Navigating Radical Uncertainty
Rethinking company culture to get stronger in the storm
America is having an identity crisis, and it’s now influencing everything, everywhere, all at once.
When writing lately about workplace culture, I’ve been more likely to encounter people sharing more pain than promise; more uncertainty than resilience, more disconnection and division than re-invention.
Earlier this month, it was a Chicago school teacher, angry that her young Black students are facing the same levels of injustice she did as a teenager. Last week, it was the director of a large foundation, sharing an internal survey revealing a wide gap between the values and viewpoints, emotions and mindsets of his organization’s executives and staff employees. Last fall, it was a former CEO expressing rage at a dinner party in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, when asked to defend his new take on democracy.
While this national identity crisis might look different to each of us, its cause is the same: a perfect storm of rising economic inequality, historic levels of political division and daily, if not hourly, examples of how our fragile democracy is getting closer to veering off the rails. In this global election year, when half the world will be going to the polls with autocracy on the ballot—this perfect storm is now advancing more rapidly into the workplace, with mostly negative results.
The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, a globally deployed survey of 32,000 respondents across 28 countries, says business is now the only sector perceived by the general population to be competent and ethical. But here’s the caveat: the Edelman survey also reveals in its U.S. index what it calls “a new paradox at the heart of society—a collision of trust, innovation and politics” that’s making it far more difficult for some companies to push forward. Only 20% of respondents said they’d be willing to have someone who disagreed with them as a coworker. And workers of all generations said they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the culture of their organization and feel less connected to its mission than they did before the pandemic reshaped the workforce. In the Edelman survey, 82% of all respondents said business needs to work harder to let workers express their concerns and “let us ask questions” to build trust. Additionally, 62% of respondents said they now expect CEOs to manage some of the changes occurring in society—not just those occurring in their businesses.
Lindsay Kaplan, the cofounder of Chief, a large private network of senior executive women representing more than 10,000 companies, says many of its members fear how the politically and socially divisive election season might negatively influence the work they have underway “to effectively motivate, reset and influence new cultural values” among remote and hybrid employees. Futurist Wayne Pan, a director of research at The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, says companies need to “focus hard on some of the impacts of human disconnection to start building community structures more resilient to change.” Dana Elmquist, the CEO of Intempio, a worker engagement consultancy, puts it more succinctly. “The pandemic finally broke what had been a broken work culture, and organizations are just beginning to figure out how to mend some of those fences.”
Until they do, “quiet quitting”—when employees put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs, but don't go the extra mile for their employer—will continue to challenge management. Trendy perks and higher pay, alone, are no longer enough to recruit and retain the best and the brightest—but moments of change, of course, are also moments of opportunity.
New Rules, Safe Harbors
To get a jumpstart on some of the major business ideas shaping this turbulent year, I was able to pop into a virtual press conference last month with Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum. “Companies must now do more to create safe harbors to shore up the trust that keeps today’s multigenerational and multicultural workforces and societies running,” he said. “We are living in a very unstable world. We have to find new rules.”
In some organizations, that work has already begun.
Forward-thinking HR and communications leaders are dusting off the use of employee councils first used by companies in the 1960s to calm and channel the influence of that decade’s social and political turmoil into “innovation labs” led by younger workers, to boost employee engagement. Some companies are also creating new storytelling strategies to enable employees to become more informed, engaged and empowered to participate in collaborative strategy teams and to co-lead internal events additionally relevant to employee interests.
Just after the pandemic, CVS, for example, created an internal podcast co-hosted by nurses who had worked marathon hours during the pandemic, to share their stories and recommendations for improved service and employee engagement. The result built worker trust and surfaced valuable new insights from clients and fellow workers about how to better cope with stress. It also helped the company’s frontline managers and staff to share and compare customer feedback more widely.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts took another direction. During the pandemic and after, to meet the growing influence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement for racial equity, the Center moved away from many of the nonprofit’s elite legacy policies to create more inclusive ones designed to shift and improve community reach and the diversity of Lincoln Center’s programming and staff —a move that expanded the nonprofit’s funding and community support, improved employee engagement, cut expenses and is now attracting new and larger audiences.
“In these times, companies have to create comfort in the discomfort,” says Ethan McCarty, founder and CEO of Integral, a business strategy consultancy. Many company leaders “have myopia” because they tend to focus almost exclusively on their customers, he says. But in a digital world facing rapid change, he adds, “it’s important for companies to start treating their employees better—as their ‘first public’ and most influential stakeholders.” What a worker says about a company over social networks, Ethan says, can boost (or bust) a company’s brand, reputation and efforts to be more relevant and responsive to changing social and cultural norms.
