As we reach the end of the year, it’s natural to look at the coming year and wonder what current trends will continue, which will cease to exist, and what other changes are waiting on the horizon. Although many sectors of the economy have seen drastic changes this year, the workplace in particular has gone on quite the ride, and those changes don’t show any signs of letting up. So today, let’s explore some recent workplace trends that are sure to persist well into 2026.
Serial layoffs
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, started the year by announcing it would be laying off 5% of its workforce by targeting “low performers.” Then, in April, the company laid off employees in its Reality Labs division. More layoffs came twice in October, and then just last month Meta announced that it may “unwind metaverse initiatives with layoffs.” And that’s all just in 2025. Layoff announcements at Meta have become the norm in the past few years, and they aren’t the only company normalizing serial layoffs.
In a recent survey, “78% of HR leaders say their company has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs in the past year,” often due to budget cuts, financial instability, changing business priorities, or disruptions to the market, such as the development and incorporation of artificial intelligence.
The repeated explanation for these layoffs is that leadership is creating a more stable company for the long term. Despite this, many of those laid-off positions are often hired right back. The same survey found that 34% of companies rehired one-quarter to one-half of roles within a year. An additional 48% of companies surveyed rehired up to a quarter of the roles they previously laid off. As the survey noted, “rehiring so soon after layoffs suggests not a return to stability, but a misalignment between quick fixes and lasting solutions.”
Repeated rounds of layoffs are bad for employee morale and a company’s reputation. Employees who remain may disconnect themselves from the workplace or resign from their roles entirely to transfer to a job that affords them more stability. Prospective employees may also be less interested in applying for roles at a company that has had a series of layoffs in its recent history.
The latest issue with remote work
Remote work conversations have been essentially nonstop since the pandemic began in 2020, but each year we see new iterations of why remote work is either good or bad for employees. The most recent discussion is on how remote work may be hurting young employees the most.
A new research study found that “younger workers suffered career-wise by working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement.” It also found that remote work may contribute to higher unemployment in this age demographic. However, younger workers aren’t necessarily to blame for this shift. In fact, a recent Gallup poll found that Gen Z workers are the least likely to prefer a job that is exclusively remote, and instead prefer hybrid arrangements.
It is possible that companies’ hiring trends are contributing to this dilemma. Notably, the researchers found that “about two-thirds of the increase in unemployment for recent college graduates in the years after the pandemic can be explained by employers being less interested in hiring younger workers into remote or hybrid roles,… figur[ing] those young people will not get the proper training.”
Even though some companies have used the development of younger workers as an excuse to install return-to-office mandates, returning to the office isn’t a fix in itself, as some employees have found. As one 29-year-old told the New York Times, “When I go to the office I sit at my desk with headphones on, on Teams calls. I gain nothing.”
