AH091 - Trends Shaping the Workplace: 2026 Forecast, with Dan Schawbel

Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.‍

Justin Venneri: [00:22] Hello and thank you for listening to another episode of the Astonishing Healthcare Podcast. This is Justin Venneri, your host and senior director of communications at Judi Health, and I'm excited to have Dan Schawbel in the studio with me today. Dan is very prevalent and present on LinkedIn. He's got the Workplace Intelligence Weekly Newsletter that has about 400,000 subscribers and just a general focus on health and wellbeing and employee benefits and trends impacting businesses that goes beyond pharmacy. So this year's Forecast for 2026, The 10 Trends Businesses Need to Focus On report, was something we were pretty excited to sponsor. So Dan, thanks for joining me in the studio and thanks for all the work you do to highlight all that benefits teams out there are doing for their employees.

Dan Schawbel: [01:07] Thanks so much for having me, Justin. I appreciate it.

Justin Venneri: [01:10] So start us off. Tell us a bit about your background and Workplace Intelligence. How'd you find yourself in this role, how long you've been doing it?

Dan Schawbel: [01:17] Oh, gosh, I've been on this journey for many, many years. Kind of an overachiever in high school and college. And then I worked for a big company called EMC Corporation when I graduated. And during that time on nights and weekends, I was really early into blogging and social media and eventually wrote my first book called Me 2.0, which focused on Gen Y and Millennials entering the workforce. And it really elevated me and put me as more of a generational workplace expert.

My first company was called Millennial Branding, of course, and then I eventually transitioned to what we have now as Workplace Intelligence because I saw Millennials and now Gen Z transforming the world of work. I was examining their needs, preferences, strengths, weaknesses. And now since they're the majority of the workforce, I really focus on overall workplace trends backed by data.

And our mission is we're a research and thought leadership agency focused on the world of work. And we partner with Judy Health as well as Deloitte, Amazon, and various other companies to deliver data-backed research studies and fresh content that is relevant and interesting to both HR executives and benefit leaders as well as CEOs, truthfully. And I get to lead the big ideas and the research, identifying the major shifts that are happening, sometimes before anyone else is even thinking about them. But not only identifying those shifts, but kind of unique angles and real-world strategies that connect them.

Justin Venneri: [02:49] We live in the world of health benefits, pharmacy benefits, primarily expanding into health benefits. And I find it interesting because we do always try to respect how busy the professionals are that are on the buying committee on the other end of the phone, so to speak. And this report, I think was really great in that you identified 10 trends that are particularly important going into 2026. And I'd love to talk a little bit about those. It's, you know, 'Top 10 Workplace Trends for 2026.' Were these in any particular order? I mean, it's amazing how much employers' benefits teams are responsible for. What would you highlight first?

Dan Schawbel: [03:28] Yeah, I've been doing this report since 2012 and it's always been the top 10 trends. Why? It's because 10's a cool number and because there's a lot of factors and influences that take shape within a given year, and thinking about forecasting into the upcoming year. And while it's not in order in terms of most important to least important, it's more about foundational impact and immediacy.

For instance, trend one and two are more structural. We go over the economic shift, for instance, from white-collar to blue-collar jobs, which I think is a massive economic shift. And then also widespread hiring freezes. Like you can't talk about this market, whether it's benefits, recruiting, employee experience, any of these topics, without examining the overall employment market. A lot of hiring freezes, a lot of layoffs right now as we speak. So these are all driven by macroeconomic conditions, AI, politics, social structures, things that are happening.

And then after trend one and two, we get more into the technology disruption and of course where our healthcare fits in, the employee wellbeing and management pressures that have been occurring. And then finally the cultural tension points. I think everything is intertwined. That's how I look at it. These are all kind of pieces of a larger puzzle.

But you're right about benefits teams. They are the front lines of every issue we cover. And when we look at trend number four, which is the rising healthcare costs, as you know, this affects everyone, not just employers, but employees, basically every human being in this country. And the benefits team is tasked with controlling a 7% annual cost surge while simultaneously figuring out how to cover GLP-1 drugs and manage mental health support. This is happening as we speak, and that's what makes this industry so interesting. The scope of HR and benefits today is no longer transactional. It's holistic and central to an entire business strategy.

Justin Venneri: [06:01] On that note, I think it's a good transition. I was going to ask about something that's been rapidly evolving and on top of everybody's mind, and it comes up in almost every conversation: AI. Trend three is that AI is widening the skills gap and reshaping learning. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you found there that folks need to pay attention to for 2026 as it relates to AI?

Dan Schawbel: [06:22] AI is still the biggest topic. It touches everything, it touches all jobs, especially we found, entry-level jobs. AI is eliminating entry-level jobs and it's actually pushing more young people to pursue careers in the trades because a lot of these white-collar jobs don't exist anymore. What's really fascinating is I remember many years ago there was such a push to getting people to focus on STEM careers, for instance, being a programmer. But then the CEO of Nvidia said those jobs aren't going to exist. And if you actually look at a graph of the amount of those jobs, it's diminished to almost nothing now. It's because of AI.

