Employers Want Less Coddled Staff, and are Betting on a Recession/AI to Help.
Hoping AI will fix employee culture is very shortsighted (and wrong)

Employers Want Less Coddled Staff, and are Betting on a Recession/AI to Help.

THEY SHOULD DO THIS INSTEAD

“I can’t wait until the robots take their jobs,” said a slightly drunk executive I overheard at a bar, speaking about his own team.?

Whether it’s through AI or a softening economy, it’s no secret that many companies are counting the days until they can take back control of the labor market.?

But leaders are being cowards, and here’s why.?

After years of increasing employee empowerment in high-value roles, many people believe a reckoning is coming. They’d like to lower wages and benefits, sure - but the more “salty” feedback I’ve heard relates to employee arrogance. And there are four types that keep coming up from my corporate partners:

  1. Churn/Loyalty: leaving the microsecond things get tough or another opportunity comes up.
  2. Triggers: the expectation that the workplace will be free of conflict.
  3. Political: expecting democratic norms in a for-profit business and advocacy on political issues.
  4. RTO: refusals to heed return to office demands as proxy for general lack of control.

The above factors are the product of two things colliding at the same time:

  1. Millennial and Gen Z cultural traits, and
  2. Corporate “enablers”?

Frustrated, some companies aren’t waiting around for a change.?

The Pendulum Swings

Several orgs have already taken extreme measures to undo cultures deemed too “soft”. These include Elon at Twitter , and others like Ford/Lowes/Tractor Supply . While Elon’s moves are considered a failure, the jury is still out on what impact this will have on others. DEI backlash is giving air cover all kinds of corporate pullback on permissive cultures.

The pendulum feels like it’s swinging from decades of “bring your whole self to work,” to “just come to work, get your job done, and go home.”??

The Employee Response

But this swing will likely produce a great deal of fallout. After all, employees who signed up for one kind of culture aren’t going to just pivot that easily; change is hard, after all. Some leaders justify their impatience by viewing this as a good test or “forcing factor” to remove employees that can’t just roll with it, but if enough high-value staffers are included in that attrition, such choices could have huge consequences.?

And counting on macroeconomic downturns to handle your employee cultural challenges is just bad business. First of all, it presupposes negative business conditions, which is a fate worse than employee insouciance. Second, people who stay in jobs because they have to are much less productive and effective than those who are there because they want to. Either way, this is a bad approach that will have many unintended consequences.?

So what should employers do if they want to shift their approach?

Get Out of the 24/7/365 Culture Business

Like the helicopter parents that caused this problem in the first place, corporate cultures need to simultaneously get more involved where needed and less involved where not.?

We need to get out of trying to dictate every aspect of culture inside the org. This means more showing by example and less telling by powerpoint, workshop and perk. Executives need to model the culture they want to see, and remove some of the obfuscation, handcuffs and avoidance that characterize internal relationships.?

In short, more honest feedback and dialogue are required. Less tolerance of anti-social and anti-productive behavior is required, too. To do this, we need to be more accepting of conflict.?

Conflict Makes Everything Better

A soft culture is conflict-avoidant. Anything that makes anyone uncomfortable is not allowed. And while cultures prize “bringing your whole self to work,” such environments necessarily mean people are highly self-censored, afraid to make people upset or disturb the apple cart.

But everything about conflict is essential to success. As Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman says: the brain is a machine built on conflict . Every decision we make is based on conflict in our minds, and the same is true for good decisions in business. Competing ideas and voices need to be heard, things need to be hashed out, and a victor needs to emerge.?

Our faulty ideas about corporate culture mean that conflict is bad. Concurrence is good. But this defeats both good strategy and the core purpose of diversity in the first place .?

But how do we allow conflict without it sinking our business?

Friendship Is the Best Cultural Investment

Friendships at work have lots of benefits. Research shows they help increase loyalty and performance, but they also serve two critical functions for cultures in transition to a more focused mode:

  1. Conflict Efficacy. Friends can have normal conflicts, resolve them, and then continue working/playing together. This is part of the reason that Friend Forward workplaces produce better outcomes.
  2. Cultural Coherence. Friendships in the workplace enable culture to be fostered and developed with minimal investment from the organization. Friendships, if scaled up, will ensure a cultural coherence through the org that cannot be “bought” or trained.?

This has broad reaching implications, including improved productivity and return to office, alongside reduced need for unionization and pressure for political alignment.?

The Smart Playbook

Friendship solves for the biggest social/emotional needs for most people (belonging, connectedness, support), so if you allow employees to get this from each other, they won’t need as much from the company.?

An investment in friendship, using my Friend Forward model, will pay significant dividends. Take the money you’re spending on two dozen cultural initiatives, and shift some of it to facilitating and supporting friendships.?

Alongside this shift, the company can move its official position to a more neutral/results oriented culture. Less investment in making employees feel a specific way, while empowering them to give that to each other, gives you more operating space to make the changes you need.?

And you can focus on doing what you do best…but with a better operating machine.


Gabe Zichermann is the leading expert on Friendship in the Workplace. His forthcoming book, Friend Forward: How to Leverage the Superpower of Friendship to Transform Our Lives & Workplaces (2025, CES), looks closely at how organizations, individuals and societies can foster friendship to improve our world. Gabe is a CEO, speaker and author who popularized the concept of Gamification, and has helped leaders in Fortune 500, government and startups create a more fun, engaged, equitable and successful world.

Reach out to me anytime to discuss Friend Forward Strategies in Your Workplace.


Made without AI

Image Credit ByteMarks on Flickr (CC)

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