Studying, perhaps. Paying attention, certainly.

The Page of Pentacles is often associated with the student or apprentice: someone at the beginning of a journey, willing to learn their craft slowly and take it seriously.

There’s something rather refreshing about that.

We live in a world that rewards expertise, certainty and having something intelligent to say before anybody else gets there. The Page represents something a little more muted: the willingness to admit there’s always more to understand, always something else to learn.

Recently, I wrote about what happens to university culture when students are no longer fully immersed in campus life. When university becomes somewhere people visit between shifts, commutes, and family commitments, rather than a world they temporarily inhabit.

But it left me thinking about a slightly different question: What is a university actually supposed to cultivate?

The obvious answer is knowledge. You go to university to learn about history, biology, engineering, psychology or French literature. You attend lectures, read books, write essays and emerge, three years later, with a certificate confirming that at least some of it went in.

But knowledge itself is no longer cloistered within the hallowed halls of universities.

The university without walls

There has never been more information available to more people.

By the end of 2025, Coursera reported 197 million registered learner accounts and partnerships with more than 375 universities and industry organisations. Add YouTube lectures, podcasts, online archives, digital libraries, newsletters and the mass of information sitting behind just a few clicks, and it’s possible to build a reasonably impressive education without setting foot in a seminar room.

Then there’s AI.

According to HEPI’s 2026 survey, 95% of UK students now use AI in some form and 94% use generative AI to support assessed work. Students are asking it to explain difficult ideas, summarise articles, suggest research directions and provide instant feedback. Yet fewer than half believe their teaching staff are helping them develop the AI skills they will need in their careers.

AI is rapidly becoming part of the basic infrastructure of learning. It can explain a philosophical theory in simpler language. It can build a reading list on Medieval Christianity, teach you the basics of Spanish grammar or create a twelve-week curriculum on the fall of the Roman Empire before you’ve finished making a cup of tea.

It can answer almost any question, which makes the ability to ask a good question more important than ever.

Maybe this is where the purpose of university begins to shift. If knowledge is abundant, the value of education can no longer rest entirely on transferring information from someone who has it to someone who doesn’t.

The scarce things become judgement, curiosity, discernment and the ability to make connections. Knowing where to look, what to trust, when something that sounds convincing is, in fact, utter nonsense. Knowing what to ask next.

(Side note: Alex McCann’s recent article explores this and it’s fascinating.)

The most important thing a university can give someone may not be a fixed body of knowledge, but a positive and lasting relationship with learning.

Learning after the syllabus ends

There are signs that people are already trying to recreate that relationship for themselves.

The “personal curriculum” or “monthly curriculum” has become a social media trend. People choose a subject they want to explore, create a reading list and give themselves projects, outings or homework. Instead of waiting for an institution or professor to decide what they should study, they construct a wholly personalised course around whatever’s captured their attention.

One month might be devoted to Greek mythology. The next to local folklore, astronomy or the films of Nora Ephron.

There seems to be a certain appeal in using the structures of formal education without worrying about grades, student loans or early-morning seminars. A personal curriculum gives shape to curiosity, turning a passing interest into something you might actually pursue.

There’s been a similar revival of commonplace books. A commonplace book isn’t quite a diary, but a place to gather fragments from the things you’re reading and noticing: quotes, ideas, facts and questions.

It’s not a new practice. In the seventeenth century, writer and diarist John Evelyn kept volumes of commonplace material as a way to organise his reading and, in his words, “reduce my studies into a method”.

Now commonplace notebooks are resurfacing on TikTok and across online reading communities, usually filled with a mixture of handwritten quotations, sketches, annotations and personal reflections.

Their return could well have something to do with the modern experience of being bombarded with too much information.

I have hundreds of articles saved across Substack, emails, browser tabs and various note-taking apps. Most, I never actually get round to reading. Saving something gives me the momentary feeling of having learned it without the inconvenience of actually having to read or remember it.

A commonplace book asks for something a little more deliberate.

You have to choose what deserves to be written down, removing it from the endless flow of information and placing it beside something else. Over time, themes emerge. An idea from a podcast connects to a paragraph from a novel or a quote you saw in a museum.

Things sit together, break down and eventually feed something new. Which is the difference between collecting information and developing understanding.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Every day’s a school day, apparently

It would be tempting to look at personal curriculums, online courses and carefully curated commonplace books and assume we’re entering a golden age of lifelong learning.

The reality is a little less tidy.

The Learning and Work Institute found that 42% of UK adults had taken part in some form of learning during the previous three years in 2025. That was down sharply from 52% in 2024. Just 21% were actively learning at the time of the survey. Among people in employment, only one in five was currently learning at work.