The skills gap—AI is widening the skills gap and employees feel unprepared. There are such marching orders from executives that say, "Use AI, use AI," but there's no training. So people are just kind of trying to figure it out on their own. And so I think what you're going to see more and more next year especially is more strategy around this, more training because of the necessity of AI adoption within organizations. These AI skills are going to evolve too. It's hard to define what the future of AI skills is going to be because AI is taking over some of these skills that we thought were important years ago that are not as relevant now.

Justin Venneri: [08:02] And then one other thing that I picked up on that I thought was interesting, it's kind of a wake of the pandemic thing, work from home. And that came up in your forecast. Tell me a little bit about that and what you see in the future for kind of hybrid or work from home strategies for employers.

Dan Schawbel: [08:16] The narrative around remote work and hybrid work and work from home, everything has fundamentally changed. It used to be the 'Great Resignation' when employees had the leverage, and now in 2026 with all these layoffs and hiring freezes, employers have the leverage. Employers have paid a lot of money for these long-term office leases. There's a huge push by the largest employers to get people back in the office more and more often. So most employers now are saying three to four days a week. You're not going to see as many remote or fully remote jobs being posted anymore because they want people back in the office. And employees pretty much have to because for every one job posting, there's three available candidates. So there's a lot more pressure to go into the office just to maintain your job.

Now, the other thing I would say that connects to trend seven, where working mothers have it tough, because they relied on the flexibility that they got during COVID where they could work remotely. Now if they're being forced back to the office, a lot of women are having to leave their jobs in mass despite their gains during COVID. So it's really undermining the efforts towards gender diversity in the workplace and leadership pipelines concerning women.

Justin Venneri: [09:43] You obviously alluded to healthcare already, and we're a healthcare tech company trying to provide solutions that make sense. What's one thing in the data that you saw or in the report that you saw that you think employers could focus on healthcare-wise, for a key takeaway for next year?

Dan Schawbel: [10:00] I think the big takeaway is that healthcare costs become a primary driver of employee turnover and job change. The need for a good healthcare package has never been greater, especially with the rising costs, because these higher deductibles and premiums are just really hurting employees. I've actually always said this: healthcare coverage is not only the most valuable part of an employee benefits package, but it's such an important aspect of an employee-employer value proposition. So if you don't have good healthcare coverage... you know, I don't have healthcare coverage. I'm married to someone who has good healthcare coverage. So I really appreciate it when someone brings that to the table.

But employees are obviously very dissatisfied and they're looking for a comprehensive, affordable healthcare plan. And it's a very powerful recruiting and retention tool. It's interesting, sometimes more than a salary bump, truthfully. Because it is sort of a salary. If your healthcare is $3,000 cheaper, relative to getting a $2,000 salary bump, you'd rather have the healthcare discount.

Justin Venneri: [11:02] It's an interesting quandary because you see the rising costs creating this unsustainable trend and the need to attract and retain talent on the other side. And I think that balancing act has become increasingly complicated.

Dan Schawbel: [11:14] And it seems like 2026 is going to be the tipping point. I feel like this has been building up for a while. It's not like healthcare costs are decreasing every year. I feel like they're going to be so extreme for next year that it's the tipping point where the system will break or change. Something's going to happen next year. That's my big prediction.

Related Content

• AH072 - The Benefits You Probably Didn't Know You Have, with Marsha Perry
• Replay - Strategic Well-Being: Rethinking Health Benefits to Empower Employees and Drive Impact
• AH086 - Balancing Technology and a Human Touch in Member Service, with Lisa Ellerhorst and Sonia Pettis
• Health Benefits 101: The Importance of a Transparent PBM Model

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Justin Venneri: [11:30] All right, that was a good overview of the forecast report. Thanks. I've got a couple of other questions for you. So I'm curious, when you're doing research or work for a client, like a white paper or something else, how do you know you've got a good story?

Dan Schawbel: [11:44] Well, the first thing we look for is, is there a really good narrative here? It's all about having a good narrative that's data-supported, maybe counterintuitive, and actionable. That's how all of our surveys are; they're very problem-solution oriented. So we have questions that focus more on the problem. In this case, we were just talking about healthcare. A huge problem is healthcare costs. And then obviously from the employer perspective, not just healthcare costs, but recruiting, retention, the typical kind of HR focus areas.

But we're not just another survey. It's all about having something unique to bring to the market. Don't be another survey that says X percentage of employees are adopting AI. Like, that's not going to break through because it's been done so many times. It's about what hasn't been said, and that's where the opportunities are. For instance, I think one of the big topics is this shift from white to blue-collar jobs. I think that to me is so fascinating because a lot of people are going to be laid off from these white-collar jobs. And a lot of these young people are like, "Oh, if I go to trade school, I become more employable if I'm an electrician or a plumber, and it's better job security." That's a huge shift from white to blue like we've never seen before.

