Worklife wrap-up 2025

London Inc. Worklife: A look back at some of the workplace trends that shaped 2025

Click here to view this article in the London Inc. Worklife newsletter

AI comes for dinner — and stays
AI models leapt to new levels of prowess while businesses scrambled to harness (and hype) the technology in every way imaginable

LOOKING BACK AT 2025, there’s really no arguing this was the year where the rollout of AI tech dominated the conversation around professional work, personal productivity and labour in a way that we haven’t really seen since maybe the rise of the internet in the 1990s.

In short, AI was everywhere this year for the professional world. A KPMG Canada survey released towards the end of the year found that 2025 was the year where adoption tipped into majority territory, with 51 per cent of Canadian employees responding that they were using generative AI tools at work, while a separate International Workplace Group survey found that 75 per cent had at least experimented with AI tools in their day-to-day life.

As ubiquitous as it’s become, though, its actual trackable impact has been harder to pin down. Studies from organizations like MIT have questioned how much profitability is being realized on the AI craze, and that same KPMG survey found that only two per cent of Canadian businesses are seeing actual ROI on their AI investments. But the positive spin on it might be that looking purely at ROI might miss the forest for the trees, and that AI’s real positive impact comes on the individual level.

One of the more interesting angles on this came in September, when we wrote about a finding from ReadAI, which suggested that workers who had integrated AI tools as assistants into their workflow were hitting the ground running on Monday mornings, and were less stressed on Sundays. While companies might be fumbling around trying to figure out how to make AI work, individual employees have been figuring it out for themselves, as a productivity tool and something that adapts to their specific needs.

That has left gaps, though. While AI usage is growing more ubiquitous, companies looked a bit flat-footed this year, not entirely sure how to take advantage of this dynamic. “Employees were using AI in their personal lives and were often ahead of their companies,” said KPMG’s Megan Jones. “But now, employers are catching up and need to more broadly engage their workforce to drive adoption.”

Tarriff turmoil
2025 will be remembered as the year everything changed for Canada-U.S. relations

ON THE HOME front, elbows were up, hands were wringing nervously and the maple leaf was everywhere this year, as the arrival of the Donald Trump presidency led to a prolonged trade war between Canada and the U.S. that, as we ready to ring in 2026, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.

In Canada, the effect was felt almost everywhere, from groceries and manufacturing to the white-collar sector. For SMEs and startups, it turned 2025 into a year where the priority for many was survival. An October survey from Merchant Growth found that “74 per cent of Canadian small business owners surveyed say they are feeling the pressures on their business,” and that for the business owners, 87 per cent said “they’ve made personal sacrifices to keep their businesses running smoothly.”

For the white-collar workforce, it amounted to a challenging year. Many employers re-evaluated hiring and workforce plans, while some were forced into layoffs or hiring freezes. Early in the year, forty per cent of employees feared they would lose their job because of the tariff war. And many of those fears persist. “The biggest problems Canadians face are the unpredictability of the current situation, and the uncertainty about when or how this period of unpredictability will end,” wrote John Weekes in Policy Magazine last week.

But Canada did persist, and that shouldn’t be left out of the story here. While our economy took a hit — especially the manufacturing sector — it didn’t take the nosedive some expected. Canadians rallied around the flag to a great degree, and it helped keep our economy rolling, if a bit hobbled at times.

“Surveys show that Canadians are voting with their wallets and trying to support domestically produced items,” said Jason Kirby, Matt Lundy and Mark Rendell in The Globe and Mail. Our tourism dollars are increasingly being spent here at home, and OpenTable data found that people were splashing some of that money on local restaurants.

“But there are limits to this moment of consumer nationalism,” warned Kirby, Lundy and Rendell, noting that a Bank of Canada survey found that “three-quarters of respondents weren’t willing to spend more than an additional 10 per cent on a Canadian-made product.”

The job market turns to hell
People are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired

DO YOU HAVE anyone in your life who has been on the job market this year? If you ask them how it’s been going, do they smile and tell you how great things are — or do they stare off into the distance, as if suddenly struck by some immense trauma?

If we had to sum up what the job market was like in 2025 in just one word, you would have to travel far down the list before you found something that was appropriate to publish in this newsletter. Let’s just go with: “broken.”

