The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is pleased to announce its seventh annual Top 10 Workplace Trends list. Based on member surveys, these are the issues that will have the most impact on the workplace in 2020. 

For the first time, there is a tie between two of the topics; at #9 on the list – “Virtual working spaces” and ”Meaning and purposeful work.” Newly trending topics include workforce health and well-being, and meaning and purposeful work. The entries in SIOP’s Top 10 list are broad, complex issues posing difficult challenges to the business world and modern society, so it’s no surprise that many other trends have appeared on previous lists. 

Industrial-organizational psychologists study workplace issues of critical relevance to business, including talent management, coaching, assessment, selection, training, organizational development, performance, and work–life balance. I-O psychologists can help all kinds of organizations, including for-profit, nonprofit and government, grappling with these issues find solutions that are right for their organizations and their staff.

To create this list, SIOP asked its members for their predictions based on their expertise as well as interactions with clients and colleagues. After the responses were compiled, members selected the top 10 issues organizations are likely to face in 2020. Nearly 1,000 members responded, and here’s what they had to say:

Diversity matters. Diverse viewpoints and diverse backgrounds are important to successfully solving complex challenges. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “The quality, vigor, and innovation of the U.S. science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) enterprise depend on increasing the diversity of individuals, research teams, and leadership in STEMM fields.”

But the report, “The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM,” issued at the end of a 22-month study says, “Talent is equally distributed across all sociocultural groups; access and opportunity are not. This is particularly true in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) professions¹ that are expected to grow as a percent of the total workforce in the coming decades. The underrepresentation of marginalized groups in STEMM contexts is pervasive.”

Three SIOP members, Christiane Spitzmueller, professor of Industrial Organizational Psychology at the University of Houston, Tammy Allen, distinguished university professor of Psychology at University of South Florida, and Lillian T. Eby, professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia made significant research and theoretical contributions to the report. Dr. Allen and Dr. Spitzmueller served on the Committee on Effective Mentoring in STEMM. Dr. Eby presented at one of the committee workshops. Find a prepress version of the report online here.

The report argues that effective mentoring is a “significant component of the complex solutions required” to comprehensively address the underrepresentation of major segments of the population in STEMM fields.

Getting I-O into Intro Textbooks (GIT SIOP) is a task force commissioned by SIOP President Talya Bauer, and its goal is to help raise awareness of the field of I-O by (just as the name implies) getting more Introduction to Psychology textbooks to include I-O material.  Among the many ways we have been working on our goal, we recently created short promotional videos explaining what is SIOP and industrial and organizational psychology.  Specifically, these videos feature SIOP members talking all about I-O: what it is, what they do, and what can be done with it.  You can check out the videos here:

When it comes to workplace legal issues, not much changes as quickly as the topic of “gig” workers these days. Teaching the next generation of business and industrial-organizational leaders about the subject requires being as nimble in the classroom as businesses must be to keep up with new regulations.

Alice Brawley Newlin, Ph.D., wants to make sure tomorrow’s leaders understand the implications of the gig economy. So, she created the senior capstone class “The Gig Economy” that she has been teaching since 2018 at Gettysburg College as part of the Organization and Management Studies major.