The other thing we were talking about is being actionable. You got to be solution-oriented. Okay, thanks for telling us what the problem is, that resonates with me. What do we do about it? Typically, when we work with companies like Judy Health, it would be, "We're the solution," and what we provide is part of that. We take the companies we work with and position them as the solution provider for the problem that we illustrated in that research.

Justin Venneri: [15:18] From everything you just described and how excited you got, I think I know what your favorite thing about the work you do is. But what's the favorite thing about the work you do?

Dan Schawbel: [15:24] I like to probe and see what's happening from a cultural standpoint. And when I say cultural standpoint, I don't mean just reading other studies or articles. That's part of the equation. But I'm talking about from a social media perspective, listening to what people are saying, how people are reacting.

Like I told you the story about how we got the headline in the New York Times about half of CEOs saying some, if not all, of their jobs can be automated by AI. I got that because I posted about the fact that all these executives are saying we're going to eliminate people and automate jobs. And then the reaction from the population was, "Okay, so what does a CEO actually do? Like, why can't we automate their jobs?" So we were already working on an AI study, and I inserted some questions. And we got that big headline. It became the front page of the New York Times. So that's something that gets me really excited.

Justin Venneri: [16:40] I see a lot of opportunity. We use AI for things all the time. And I know we're exploring different things internally that AI can help with, whether it's surfacing information more quickly or streamlining processes. And I think the interesting thing is that as that time frees up, we can in turn reallocate time to higher value things. So I think it's an amazing time to think about the ROI on time. I think that's a really interesting thing that's coming out of all this.

Dan Schawbel: [17:16] And I think that that's really important because I did a study on this, too. What's fascinating and what inspired this study... is basically you have like Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, various CEOs and billionaire business people coming out saying AI is going to reduce the work week. Because AI's promise is it's going to automate all these tasks for you, you're going to have more time to do personal things.

But I questioned that. I was like, "Okay, so you're going to automate. People are going to have less of certain types of work to do. Historically when that happens, are you going to keep adding additional new work or are you going to actually let these people work fewer hours?" And in my opinion, I think it was going to add more work. And so the study found that AI is not going to reduce the work week because executives will just keep adding more work to your workload. And to me, that's awesome. Right? Because you're taking something that's counterintuitive.

Justin Venneri: [18:26] Well, it's funny, we joke internally sometimes about that. At the end of the summer when things slow down, we'll do X, Y, or Z. And then things don't slow down.

Dan Schawbel: [18:35] Well, you're at a fast-growth company.

Justin Venneri: [18:37] I would say over my career, going back to 2001-ish, there's always that, "Okay, when I have a little bit of time, when things slow down a little bit, we'll get this, that, or the other thing done." And it just never seems like it slows down. And every year it seems like it speeds up. And that's across a bunch of different types of companies I've worked for. So it's kind of funny. Dan, thanks for sharing the overview of the forecast report and sharing a little bit about what you do. I always ask everybody, what's the most astonishing thing you've seen or heard? Surprising, interesting, funny, that relates to our discussion today. Tell us a good story to close out the episode that's safe to share.

Dan Schawbel: [19:17] Well, we did one study where we were looking at AI's impact on productivity from both the C-suite and the employee perspective. And what made this really interesting is, of course, there's been a lot of talk on AI and productivity. When people talk about AI, productivity is probably the next word they use because that's the immediate KPI that people are evaluating AI with. And so we looked at it from both perspectives and what we found was 96% of the C-suite expect AI to boost worker productivity. Now, that might not seem interesting because it's almost a hundred percent and it's not surprising.

But when we asked employees the impact of AI on their productivity, 77% of them say that AI has increased their workload. So it's done the exact opposite of what the C-suite would expect. On its own, the 96% is not interesting. But once you add in the 77% of employees stat, that makes it super interesting because now you have a gap between both that is so extremely large that it tells a story of, hey, all this AI adoption is not really actually working and making people's lives more efficient.

Justin Venneri: [20:54] That is interesting. Well, Dan, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. I'm assuming that LinkedIn's the best place you would suggest for people to get in touch with you. Is that correct?

Dan Schawbel: [21:02] That's correct, yeah. LinkedIn.

Justin Venneri: [21:04] All right, well, I'll put a couple links in the show notes to the forecast and to your LinkedIn account. And thank you again for your time and look forward to staying in touch.

Dan Schawbel: [21:11] Thank you.

Additional Resources/Links

• Connect with Dan Schawbel on LinkedIn
• Workplace Intelligence Weekly (Free Newsletter - LinkedIn)
• Join Dan Schawbel and Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX and author of Be Yourself At Work, for an exclusive webinar to look at the Workplace Trends 2026 Forecast: Click Here to Register

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Disclaimer

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed are those of our guests, do not constitute professional advice, and may not represent Judi Health's/Capital Rx's position on any matters discussed. We make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy or completeness of the content; information is subject to change and may not be updated.

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