The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference is the most prolific annual forum for research and data-driven practical recommendations emerging from the scientific study of work. Each year, presenters collectively share between 800 and 1000 sessions, comprising panel discussions, posters, symposia, debates, and alternative formats such as lightning-paced Ignite-style presentations. Industrial-organizational psychology is one of the economy's fastest-growing professions, and the conference itself has grown rapidly to over 5,500 attendees for the 2018 event.

The longevity and consistent topic framework for the SIOP conference lends itself extremely well to a structured view of how workplace science has changed over time, and projections for how it's likely to change further into the future. As a session is submitted to be reviewed for each year's program, the submitter classifies it into one of 34 topic areas. In this article, I use these topics to present a series of visualizations on important trends from 2008 through 2018: 11 full years of conferences. For each set of topics categorized by their shared pattern (for example, fastest-increasing, top-ranked, newcomer topics), I include a data visualization (see the note at the bottom of the article for more information about the dataviz approach used) and briefly review the topic trend displayed. I welcome all comments and ideas to further analyze, interpret, and extrapolate future-of-work implications building on the data shown here!

All Workplace Topics

The first visualization shows all 34 workplace topics, ranked by their proportion within each year's sessions. While certainly colorful as a summary view, this graph makes it very difficult to discern how topics cluster together in their year-to-year patterns. To better do so, I selectively highlight topic sets in the sections below. Moving on!

Fastest-Increasing Workplace Topics

The three topics highlighted in blue - inclusion/diversity, OHP (occupational health psychology)/stress/aging, and research methods - increased most over the 11-year period. (Rate of change is calculated based on the strongest positive year-proportion correlations across the time span). These increases are driven by surging and broadening interest in all forms of diversity at work - among them racial, gender, age, and sexual orientation, a deeper awareness of safety and stress factors impacting worker productivity paired with an aging workforce, and a massively accelerated emphasis on the analytics and data science techniques (in recent years including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing) captured within the research methods topic category. As evidence for the business advantages of diversity accumulate, as the role of safety orientation is seen as both the profitable AND right way to act, and as artificial intelligence in all its forms continues to draw investment and scrutiny across the enterprise, these topics show clear signs of continued increases into future years.

Fastest-Decreasing Workplace Topics

The three topics highlighted in orange - testing/assessment, global/cross-cultural, and organizational justice - decreased most over the 11-year period (strongest negative year-proportion correlations). Employee testing and assessment remains a top 3 topic for workplace science, but its decline from a perennial top 1 or 2 topic to 3rd or 4th in 2017 and 2018 leads to a negative trend overall. Some of this decline may be due to the major role of technology in testing/assessment (and as a result, sessions that would have otherwise been listed as testing/assessment being listed now as technology instead).

Global and cross-cultural presentations have sagged much more so, possibly due to a shift from US corporate-controlled to locally-optimized talent management practices - resulting in a decline in research using globally-uniform datasets. Alternatively, global perspectives may be so integral to modern talent management that many of the key research and practice aspects may have already been mined and exhausted (I particularly welcome other ideas on possible causes underlying this surprising trend!).

Organizational justice - how workers perceive fairness in the workplace - has in its original form largely fallen out of favor among workplace researchers. Though fairness itself remains a high-interest topic, this work is often integrated within the discussions of other topics, such as staffing, performance appraisal, and more recently, workplace technology. Simultaneously, corporate vernacular seems to have moved beyond discussions of "justice" - this may be an opportunity to reframe organizational justice concepts under the banner of algorithmic bias, digital privacy, and other more contemporary terms, to bolster the relevance of work in this area to pressing business challenges.

"Newcomer" Workplace Topics

Though the clear majority of SIOP topics (32 out of 34) have remained the same across all 11 years of data summarized here, two new topics were added beginning in 2015: technology and pro-social. The technology topic includes presentations heavily focused on gamification, social media, simulations, and other workplace uses of technological tools and systems. The pro-social topic includes presentations about humanitarian work psychology, corporate social responsibility, and sustainable development in the workplace. These topics are notable not only because they are new, but also because of the rapidity with which they've secured prominence among all presentation topics: technology, on average, is the 13th ranked topic. Along with my colleague Tiffany Poeppelman, we've discussed the rising role of technology as a topic for SIOP conference research and practice in two in-depth articles: in April 2017 and July 2017. Pro-social, though a less common topic overall, trended up rapidly between 2017 and 2018. The novelty and fast-paced advancement of knowledge on these topics makes the SIOP conference a particularly valuable and timely source of evidence-based guidance for how to effectively and fairly incorporate technology into the workplace, and for addressing worker concerns and demands that their employers be good actors from social, political, community, and environmental standpoints.

Top-Ranked Workplace Topics

Three workplace topics have, on average, drawn the heaviest attention across the entire 11-year span: leadership, inclusion/diversity, and testing/assessment. As noted above, the rank of inclusion/diversity presentations has increased slightly while the rank of testing/assessment presentations has decreased slightly in the past several years. However, leadership's prominence as a top 1 or 2 topic has never wavered: each year between 60 and 90 separate SIOP presentations explore all aspects of the role of leadership in the modern workplace. The continued business challenges faced by leaders and conceptual advancements in the study of leadership itself have ensured that it remains an extremely high-interest topic. I see no signs that any of these three top topics will notably fade from the conference, though as noted above, safety/stress/aging topics are approaching the same degree of consistent focus. The yearly SIOP conference is likely to remain a vital forum for leading-edge knowledge about leadership development and growth, active management and leveraging of diverse worker perspectives, and hiring practices utilizing objective, accurate, bias-free, and efficient testing and assessment tools.