Access to learning is far from equal. Higher earners were almost twice as likely to have learned at work as those on lower salaries. Age, income, class and previous education all affected whether someone continued to learn as an adult.

Yet when people did participate, 94% identified at least one benefit. These included greater confidence, personal development, enjoyment and improved skills.

The desire to learn might be widespread, but the time, support and permission to do it aren’t, which is where we move from individual habits to wider culture.

Curiosity at work

Organisations have been talking about continuous learning for years.

It appears in values and leadership frameworks. There are learning platforms filled with courses people intend to complete as soon as their actual job stops getting in the way.

But a culture of learning isn’t the same as a collection of training modules.

In the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs survey, employers said they expected 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. Curiosity and lifelong learning were among the capabilities expected to grow in importance.

That makes continuous learning sound like an economic necessity, but organisations often treat it as an extracurricular activity.

Learn, but only after you’ve completed your preassigned tasks. Experiment, but don’t waste valuable time. Be curious, but make sure you already have the answers prepared.

A genuine learning culture would feel very different. It would make it safe to say, “I don’t know”, give people time to follow an interesting train of thought and reward people for changing their minds when the evidence changes.

It would encourage people to bring ideas in from outside their immediate discipline. A museum exhibition might inform a customer experience project. A book about travel might change how someone thinks about employee journeys. A university vlog might lead to an article about hybrid workplace culture (👀).

Rather than sitting separately from the work, learning would change how the work itself was done.

Beyond the campus

Universities have a role to play here too.

In an age of AI, their purpose cannot simply be to preserve their monopoly over knowledge. That monopoly has already gone.

Their opportunity lies in creating a culture around learning.

A university can bring people into contact with ideas they would never have searched for themselves. It can place an expert in the room when a conversation becomes difficult, introduce different disciplines to one another and ask students to test their thinking against people who see the world differently.

It can offer the friction that personalised technology often removes. AI is incredibly good at giving us the information we request, but education should also confront us with the things we didn’t know to ask about.

That might be the more compelling promise of a university now. To come here, not just to acquire knowledge, but to become someone who knows how to keep learning.

For commuter students, mature students or those balancing study with paid employment, that culture will need to be cultivated deliberately. It can’t depend entirely on hours spent lingering in the library or conversations that happen by chance in the dining hall.

Universities may need to create new rituals around curiosity: interdisciplinary talks, reading groups, peer teaching, field trips, shared projects and opportunities for students to show what has changed their thinking.

The institution may no longer surround every part of a student’s life, but it can still shape their perspective on the world.

The beginner’s mind

Perhaps this is why the Page of Pentacles feels like the perfect card for this moment in time. It’s a card that’s not afraid to admit it doesn’t know everything, that’s willing to take the first step and begin. And, if things don’t work out, begin again.

You can be the Page of Pentacles at eighteen, starting university with a clutch of new notebooks and no idea how to do you own laundry.

You can be the Page in midlife, learning a language or discovering a sudden fascination with medieval pilgrimage routes.

You can be the Page at work, entering a meeting ready to listen and ask questions rather than merely waiting for your chance to share what you already know.

AI can help us navigate more knowledge than any previous generation could have imagined, but access to knowledge is not the same as education.

Perhaps the next era of learning will not belong entirely to universities, workplaces or technology platforms. Instead, it will belong to people who dare to ask questions, follow their curiosity and see where it leads.

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I don’t suddenly have a burning desire to go back to uni. What I’m actually fascinated by is the feeling of immersion in these videos.

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

Once upon a time, universities felt like a different world.

When you read books like Maurice or Brideshead Revisited (or let’s face it, settle in for your annual rewatch of Gilmore Girls), universities are these self-contained environments that encapsulate a whole world, and remove students from the wider one. It’s why they’re such perfect settings for stories - the campus becomes a character in its own right.

Thinking back to my time at uni (I went to Royal Holloway between 2006 and 2010), I remember the feeling of being totally separated from the real world. After a week, it felt as though I’d been there a lifetime. Home faded into the background and campus became the centre of gravity. (I suspect a lack of smartphones and only the beginnings of social media played a big role.)

Back then, universities asked students to move into a different world. Increasingly, they mould themselves around the life students already have.

Students are working more than ever. According to the latest HEPI report, 65% of full-time undergrads are in paid employment during term time. They work an average of around 14 hours per week, on top of their studies.

And paid work is only part of the picture. More students are living at home and commuting to campus to keep costs down. Universities themselves are recognising that today’s student body is far more varied than the traditional image of the 18-year-old who moves into halls, joins a whole load of societies and spends every waking hour on campus. Many students are now balancing caring responsibilities, travelling significant distances, fitting lectures around shifts, or returning to education later in life as mature students.

