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The flexibility gap: The silent dealbreaker for blue-collar talent

The conversation about the changing world of work is often dominated by white-collar headlines – hybrid policies, AI adoption, and office redesigns. But there’s another, quieter shift happening: the balance of power between white- and blue-collar workforces. And it’s reshaping what employers must do to attract and keep their most essential people.

In our World of Work Trends Report 2025, we found that 35% of the fastest-growing roles fall outside traditional white-collar categories, while demand for white-collar professionals is declining in many regions. Roles in manufacturing, logistics, and other frontline sectors continue to be in high demand. According to Revelio Labs, job postings for white-collar positions fell by 12.7% between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025 – slightly more than the 11.9% decline in blue-collar postings. And the sharpest drop? Entry-level business and tech roles.

Pay is also telling a new story. While white-collar wage growth has flattened, pay for blue-collar jobs is on the rise. This is a clear signal for leaders: the value of frontline talent is increasing, and old assumptions about what matters to them are out of date.

Why flexibility is the new currency

Blue-collar workers want to feel valued – but many don’t. In our latest research, Top Employers Institute has spoken to 2,200 blue-collar workers to understand what really matters to these employees. We’ve found that only 68% of blue-collar workers say they feel appreciated for their contributions. Historically, pay has been the main bargaining chip. But now, flexibility is emerging as a silent dealbreaker.

For many blue-collar employees, flexibility doesn’t mean working from home – it means more control over schedules, predictable hours, shift-swapping options, or even compressed work weeks. These are the factors that determine whether a role fits into their lives – and whether they stay or go.

As Top Employers’ Organisational Psychologist Emily Cook puts it:

Blue-collar employee experience has long been treated as a second-tier issue. But in a labour market defined by skills scarcity and operational risk, it must now be on the executive agenda.

One strategy won’t fit all

HR strategies designed for office workers rarely land well on the shop floor. In a labour market where more than a third of the fastest-growing jobs are blue-collar, leaders need people strategies that reflect how different groups define a “good job.” That means listening to employees, adapting benefits, and above all, embedding flexibility into workforce design.

The competitive edge

Pay alone won’t secure the talent companies need amongst their blue-collar workforce. Flexibility, recognition, and career opportunities are now part of the same equation. The employers who adapt fastest will be the ones who win in a tightening labour market.

Explore how Top Employers are responding to this shift – and the practical steps they’re taking to redesign blue-collar work for the future.

Rethinking Blue-Collar Employee Experience

Blue-collar employees are the backbone of the global economy, and their output is critical for the success of many organisations. However, their needs and expectations have, too often, been overlooked in HR strategies.

But that is changing

Across industries, blue-collar employees are stepping forward to make their voices heard, demanding fairness, recognition, and a meaningful workplace experience. Organisations that fail to listen risk losing talent and competitive ground in an era defined by skills shortages, retention pressures, and operational risk.

We’re proud to introduce our latest report, Rethinking Blue-Collar Employee Experience. The report draws on data from 2,200 employees across 11 countries and provides an in-depth examination of the needs, challenges, and realities faced by blue-collar workers, offering a roadmap for enhancing the employee experience for this critical workforce.

Download the report to discover:

🔹 Actionable, evidence-based actions HR teams can take to drive belonging, retention, and engagement.

🔹 First-hand insights from blue-collar workers from different generations, industries and regions to understand the real-world challenges and needs of employees.

Key findings:

✅ Connection drives engagement: Blue-collar employees with strong workplace relationships are 51% more likely to be engaged, yet many lack structured opportunities to connect.

✅ Pay matters, but meaning matters too: While only 55% believe their pay reflects their value, employees who feel their work makes a positive impact are 74% more likely to be engaged.

✅ Communication impacts safety: 26% say their workplace safety measures are inadequate, underscoring the link between clear communication and operational resilience.

✅ AI brings anxiety and opportunity: While 73% agree AI is improving their industry, only 61% have received sufficient training, and just 25% say their current job aligns with their long-term goals.

