouses where no humans are needed for end-to-end processes like distribution, and impending driverless taxi technology. Some job functions will quickly diminish into history.
Which leads into another future consideration. With the rapid changes in work comes expiring and new job roles. What are the skills we need to train for the future? Even though we might not know the job role titles yet, we know that such areas of critical thinking, creativity, sophisticated emotional intelligence and customer service skills can at present still not be replicated effectively by AI. We need to be rapidly supporting our people make the “step up” in their skills to keep our workforces relevant, just like we did in every previous industrial revolution. However, if we can do this proactively we can save a lot of time, effort, anxiety and money in these transitions.
The Tap’d response to the last 10 years and the future of work
Like all organisations, we have evolved at Tap’d Solutions to keep pace with the changes in the workplace. We pride ourselves in trying to stay in front of the curve in many areas. We have gone from being an in-person organisation to having a mindset of “digital first” in our engagements with our customers. However, through our research in understanding human behaviour in the workplace, we also know that some aspects of learning and growth still need real-time interaction. We call this synchronous and asynchronous learning – not based on format but based on whether the learning is delivered “live” or offline through individual or small-group team-based interactions.
With the pace of change in the world we continuously are looking externally and adapting to our customer needs. We suggest flows of work with our customers, yet configuration and bespoke proposals are now the norm as we collaborate and learn from each customers individual circumstances.
We understand that we have to bring the latest thinking to our clients and be best in class to bring the value our customers need. This is why our associates are continuously learning, both formally and through tacit knowledge growth. We share some of this with our Tap’d Reports and Tap’d Talks HR podcast which celebrates its one-hundredth episode this month.
In summary, the last 10 years has seen employees demand more from employers, global events radically change the external environments and the time horizons of organisations, and the internal work structures of organisations radically alter with hybrid working and technology advancements.
This intensity of change in the workplace is only going to accelerate. We are ready and excited about the future at Tap’d. Are you?
(If any of the above topics are provoking thought, then please do reach out to us and we can share more of our take on these hot topics).