Technology has changed things too. Recorded lectures and online resources mean students can learn without physically being there, which has made higher education more flexible and accessible, but has also changed the role of the campus itself.

None of this is a criticism. In many ways, it’s a sign of progress. Higher education is more open to more people than it has ever been, but it does raise an interesting question. If fewer students are spending most of their time immersed in university life, what happens to the culture that used to emerge almost by accident?

The same thing is happening in workplaces.

People work more flexibly. They dial into meetings, not from the boardroom surrounded by colleagues, but from their kitchen table (which in my case, often means being surrounded by cats). They might spend a couple of days a week in the office, but not necessarily with the same colleagues each time. Work and collaboration still happen, but increasingly, it happens between people whose days only occasionally overlap.

Which makes me think we might have been talking about hybrid working in the wrong way. Rather than focusing on loss of proximity, maybe we need to turn our attention to the loss of synchronicity.

Culture has never been just about sharing a building.

It’s about sharing an experience. Bumping into the same people while making tea, complaining about the printer that’s never working, waiting outside the same lecture hall, everyone debriefing in the pub after a difficult client meeting. Those moments don’t feel particularly important when they’re happening, but over time, they add to the texture of a place.

When those shared experiences become fragmented, culture fragments too.

A commuter student experiences university differently from someone living in halls. A mature student with children experiences it differently again. The same is true in organisations. The experience of someone who spends five days a week in the office is fundamentally different from that of someone who works remotely, travels constantly or fits their work around school pickups.

Perhaps there isn’t one culture anymore. There are multiple versions of it, each experienced from a very different perspective.

Culture no longer materialises on its own.

For a long time, organisations and universities benefited from the fact people spent a lot of time together. Rituals emerged because people repeatedly crossed paths and traditions stuck because everyone experienced them together.

Now that’s changed. If universities are no longer places people inhabit, but places they visit between shifts, commutes and family commitments, perhaps they need to think differently about what they’re offering. And if organisations are asking people to spend less time together in person, perhaps culture can no longer be treated as something that just happens when enough people occupy the same building at the same time.

Maybe that’s the challenge facing both campuses and offices: how to create a real sense of belonging when everyone is just passing through.

Because perhaps culture has never been built by shared spaces alone. Perhaps it’s always been built by shared moments. And shared moments are much harder to stumble into than shared spaces.

I always take the same route, which means I’m able to notice even the most subtle changes as the year turns. At the moment, it’s the first green blackberries slowly darkening on the bramble. It’s the purple flowers turning to thistledown, ready to be blown hither and yon by a summer storm. It’s the orange rowan berries high up in the trees. I notice the seasons changing, the days shortening into autumn, the first frost.

The walk itself is nothing spectacular, or even overly picturesque. I live in a built-up suburb of Manchester and walk through a perfectly ordinary park. What makes it meaningful is the way it helps me clear my head before I start my day, and how it helps me connect to nature before spending the day on a screen.

That morning walk has become part of the fabric of my life.

Photo by EUNHEE BANG on Unsplash

Humans are meaning-making creatures.

We make meaning in all kinds of ways. It could be a daily ritual, like a cup of tea in bed each morning, or pulling a tarot card over breakfast. It might be a place; a favourite coffee shop, a forest walk or a treasured bookshop.

Sometimes these rituals are collective. A church, a choir, a family Christmas dinner, a group of friends getting together on the same date every year. Sometimes, rituals and places are experienced alone, like my morning walk.

The same thing happens at work.

We’re constantly gathering small pieces of information and assigning meaning to them. Someone is publicly thanked for working late. A meeting is scheduled over lunch. Someone raises a concern and is met with silence. A colleague checks in after a difficult week.

In isolation, each of these moments doesn’t mean much. But over time, they start to form a pattern. And those patterns become stories.

Stories like:

• This is what it takes to succeed here

• This is whose time and wellbeing matters

• This is what happens when you call something out

• This is what the organisation really values

Culture is described as something that’s shared.

And yet two people can sit through the same company meeting and leave with entirely different interpretations of what they heard. For example, one might feel reassured by the company investing in AI (“we must be doing well”), another worried about the future of their role (“they won’t need me anymore”).

People bring their own memories, mindsets and experiences to work. They notice different things, find different patterns and tell themselves different stories about what’s happening and why.

This doesn’t mean organisational culture is entirely individual. Our interpretations are shaped by the people around us. We compare notes, swap stories and affirm one another’s theories, turning a private impression into a shared understanding.

It starts with attention.

Someone noticing how clients are spoken to, who gets rewarded (and who doesn’t), how managers handle one-to-ones, what’s discussed openly and what’s shared behind closed doors.

Then there’s pattern.

One cancelled development conversation is a blip. Repeated cancellations when things get busy means people start to understand where personal growth sits in the order of priorities.