Just a couple weeks ago, we reported on a finding from Greenhouse, which said each job posted now gets 242 resumes on average, leaving each one with just a 0.4 per cent chance of leading to a job. (“About as close to useless as you can get,” is how we summarized it.)

The volume of résumés was just one part of the story. There is an AI arms race taking place in the hiring market, with no signs of halting any time soon. “AI has paradoxically worsened ghosting, despite promises of efficiency,” reads a blog post from The Interview Guys. “Thirty-eight per cent of jobseekers now mass apply using AI tools, flooding employers with applications while reducing application quality.”

Recruiters are overwhelmed by applications, while desperate candidates are turning to ever-more fanciful tricks — from whitefonting to using ChatGPT to outright lying — just to try to land a job.

Nobody has been hit harder by this new reality than those at the entry level rung of the ladder. “Breaking into the workforce in 2025 is harder than it’s been in years,” wrote Mirna Daouk. “Applications going nowhere. No response, or worse, the silent ‘no.’ Entry-level roles that require three years of experience. Vague feedback, if any. You’re not imagining it — there’s a real breakdown happening.”

But this is not a story of surplus talent, either. The biggest of 2025’s broken job market isn’t just that so many people struggled to land a job, but that employers said they were struggling more than ever to find the right people. “More than three in four employers across Canada report difficulty finding the skilled talent they need in 2025,” said a survey from the Manpower Group, which noted that “this figure has doubled since 2015.”

So, in short, the no-hire, no-fire job market persists. “Slow hiring, rather than job losses, is the likely cause of the current slow burn,”  said a November study from the Hiring Lab and Indeed. “The hiring rate was not above pre-pandemic levels in any of the 21 industries tracked by Statistics Canada, and layoff rates were higher than pre-pandemic norms in only four.”

Things gets loud
Instead of quietly detaching from work, resentment has hit a high for many employees — and they’re not exactly hiding it

WHEN WE FIRST launched this newsletter, ‘quiet quitting’ was all the rage. Employers were flummoxed and dismayed as they tried to understand why employees were just hitting bare minimums. Quiet quitting struck a chord within the workforce, particularly among younger employees, and it led to a couple years where everything was done quietly — ‘quiet thriving’, ‘quiet firing’ and ‘quiet promotions’ among them.

In 2025, we saw many of those trends from the last couple of years come to a head. The dynamics that created quiet quitting in 2022 lead in two directions by 2025: ‘quiet cracking’ and ‘loud quitting’.

The former, quiet cracking, dominated workplace headlines over the summer. “Unlike quiet quitting, which was framed as a conscious choice or act of resistance, quiet cracking captures the experience of employees who feel stuck in their jobs but can’t leave,” wrote Forbes’ Rahkim Sabree. Research from TalentLMS found that 54 per cent of employees are “experiencing some level of quiet cracking,” and suggested “the economic impact is staggering: disengaged employees are costing the global economy $438 billion annually in lost productivity.”

But by the end of 2025, none of this was on the down-low. The quitting was no longer quiet — it became ‘loud quitting’.

“Workers are so frustrated with toxic workplaces that they’re ditching jobs without any warning or resignation letter — or rather, revenge quitting,” stated a report from Fortune magazine. According to job platform Monster, around 47 per cent of employees said they had done this, and in 2025, many gave it more thought.

“Four per cent of full-time employees are planning to revenge quit this year, with most having given the idea some thought for the past 13 months,” said a post from Bob Marshall of FlowchainSensei. “When people are willing to quit loudly even in the teeth of a recession, it signals that workplace dysfunction has reached truly unbearable levels.”

How these workforce trends evolve in 2026 will be one to watch, though. With many economists suggesting the new norm is a low-hiring, low-firing situation — something we talked about when we covered ‘job hugging’ back in August — all that loud quitting may become quiet again, as people hold onto their jobs, spooked by the rise of forever layoffs towards the end of the year.

“It’s a message to employers: evolve or lose your best talent,” said senior consultant at SHL, Marais Bester. “Organizations that cling to outdated models of work, fail to embrace flexibility or overlook the voices of their workforce are the ones that will suffer the most.”

On that cheery note, we’ll see you in 2026! Kieran Delamont