Bottom-Ranked Workplace Topics

Paralleling the top-ranked topics at the other end of the scale are the three topics drawing the least attention on average across the years: consulting practices/ethics, legal issues/employment law, and human factors. One likely reason for two of these topics appearing so low on the list is that related work is limited to largely practitioner presenters (consulting practices/ethics and legal issues/employment law). Though ethical and legal pressures remain high for talent management practitioners, the narrowness of these topics renders them near the bottom of the ranked list overall.

Human factors - the study of how workers interact physically and psychologically with their work environments - is certainly a topic with high applicability for workplace science in general. However, if research and practice on worker-environment intersections is oriented toward the technological aspects of these mutually-influential systems (as it has been in the past few years), these sessions are more likely to be classified under the "technology" topic. Nonetheless, for workplace scientists to adequately prepare for and guide employees and companies through the well-underway period of consequential technology disruption, they should take steps to better draw on and contribute to relevant human factors research. Ideally, this should include enhanced partnerships with fellow researchers and practitioners in related disciplines. In this context, the low ranking of human factors is concerning as an apparent knowledge gap.

Most-Consistent Workplace Topics

The three topics with the most consistent interest over the 11 years - groups/teams, work/family, and human factors/ergonomics - are those that have an on-average flat trend line across the time span (even more so than topics such as leadership which are near the top overall but nonetheless show fluctuations keeping them out of the most-consistent group). Human factors is discussed above; groups/teams and work/family have been long-term focus topics for workplace scientists. Companies comprise workgroups of many forms - departments, project teams, and in recent years, agile/matrixed teams - and the ever-changing landscape of team functioning at work has created sustained study for these issues. Abundant SIOP presentations each year delve deeply into this topic.

Similarly, workers have long needed to strike a balance between their work and family lives, yet they continue to struggle in doing so, often due to pressures placed on them by their companies. The workplace scientists whose work is featured at SIOP have year after year advanced their research of this topic to provide evidence-based guidance for achieving benefits such as turnover reduction as a result of work-life programs.

Other Notable Workplace Topics

A final group of topics is best characterized as "other" due to no one upward, downward, highest, lowest, or most consistent trendline accurately representing them. Strategic HR/utility sessions discuss the role of HR in attaining a strategic reputation within their companies, and proving their value to business partners. This topic has oscillated both upward and downward over the years in any particular 2-3 year period, as too has HR's own standing. It's likely that research and practice guidance for HR - as shown by focus in the SIOP conference - will similarly cycle as a lag indicator of the latest round of pressure placed on HR to rethink and reinvent itself.

Training has one of the most unique trendlines of any topic, increasing into the early 2010s, then declining almost interrupted since (it is the orange line decreasing slightly from 2013 to 2014 and then decreasing steeply from 2014 to 2015). In contrast to the waning scientific focus on this topic, worker training as a company investment does appear to be increasing. It's unclear why these trends are out of sync: one possibility may be that apart from technology-infused learning (which in this analysis would likely be covered in the technology topic), few new training developments workplace scientists deem worthy of intense study have emerged in recent years. Regardless of the cause, this topic may represent a blind spot whereas companies are seeking guidance in line with their investments, but workplace scientists are failing to provide it.

Organizational culture and climate is decreasing overall as a topic, other than a spike from 2012 to 2013 (followed next by a drop back to the same level in 2014). Culture continues to be a very high-intensity topic in major business publications such as Harvard Business Review. Yet, workplace science's contributions appear to be fading here too. However, if culture is being further defined at SIOP as it relates to diversity, technology, leadership, and other topics that ARE intense areas of study, this may be a gap that's more artificial than true.

Gaps and Opportunities for Workplace Science

My intention for this article was to review and visualize data from the annual SIOP conference as a potentially rich source of information about workplace trends: topics rising, falling, new, and stable. I also sought to call out gaps in the research and practice base generated by industrial-organizational psychologists as a leading source - again, potentially - of high-caliber workplace science.

The work exhibited at the SIOP conference, when well-aligned with key issues, can and will continue to meaningfully advance positive workplace outcomes: for employees in the form of engagement and satisfaction, and for companies in the form of productivity, stronger customer service ratings, and revenue growth. Although largely this impact appears very probable to the degree that SIOP conference presenters can build visibility of their work to key HR and other business constituents, many opportunities for improved connectivity, multidisciplinary partnerships, and influence remain for topics with conference trends that are directionally inconsistent with business forces.

Drawing on SIOP for Future of Work Trend Spotting...and Acting

Each year, nearly 1000 distinct sessions are presented at the SIOP annual conference. Not only do these sessions cover the workplace topics listed above; they also encompass the other topics listed (albeit not highlighted) in the visualizations above: coaching for leadership development, innovation, engagement, personality, and organizational change only a few among them. To aid business professionals seeking to draw on the data-driven, practical recommendations shared at the annual conference, SIOP makes its yearly programs fully searchable and printable; authors of individual sessions can also be contacted for the presented material. As an organization, SIOP also summarizes much of the collective output of its workplace scientists on its website, in its newsletter, and via its Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. SIOP also publishes a yearly list of Top 10 Workplace Trends, including many of the topics identified above, along with newer ones just beginning to emerge (and likely to garner attention at future years' conferences!).

NOTE: To display the trends in this article, I used the "bump chart" visualization technique in which lines for different groups are ordered vertically based on their ranked values. For more information on bump charts, see Ken Flerlage's excellent article on the topic, the bump charts entry at datavizproject, and the RAWGraphs guide to creating them within that open-source program. Contact me if you'd like access to the Excel worksheet I used to create the graphs presented in this article (containing a matrix of counts and proportions for sessions by content area and year).