PrismHR 40th Anniversary: 3 Workplace Trends From 1985 and Now

Year: 1985 

PrismHR is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025. To commemorate the occasion, we will periodically share stories related to workforce trends over the past four decades. In this blog, we head back to the past to check out 1985.

Let’s journey back to 1985—the earliest days of PrismHR’s predecessor F.W. Davison & Co.—to see what was going on in the world and especially in the world of work then.

Popping in on Pop Culture

In January 1985, 46 of the biggest names in pop music gathered in a studio in California to record the song “We Are the World”; moviegoers flocked to theaters to see Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) send Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back to the past to save his family’s future in “Back to the Future”; and Microsoft Windows 1.01 was released and helped change the game for computer-human interaction by putting a “new face on DOS” and using a Disk Operating System “to do some work,” as PCMag reported at the time.

Speaking of Microsoft, the first version of Excel came out that very same year for the Apple Macintosh. The first Windows release would debut near the end of 1987—and countless people handling HR and payroll-related duties jumped for joy that not everything had to be done via pen and paper anymore. Others, of course, were less adventurous to jump into the world of then-high-tech computing.

Working Hard, Working Efficiently

A help wanted ad in the Santa Cruz (California) Sentinel in August 1985 sought a “clerk” for personnel and payroll for a company with 150 employees. The ad was looking for someone with “training or exp. in payroll processing & employee recordkeeping (hiring, discharge, insurance, profit sharing).”

“Must work well with people,” it said.

Today, many companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), outsource at least some of their HR functions. A recent Deloitte survey found that 57% of organizations outsource their HR. Interestingly enough, Deloitte even defines the “digital workforce” as a combination of human talent and automated processes powered by technology, such as artificial intelligence, and “autonomous software ‘digital workers’ to augment the human abilities, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and innovation while reducing operational costs.”

Without a doubt, HR outsourcers (HROs) must rely on automation to keep up with today’s increasingly complex workforce where speed is essential to ensure clients get the right information at the right time and at the right place to make the best business decisions.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to see how much things have changed …

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1985 At-a-Glance

Item	1985 Cost	1985 Cost, Adjusted   for Inflation	Current Cost
First-Class Stamp	$0.20	$0.59	$0.73
Movie Ticket (Avg.)	$3.55	$10.48	$10.78
Concert Ticket (Avg.)	$15.13	$44.67	$136.45 (Avg./ticket, top 100 tours)
Gas Price (Avg. Per Gallon)	$1.12	$3.31	$3.14 (As of Feb. 25, 2025)
IBM Home PC	$4,395	$12,975	$800-$1,200 (midrange)

Sources: AARP, U.S. Inflation Calculator, U.S. Postal Service, The Numbers, Digital Music News, AAA, ElectronicsHub

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1985 and 2025 

1. Then: A key area of workplace advancement was in its infancy—telecommuting. As The Harvard Business Review wrote that year, “Your Office Is Where You Are.” Today, remote work is ubiquitous, but at the time it was a novel concept. The authors, Philip Stone and Robert Luchetti, wrote:
   
   “Today’s office desk is a node in a communication network. Being ‘away from one’s desk’ often means that a person is not at that moment plugged into the network. But once we abandon the position equals place tradition, we need to consider how people can stay in the network when they are on the move. Telephone call-forwarding and paging systems are examples of attempts to meet this need.”
   
   Now: According to Pew Research, about a third (35%) of today’s workers perform their duties from home all the time, down from 55% in October 2020 during the pandemic. Call-forwarding and pagers are mostly obsolete, of course, as most people carry more processing power in their front or back pocket in the form of a mobile phone than what was available to workers in 1985. And automation today vs. in 1985 is literally night and day when it comes HR tech from payroll to workforce management—and especially when it comes to reporting.   

2. Then: The 401(k) retirement plan was introduced in 1978 when Congress enacted Internal Revenue Code Section 401(k)—thus the name—under the Revenue of Act of 1978. In 1985, there were 30,000 401(k) plans vs. 170,000 defined benefit plans (pensions). Today, there are 715,000 401(k) plans with $8.9 trillion in assets vs. 304 state-administered funds and 4,632 locally administered pension plans with about $5.5 trillion in assets. Some of those plans date all the way back to the 19th century by the way. Still, there’s quite a difference in the sheer number of 401(k)s today vs. available pensions.  
    
   The Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Herald wrote in 1985 about an interesting trend in the workforce—early retirement. As the paper proclaimed, “With many companies offering early retirement incentives and employees often seeking more time to enjoy their leisure years, America’s workforce has gradually decreased in age since World War II.” 
    
   Now: The number of workers who are working past 65 is growing. In fact, according to one study, 33% more people were staying in the workforce past 65 in 2024 compared with 2015. Part of the reason could be that U.S. workers believe they are behind in their retirement savings. A poll from last year found more than half of American workers (57%) said they were behind on saving for retirement. The good news is almost two-thirds (63%) of those surveyed said they were contributing more or about the same to their retirement savings in 2024 compared with 2023. Being able to offer your clients the most robust retirement opportunities can help them recruit and retain the best talent while helping their worksite employees enjoy their golden years.

3. Then: It might feel like computer viruses have been with us as long as we can remember—and they kind of have. In fact, the posthumously published Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata by John Von Neumann was published all the way back in 1966. The theory became the foundation for the development of computer viruses. Just five years later, the Creeper worm was created, which was designed as a program that could move between different computers. And by 1982, believe it or not, a teenager created what is known as the Elk Cloner virus as a practical joke. Once someone inserted a floppy disk into an Apple computer with the Elk Cloner on it, the program would automatically clone itself on that disk. By 1985, the government was certainly paying attention to computer security. In September 1985, the Computer Security Research and Training Act of 1985 was introduced at a House subcommittee.
   
   Milton Socolar, a special assistant to the comptroller general in the Government Accountability Office,  said at the time, “We have long been interested in ensuring the security of automated information systems, and during the past decade have issued over 40 reports related to information system security. As stated in the bill, information stored in government computers and transmitted over connecting networks is vulnerable to unauthorized access and disclosure, fraudulent manipulation and disruption.”
   
   Now: The number of computer viruses is hard to determine, but according to Statista there were over 6 billion malware attacks in 2023 alone costing companies almost $5 million on average per breach, and its predicted that the total cost of malware to companies, governments, people and so forth will hit a staggering total of $10 trillion worldwide this year.

As an HRO, you know how important cybersecurity is to your clients and their worksite employees. That’s why it’s essential to choose an HR software provider that offers state-of-the-art System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2) compliance as well as data monitoring and encryption and multifactor authentication, etc. Keeping your data and your clients’ data secure is imperative in today’s workplace, especially since identity theft numbers continue to rise. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission logged over a million identity theft reports costing consumers more that $10 billion.

The workplace is changing faster than ever before with no signs of slowing down.

The only way to keep up is through automation and innovation—something PrismHR has focused on since Day One. In our next installment, we’ll focus on 1995 the year Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film debuted, and a graphical user interface software called Windows 95 offered a start button, task bar, recycle bin and desktop shortcuts.

Don’t worry, we’ll have our grunge shirts and khakis ready.

Learn more about recent PrismHR innovations.