How workers (really) feel about their workplace
The Integral Index is a national survey of 2,000+ American full-time workers conducted annually, designed to provide insight into the state of the workplace and how employees feel about it. Co-produced by Ethan’s company with the Harris Poll, it was co-designed with Dr. Rita Men, the Director of Internal Communication Research at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. Here are few brief excerpts. Some findings may very well reinforce what you already know, but some may provide a few surprises.
Among the top takeaways? Top-down management frameworks still exist at many organizations, and are sabotaging even some of the most intensive efforts to improve company culture. Workers 18-24 are the most likely (55%) to say their company’s “best days are behind it”—and that its top management “only sometimes, or not at all” shares the same values as staff.
Remote and hybrid work policies. Keep them going, workers say. Work-at-home and hybrid employees are more likely to experience a positive work mindset (71%) than those who work onsite. They also are more likely to feel motivated, cared about and empowered. Most respondents (75%) said they are happy with their organization’s expectations about where they work, but happiness is lower among low-level managers (73%) and non-managers (69%) and higher among senior-level managers (83%) and mid-level managers (80%). Happiness about where they work ( home or office) also varies by age. Those employees least happy with being remote are aged 18-24.
Politics at Work. In recent years, organizations have increasingly been expected to deal with politics, setting norms for respectful dialog in the workplace while also being asked to take public stands on issues. When asked about workplace norms, however, employees higher up on the management chain said they were more comfortable sharing their own opinions—and were more likely to let others share theirs. But mid-level managers and younger employees (18-24) feel differently, saying their values don’t always mesh with those of their superiors. In-house gatherings to share, discuss and establish “safe” ways to connect across the divide are needed to make workers feel more welcome, included, informed and understood.
Social purpose. Which issues are most important for organizations to try to make a positive difference? Employees’ good health and mental well-being are, by far, the most frequently cited as being critical (42%), suggesting a continued need for management to improve their relationships with staff members. Eradicating income inequality (CEO vs. staff pay) and racial inequity were also cited. Integral says these three issues are those which employers have the most ability to make a difference for themselves and their employees this year.
Career care and support. The results were striking, though somewhat intuitive, suggesting a greater need for companies to improve their policies and approaches to relationship-building. For example, managers are far more likely than non-managers to say that their organization “enables me to grow my career at the organization” (76% vs. 50%) and that “my company cares about me” (75% vs. 56%). Participation in the company’s goals also drives engagement and positive mindset. But the gap between top/senior management and non-managers is significant. Meaningful employee engagement hinges on the quality of relationships between employees and their organization but only 55% of non-managers said their company cares about them vs. 80% of topline and senior managers, a 25-point gap.
Size Matters. Employees of small and mid-sized organizations are more positive than employees of large organizations about their work and work culture, and while 84% of employees chose positive terms to describe their current work culture, 22% chose negative terms, and those who did were of all ages. The group most likely to use negative terms to describe their work culture were frontline managers (28%)—those tasked with delivering outcomes for most new company projects, suggesting a need to create more meaningful opportunities for non-managers to participate in and support them. Top/senior managers were more than twice as likely than non-managers to say their work culture is innovative (33% vs. 15%) and twice as likely to describe it as stimulating (20% vs. 10%). Again, creating better relationships between management and staff is critical in these times of turbulence.
Wake-up call and question
In a stirring address this week at the Next Gen SAP Enterprise Architect Forum, global business strategist
— the author of the popular Substack column, The Future Doesn’t Fit Into The Containers of the Past—said companies need to make “seismic” changes to work culture now, or face irrelevancy, and eventual obsolescence.“Power is shifting from West to East, from large to small and top to bottom-up,” he said. Some leaders will need to redefine strategy, others will need to reorganize how work gets done. Everyone else, he says, will need to get better at communicating the benefits of change and adjusting incentives to reward adaptability. The alternative, Tobaccowala said, “is irrelevance, far worse than simply being slow to change.”
Rishad, a forthcoming guest in our upcoming #NewRules podcast that launches next month—urged companies (and our readers) to ask themselves these two tough questions to determine what’s most needed from their companies to stay relevant and succeed.
Is your company a good fit for the talent it has and needs?
Is it ready and able to change as rapidly and radically as the world around us?
Please share your thoughts by submitting a comment, below. As valued and experienced professionals in dozens of sectors, Bradley and I are eager to hear your take on work culture and what you think companies most need now, this year, to navigate the challenges ahead.