✅ Flexibility is a silent dealbreaker: 64% value flexibility more than financial rewards, yet nearly a third report they have no control over their schedules.

Why it matters:

Blue-collar workers shape more than just operational outcomes. They play a prominent role in influencing your culture, productivity, and organisational success. Investing in their experience is not only the right thing to do. It is critical for your organisation’s success.

Download your copy now:

Unlock actionable insights to build a future-ready blue-collar employee experience that drives productivity, profitability, and sustainable growth. 

Q&A with Michelle Fellows from The Perfume Shop

We caught up with Michelle Fellows, People & Development Director at certified UK Top Employer The Perfume Shop, who shares what makes the organisation a Top Employer, how they retain talent in a competitive industry and the ways AI is being implemented within the HR function.

Introduce yourself and tell us about your organisation

I’m Michelle Fellows , People & Development Director at The Perfume Shop. I’ve worked in the business for 24 years and led the team for the last 20 years.

The Perfume Shop was established 32 years ago and our purpose is simple – to be the UK & Ireland’s number destination for perfume. Our brand values are “We’re Expert, We’re Passionate & We Care”, knowing perfume like the backs of our hands, like no one else on the high street.

With 2,000 employees across the UK & Ireland of which more than 1,500 are based in our stores, we have the best-trained people with expert perfume knowledge ready to showcase their passion for perfume by offering the finest advice.  We stock the widest and newest fragrance range with exclusive brands and best offerings for customers.

We are also proud to be an O+O business (offline + online), with around 1 in 4 of our sales made online via our website. Our Store teams are supported by a Distribution team of 70 people based in our Warehouse in Dunstable and a team of 200 in our Head Office, which we call ‘Scentquarters’, in High Wycombe.

We call ourselves The Perfume People and you can see our Talent, Passion and Spark in everything we do.  We care about our customers, we care about each other and we care about being a sustainable business.

What makes The Perfume Shop a Top Employer?

It’s our approach to our people. Our people have always been at the heart of our business strategy because we recognise that happy people mean happy customers, creating long term loyalty and value for the business.

We take great pride in our positive culture, but we don’t take it for granted.  We continually look to improve by benchmarking ourselves externally, listening to our people and taking action on what we learn.

We were very proud to be accredited as a Top Employer for the first time in 2023.  It’s given us confidence to really shout about our people credentials.  We were delighted to understand the areas where we excel and find out where we could be better.

What is the biggest people challenge your business faces? And what are you doing to meet this challenge?

Retaining our people remains our biggest challenge and it’s the KPI that we’re all focused on in our team. We’ll continue to invest in our pay rates for Stores. We’re an accredited Real Living Wage employer and we’ve seen the difference that this makes in attracting and retaining people.

We’ll continue to focus on career development.  Retail is a brilliant place to create a career and we’re proud to ‘grow our own’.  We’ll continue to offer a wide range of apprenticeships across the business.  We also have a wide range of internal learning programmes that support people to progress to their next role, or develop key skills in the role they have.  We also enable a handful of people to attend prestigious leadership development programmes offered by the BRC, which is the gold standard in our sector.

We’ll continue to listen, learn and respond to the feedback and ideas from our teams.  As a smaller organisation we’re able to be agile and respond quickly to our people when they tell us that we’re getting something right, or wrong!

Tell us about a recent HR initiative you have instigated within your organisation that you are most proud of?

Given the cost of living crisis, I’m really proud of the way we’ve invested in our teams and ensured that they can get more pay in their pockets.  There are 3 key ways we’ve responded to the cost of living crisis:

Living Wage – as a real Living Wage employer we can demonstrate our commitment to our employees and that we want to pay our people a wage that enables them to meet their every day needs.

Incentive pay – Across October, November and December we offer everyone the opportunity to earn extra in commission, including our 800 temporary Sales Assistants who join us to support with Christmas Trading.  In 2023 we paid an additional £250 (on average) to every Sales Advisor across the business.  It’s our way of ensuring that we retain our teams at a critical time of year for the business, and enables us to recognise and reward their hard work.  We also have bonus schemes for Store Management, our Head Office teams and Warehouse management.

