Each year that we participate in the Future of Work Canada conference in Toronto, it provides an opportunity to take the temperature on the state of the workplace and trends influencing it beyond our own clients. As I reflected in last year’s roundup, each year’s gathering, speakers and topics represent unique ingredients that together build a “soup” that is a moment-in-time representation of those trends and influences (aka “ingredients”).
Unsurprisingly, 2026 brings its own flavour, distinct from previous years. One built less on certainty and more on questions like:
- What does the future look like when the “now” is so much more unpredictable, complex and fast-moving?
- What skills do I need to develop to adapt my role and career to this increasingly complex world?
- What does my organization – and our leaders – need to do to navigate successfully?
To characterize the sentiment for 2026, I would argue that complexity and capability emerge as the distinct flavour for navigating the future of work in this unpredictable time.
Themes from a 2026 perspective on the future of work
Turning macro-economic trends into strategic imperatives
The conference kicked off with a brilliant keynote speaker, Economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, Armine Yalnizyan. Her unique background in both human resources and economics grounded the conference in a data-driven reality. She framed our current polycrisis as a perfect storm of disruption: trade and economic uncertainty, rapid technological change, aging and rapidly shifting immigration demographics combined with historical underinvestment in infrastructure. She used data to shatter the “surplus” mindset of the past several decades and anchor new realities facing Canadian workplaces.
She introduced a term that will forever stay with me: “slowth,” a term that describes the slow economic growth facing our current and future generations. But, while the data looked grim, she did leave us with a sense of hope that can help our organizations anticipate and respond to these trends in highly impactful ways:
- Caring for our employees is good business: “The care economy may become our biggest driver of future economic growth.” This can include offering flexibility for caring for reproductive health, aging or growing families; or providing care or benefits that allow employees to continue working while compensating for the realities of their care commitments and gaps in our underperforming public system. This type of care will impact the number one determination of organizational success in the coming decades: retention.
- Making retention your #1 focus: Paying attention to the employees you have, getting ahead of well-being, burnout, mental, financial and physical health, especially women’s health, will impact your organization’s productivity and offset continuity risks. It will provide stability amongst the myriad external factors that can’t be controlled and will minimize the need to recruit and hire amid the scarcity of available employees in the future.
Understanding and proactively defining culture
Culture rose to the surface of conversations in a way that felt different in 2026. Speakers and attendees expressed a more nuanced perspective about culture, acknowledging its critical importance as the operating system that bridges strategy to drive organizational performance. I observed a more distributed and partnership-based approach to culture, perhaps evidence of culture emerging from the “HR initiative” world to becoming a strategic lever that requires buy-in not just with leaders but at all levels of the organization.
The discussion focused on intentionally shifting culture by starting with understanding employees’ beliefs and behaviours and how they impact how work gets done rather than just focusing on observable issues or behaviours like trust or accountability. Methods such as surveys and data were balanced (overshadowed, in fact!) by more empathetic approaches to conversation “hosting,” sensemaking and listening sessions that create the conditions for sharing experiences that expose culture realities. I heard encouraging stories where organizations leaned into developing mid-level managers’ sensemaking role; their listening and dialogue skills paired with action resulted in tangible improvements in culture.
At Habanero, we’ve long recognized the connection between these deeper level, below-the-surface drivers and organizational performance (see our “Building an awesome culture” overview video), but it was encouraging to see the ideas adopted more widely. I see this as a good marker of increased culture maturity and expect to see more organizations dive deeply into understanding and defining culture to improve performance.
Improving complexity fitness with leaders
Leadership is an ever-present FOW topic; however, this year conversations were deeply influenced by the complexity our leaders and managers face. Complex problems are different from complicated problems; each demands a very different skillset from leaders.
Complicated problems can usually be solved with the help of a domain expert who evaluates potential courses of action and recommends a solution, often based on best practices. Most leaders have risen through their organizations by being confident, capable domain experts who can guide teams through complicated challenges.It’s harder for leaders to use those same analytical, decisive skills to solve complex problems. They can’t lean on what’s been done in the past because the challenges are emergent and non-repeatable. There’s no best practice here. Instead of insights from an all-knowing expert, complex problems often need many points of view and perspectives.
Learning from complexity can also be less clear and linear than what leaders are used to. In complexity, success is in doing, learning and adapting, which isn’t always visible in a clear KPI.
This concept of complex vs. complicated is based on The Cynefin Framework, a well-researched model by Dave Snowden. For attendees, it was a helpful tool for understanding why today’s challenges feel different and why we need different skills for solving different types of problems. Leaders at all levels need skills for managing complexity so they can feel more confident and secure with challenges both now and in the unknown future. They’re being called upon to develop their “complexity fitness” (a term coined by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin). Here are some ways they can get started:
- Be vulnerable by voicing and modeling that it’s ok to not know or to learn from unexpected outcomes.
- Let go of certainty by shifting to a continuous learning approach, a practice of sensing and responding and adapting (which is hard when leaders have been promoted based on a lot of knowing).
- Lean into listening by making space for multiple and representative voices and experiences and learning from differences (rather than making assumptions).
- Develop a more of/less of approach by paying attention to and nurturing the ways of leading and working that they want more of or less of from their teams and employees.
- Avoid mindtraps (another Garvey Berger concept) by paying attention to the ways of thinking that limit our growth and ability to respond to complexity
Honourable mentions:
There were other topics that surfaced on my radar that are worth a 2026 honourable mention, if not a full theme:
- Succession – There’s a cliff coming and many organizations are underprepared for their next generation of talent, knowledge and leadership.
- AI – This was not a dominating topic, unlike previous years, which I think represents that it’s more accepted and embedded in our ways of working, analyzing data, drivers, themes, etc.
- Authenticity – This continues to be craved by employees and leaders; when it’s present, it’s a key driver of performance.
- Flexibility – It's still the gold standard for return-to-office.
- Trust – It’s expressed so many ways, from investment in technology to following through on commitments; however, it is fragile and at risk when there’s a gap between promise and reality.
Wider lens for the future
Attendees view the Future of Work in 2026 from a wider, more elevated perspective than in previous years. They’re considering the broader societal and economic conditions that are affecting each workplace and organization uniquely. The Future of Work isn’t about a single technology or trend. Instead, it demands attention at multiple altitudes and commitment to build new skills that will allow us to adapt to changing, unpredictable and complex forces.
