Back to Basics: The Fundamental Elements of Being an Employee

I have a framed photo from 2016 of a large leadership team gathered on the shores of Monterey Bay. Relaxed, smiling, and unified. Recently that leadership trip has come up in conversation constantly with friends and ex-colleagues. The world of work has changed, and we all remember a time when ‘we didn’t know how good we had it.’ 

Pre-pandemic, the work world was centered around fast growth, hard work, and endless opportunities that put employee engagement first. Employers were concerned with whether or not teams were happy and ways to spark innovation and further employee commitment. In that world, employees had options and the upper hand. Wellness, the inner work of leadership, flexibility, and perk wars all emerged from that place and time. And then it all changed. 

Enter 2026

It can feel like we’re in a new modern-day Dickensian work world where engagement is on the periphery, and performance reigns supreme. The culture is performance-driven, office-based (yes, 5 days a week now), relentlessly measuring output and systematically purging underperformers. In an era of artificial intelligence and fierce competition, employers can afford to be merciless by prioritizing metrics above all else and discarding anyone who fails to meet benchmarks. The question plaguing leadership (and one I have heard on repeat) is, ‘How did our employees become so entitled?’ 

But not that much has changed if you dig deeper. The pressure on leadership to perform never went away, and leaders have always been accountable for hitting targets. The only thing that’s changed is the methods that we place the most emphasis on. As someone who spent the last two decades in talent leadership roles at Cisco, SAP, Salesforce, and other tech companies, I’ve come to one simple reflective conclusion: we simply took it too far. 

Where It Went Off the Rails

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact start of intense employee focus, but most roads lead to the dot-com boom and Google’s campus culture sometime in the mid-2000s. Stock options, employee nap nooks, and free meals were all part of a plan to lure the best talent to Silicon Valley. Many organizations followed suit, attempting to offer the best employee benefits. Some of that was needed and opened up a world where people mattered.

But then we devised terms like ‘total transparency’ and ‘work family’ that promised more than could be delivered. The transparency people came to expect blissfully ignored the fact that organizations exist to make money, while striving for family-like atmospheres had team members confused when leadership spoke of bottom lines.

I had many employees come to me when the work world began to shift, saying the changes were unfair. But fairness rarely plays a role in corporate life. Leadership is at fault for changing the narrative so much that it became unrecognizable and impossible to keep up with. The only place the work world could go after so many empty promises was a place of mistrust.​

The Somewhat Harsh Reality

​We infantilized employees during the past decade. We lured them with unrealistic narratives of what work would be and promised them health and wellness in return for showing up. If employers complain that employees are entitled, then they need to hold the mirror up to see how they have been complicit. It’s time to have a real and frank discussion with employees. 

There is a Third Way

People have not fundamentally changed, yet the environment has, and the easy trap we fall into is looking for simple answers to complex changes in the market. 

It’s time leadership understood the assignment and passed the lesson down to teams, starting with the following:

1. Appropriate transparency and frankness: treat employees as adults, emphasize that business is a commercial enterprise, and that this will always come first – without this, nothing else follows. Not everything is or can be shared. Everyone needs to hear this. All the time.
2. Team efforts shift: some team members will contribute more than others, and it’s ok to differentiate, recognize, and reward that without worrying about offending others. Work is both competitive and collaborative. 
3. A company is not a family, but it can be a community: we respect and value each other, and you get out what you put in. It’s that simple. Corporate life is not fair, and to expect it to be is a road to disappointment.  
4. Everyone needs help at some point: we focus on employee programs that support people, for the ultimate benefit of the company. The better you are, the better you perform, the better the company performs – it’s a virtuous cycle.

Not making these fundamentals clear and consistent is where organizations are failing their employees. Yes, we must have cultures that work to integrate humanity and are guided by values. How can we hope to do that when we have companies that aren’t upfront with employees about the realities of performance and the expectations that come with a job?

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