Financial wellbeing focus – We’ve launched Wagestream across the UK business. Wagestream is a service that allows employees to access a portion of their earned wages (streaming) before payday, helping them manage those unexpected bills.  Wagestream helps employees to manage their finances more effectively, provides financial education and enables them to create saving pots.

How is AI helping you – or challenging you in terms of your people practices?

AI is an area I’m personally hugely excited about. It provides a brilliant opportunity to help us become more efficient in the way we do things and the way in which we support the needs of our people across The Perfume Shop.

We’ve already created bots which automate the administrative parts of our recruitment and onboarding processes.  We’ve recently launched a chat bot to provide policy advice.  Automating the routine tasks makes sense, it enables the team to spend more time doing the things that AI can’t, like partnering, coaching and advising, adding value to the business.

But AI also poses some challenges for us.  We need to ensure that our people are equipped and ready for the changes that AI brings. We need to reskill and upskill our workforce, foster a culture of learning and innovation, and provide support and guidance. We also need to ensure that our people feel valued and engaged, and that they have a sense of purpose and meaning in their work.  We’ll need to ensure that AI develops in a way that is ethical, transparent and fair.

We’ll need to balance the human and the machine aspects of our people practice. We need to leverage the strengths of both AI and human intelligence, and find the optimal combination for each task and situation.  We also need to preserve the human touch and connection that make our brand unique and appealing.

Which wellbeing offerings in your business are proving the most popular with employees? And which are proving the most effective in terms of their impact?

We’re really delighted with the response to Wagestream. To date since launch we have 36% enrolment across the business, with 2563 streams and 162 saving pots created.  We considered carefully whether it was right thing to do as we were concerned that giving people access to a portion of their pay early would create more financial hardship, but the data and insights from Wagestream showed us that the opposite was true and when people can access their pay when they need it, it reduces their use of pay day lenders, credit cards or other forms of high interest debt.

Have you any new DEI initiatives you can tell us about that help you tap into fresh sources of talent?

In the last 12 months we’ve done a lot to ensure we support women across their working lives.  86% of our employees at The Perfume Shop are women so it was important that we responded to their feedback.

This year we’ve reviewed our maternity pay offering and implemented enhanced pay for Store Managers, Deputy Managers and Head Office employees.  Eligible employees will now receive full pay for the first 13 weeks, followed by 50% pay for a further 13 weeks.  This is a significant investment, but protects people from worrying about their finances at an important time for them and their family.  It’s early days in terms of understanding the impact, but it’s proved popular with people who are already on leave, or about to go on leave and will help us attract and retain people who are thinking about starting a family.

Every year we appoint a number of Sustainability Champions from across the business.  They help us drive our Sustainability agenda across the People, Product and Planet pillars with fresh eyes and fresh ideas.  They developed a Period Positivity policy which sets out our approach to periods.  We want to provide an open and supportive environment where people who have periods feel comfortable, they can discuss periods if needed, and have access to period products in an emergency.

We have also developed a Menopause policy which was formed by holding a series of listening groups with women in Perimenopause or Menopause, so we could understand what they needed, because fostering a culture of openness surrounding menopause is important here.  We want all employees to feel able to talk about menopause and be aware of the symptoms. For those experiencing menopause we want to provide information and support to be their best selves during this stage of life.

Around International Women’s Day in January we took the opportunity to really celebrate women here at The Perfume Shop, featuring women across the business across a wide range of career stages and seniority.  We’re very proud to have a female Managing Director and a Leadership team which is 78% female.

Inspiring women to understand that we care about them, that we want to support them and offer brilliant careers is a key part of our retention strategy.

What’s next? Tell us about a new project that you’re most excited about?

2024 will be the year where we begin to harness AI, so working across the business and getting everyone thinking about the opportunities for them personally will be my mission!

Get in touch to discover more about the Top Employers Certification Programme and how it can help your organisation grow as an employer of choice.

