One thing I’ve noticed over the last few years is how quickly organisations now respond to cultural anxiety.
A difficult story appears in the news, social tensions rise, a workplace incident goes viral somewhere online, and within days employees are being assigned mandatory training with titles like Respect in the Modern Workplace or Creating Safe Conversations.
Now, some of this is completely understandable. Organisations do need policies. They do need training. Clear standards matter, particularly around behaviour and harassment. But I do sometimes think workplaces are in danger of convincing themselves that culture can be fixed largely through compliance exercises and increasingly sophisticated online learning platforms.
I’m not sure human beings are quite that straightforward.
Most people can now complete workplace e-learning almost entirely on autopilot. You click through a series of scenarios involving somebody called “David” making an obviously inappropriate comment in a fictional meeting room, answer a multiple-choice question that practically answers itself, and then receive a certificate confirming you understand respect and professionalism.
Meanwhile, in actual workplaces, people are still interrupting each other in meetings, speaking carelessly under pressure and occasionally behaving like LinkedIn arguments have become a recognised management style.
That disconnect is where the real conversation sits for me, because culture shifts rarely happen because employees completed a module. They happen because leaders consistently model standards through behaviour, judgement and tone over long periods of time. And tone matters far more than organisations sometimes realise.
Particularly at the moment.
We’re living through a period where political and social issues increasingly spill into everyday working life. Employees are more connected to global events, more vocal about personal beliefs and, in some cases, more emotionally exhausted by the general state of public discourse than they probably were a decade ago.
That creates a genuine challenge for organisations.
How do you create workplaces where people feel respected and psychologically safe without expecting everybody to think identically or suppress their personalities entirely?
Workplaces cannot realistically become emotionally neutral spaces where nobody ever disagrees with anything. Nor should they. At the same time, most people do not actually want to spend Tuesday afternoon trapped in a meeting that slowly mutates into an unofficial geopolitical debate moderated by somebody from Operations.
There has to be a middle ground between “bring your whole self to work” and “please leave all human complexity outside the building”.
I think this is where respect becomes far more useful than ideology as an organising principle. Respect does not require total agreement. It requires judgement.
It requires people to understand context, boundaries and the fact that other people may experience the same conversation very differently from them. It also requires a bit of emotional restraint, which is perhaps becoming a slightly underrated professional skill generally.
What worries me slightly is that some organisations are responding to cultural tension by becoming increasingly performative. More messaging. More scripted language. More policies trying to account for every possible interpersonal scenario in advance.
The irony is that the more workplaces over-engineer communication, the less natural people often become with each other.
You can almost feel employees trying to navigate conversations while mentally scanning for legal risk like slightly anxious corporate sat-nav systems recalculating the route.
That is not the same thing as respect.
Real respect is usually much quieter than that. It shows up in how managers handle pressure, how colleagues disagree, whether somebody notices they’ve crossed a line and adjusts accordingly rather than doubling down out of pride.
Most difficult workplace situations are not caused by cartoon villains deliberately trying to offend people. They’re caused by poor judgement, emotional defensiveness, frustration or people simply failing to read the room properly. And reading the room remains one of the most valuable workplace skills nobody formally trains particularly well. Especially now.
Workplaces contain people with very different experiences, sensitivities, communication styles and pressures. The same comment can land completely differently depending on context, relationship and timing. Most adults actually understand this instinctively in their personal lives. Work is not magically exempt from normal human nuance.
This is also why I’m slightly cautious about the growing assumption that AI can somehow solve large parts of workplace culture.
AI will absolutely improve efficiency in certain areas. It will probably make training faster, communication slicker and policy drafting infinitely more unbearable to read than it already is.
But culture itself is still human.
AI cannot judge emotional nuance particularly well. It cannot sit in a tense room and sense that a conversation is starting to drift somewhere unhelpful. It cannot quietly de-escalate conflict through credibility, trust and interpersonal judgement. At least not yet, which I suspect should comfort all of us slightly.
Ultimately, I think the organisations navigating this period best will be the ones that resist the temptation to overcomplicate respect.
Most employees are not asking for perfection. They are asking for clarity, fairness and workplaces that feel emotionally stable enough to function properly.
That doesn’t require endless ideological alignment. It requires adults who know how to communicate well, leaders who model proportionate behaviour and cultures where respect survives pressure rather than disappearing the moment things become difficult.
Which, when you strip away the corporate language around all of this, is probably what most people wanted from work in the first place.