QA with Rebecca Jackson from Pfizer

Best practice ethical AI: Our Top Employers in action

Our new whitepaper Ethical AI in the world of work: A framework for success explores the key role of ethical AI in the workplace. It emphasises HR’s vital role in its implementation and includes our ethical AI framework, which must always rest on three pillars:

• AI decisions should be human-centric.
• Considerations must be evidence-backed.
• A long-term lens should be applied to its use, benefits and costs.

The whitepaper shows how Top Employer organisations from around the world are already harnessing AI’s potential effectively with impressive results.

To download the whitepaper, click here.

Human-centric

Accenture Poland, for example, has used AI to help promote employee connection and engagement. Through their initiative ‘Change @ Work,’ they developed an AI tool called ‘Remesh,’ which allows for real-time input from their 250 employees. Its human-centric approach demonstrates how AI can increase a sense of community and improve employee satisfaction.

The South African Breweries demonstrates ethical AI through a collaborative approach between a diverse team of stakeholders and different perspectives when assessing, implementing and managing AI tools.

Evidence-backed

Airbus has embraced AI as a key strategic partner in their organisation. Since 2023, new AI tools suggested by employees are carefully assessed by a Trustworthy AI Steering Committee to ensure they are implemented responsibly. This shows why it’s essential to have transparent AI and for key stakeholders and HR professionals to be involved from the beginning.

JTI Switzerland introduced an AI-powered HR assistant called ‘Ayumi’ in early 2024. Before launching it across the organisation, though, their HR team piloted the tool and used it in their daily tasks. This early testing meant they could collect feedback and develop relevant training materials for colleagues.

Virtusa Corporation committed to an 18-month long HR digital transformation by integrating all their HR processes into one platform to drive the improve employee experience. It has shown how AI can successfully create a smoother and more supportive environment for employees by making sure technology suits both theirs and the organisation’s needs.

Long Term Lens

The impact of AI on Verisure’s UK people practices and DEI efforts has been extremely positive. The business noticed the pitfalls of using gendered language in job adverts that could stop women from applying. To address this bias, it began using AI to improve the hiring process and promote equal opportunities for all candidates.

Our view

Our Top Employers report ‘Ethical AI in the world of work: A framework for success,’ demonstrates how AI can drive business success while respecting employees and contributing to the wider society. The practical examples explored show that with thoughtful and careful implementation, all businesses are capable of harnessing AI’s potential to create more collaborative, inclusive and transparent workplaces.

To download the whitepaper, click here.

Ethical AI in the world of work: A framework for success

The use of AI in the world of work is full of both opportunities and challenges.

It has been one of the critical drivers of change in 2024 – and its impact will be just as substantial in 2025. Organisations that harness the benefits of AI will enjoy faster product innovation, agile business models, increased profitability and improved customer experience. However, its introduction is also bringing many challenges, the most obvious of which is the impact on the workforce, with some jobs becoming obsolete and fears on an adverse impact on career paths.

The question that many business leaders are asking themselves is: How can AI be leveraged to drive business success in a way that is respectful to employees and responsible to society overall? And how can it help the future workforce realise its career potential?

This whitepaper therefore looks how to adopt an ethical approach to AI to drive business success, considers HR’s role in bringing this alive and introduces our Top Employers Institute Framework for its successful implementation.

Want to explore the research? Download it now for free! Just fill in the form for instant access to this exciting research!

Our Ethical AI Framework is built on three pillars.

• AI decisions should be human-centric. This means that the needs of individual employees are considered alongside the business opportunities that new technologies provide.
• AI must be evidence-backed. There needs to be a clear visibility on the way AI tools function, given the rapid evolution of technology.
• Use a long-term lens. The use, benefits, and costs of AI should be evaluated with a long-term perspective, acknowledging that their full impact, including unforeseen consequences, may only become apparent over time.

In this whitepaper, we will not only outline what it means to leverage AI ethically, but also provide some examples of Top Employer organisations that are already applying these values. These include Accenture Poland, The South African Breweries, Airbus, JTI Switzerland and Virtusa Corporation.

Discover all the insights by downloading the report via our form.