A leader occasionally admitting they got something wrong is refreshing. Repeated admissions of things not being handled well tells a very different story.

Meaning grows through repetition. It’s rarely one grand gesture that defines a culture, but what happens over and over again.

Finally, there’s story.

People take the patterns they’ve noticed and create a narrative around them.

The organisation says they care about wellbeing, but praise those who work long hours.

We talk about collaboration, but decisions are made behind closed doors.

Or we genuinely care about people, and I saw that first hand when I asked for help.

These stories aren’t always objectively true, but they influence what people expect, how they behave, and what they tell others.

Organisations can shape meaning, but they can’t dictate it.

This is where so many culture programmes get stuck. They announce what something means, and assume their work is done.

A new set of values is launched, a new transformation programme is announced as ‘an exciting new chapter’, a return to office mandate is dressed up as an opportunity for collaboration.

But that’s not how people create meaning. They test the official story against what they can see:

• Do the new values influence how decisions are made?

• Does the transformation programme actually change anything day-to-day?

• Does collaboration actually improve?

The organisation can offer an interpretation, but it can’t force people to accept it.

That’s why the gap between the promise and the practice matters so much. The promise tells people what the organisation wants something to mean. The practice is what gives them the evidence to create the meaning themselves.

When the two align, trust grows. When they don’t, people believe what they experience in practice, not what’s written on the poster.

The smallest moments can carry meaning.

My morning walk matters because it’s something I return to again and again. It doesn’t just give shape to my day, but helps me notice the turning of the year.

Work is full of these ordinary moments. They may look insignificant from the outside, or even to leaders, but over time they become part of the fabric of people’s lives.

Maybe that’s where culture begins. Not with a strategy or a report, but with what people notice, the patterns they find and the meaning they create from them.

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Whether it’s restructuring, AI rollout or a new CEO, the leadership team stops having (or at least, sharing) all the answers, employees stop knowing what’s next and a gap begins to emerge.

Guess what humans are incredibly uncomfortable with? Gaps.

So uncomfortable, in fact, we fill them. And not always with facts. Instead, we fill them with stories.

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

The office folklore.

Long before the heady world of Sharepoint, Intranets, Teams channels and ‘internal comms’, people gathered around campfires to attempt to create meaning out of uncertainty.

Why did the crops fail? Why did the river flood? Why does the forest feel so scary after dark?

Some stories were completely true, some were rooted in truth and some were wildly fictional. It didn’t really matter - it was more important to make sense of the unknown.

Today’s workplace isn’t hugely different. We may have replaced the campfire with the kettle (something I argue here is Absolutely Essential), and travelling bards with the Slack channels, but there are some clear similarities.

Instead of ghost stories, there are harrowing tales of cost-saving measures and headcount reductions. These stories spread, because they answer our deep-rooted human need to know something (anything!) rather than nothing.

Imagination hates a vacuum.

Psychologists have known for a long time that uncertainty is often harder to handle than bad news. When we don’t know what’s happening, our brain starts seeking out patterns. We begin joining the dots, predicting futures and constructing narratives.

Rumours tend to germinate and grow in the gaps left by communication. The less information - and clarity - you give people, the more creative they become.

Sometimes they fill the gaps with hopeful stories, but more often than not, they lean towards the catastrophic. Whatever their sentiment, the more times the stories are retold, the bigger they grow, just like every good piece of folklore.

Fairy tales don’t build trust.

By trying to protect people, organisations make a big (but understandable) mistake.

Whether it’s withholding information (“We’re still working through the details”) or sharing a polished, corporate version of events (“We’re embarking on an exciting new phase of transformation”) everyone knows they’re not sharing the full story.

Ironically, this bid to reduce anxiety often ends up fuelling it. The uncertainty doesn’t disappear in a puff of smoke, it simply moves elsewhere. Usually to WhatsApp chats, lunchtime beers, or - worst of all - late-night LinkedIn doomscrolling.

The truth doesn’t have to be comfortable.

One of the toughest things leaders have to do is say, “We don’t know yet”. It can feel weak and incomplete and a little bit risky, but actually, it might be the most trustworthy thing they can say when things feel uncertain.

When times are tough, people aren’t necessarily after a neatly wrapped answer. They want honesty. And most of all, they want to be treated like adults.

Being honest about not having all the answers builds credibility. Pretending to have answers you don’t leads to folklore.

Tell your story before someone else does.

Every organisation has stories. The issue isn’t whether they exist, it’s where they originate. Because if leaders don’t give people a narrative they can believe, they’ll invent one of their own.

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It’s a deeply human subject, all about how people behave, what they care about, how they spend time together, what gets rewarded (and ignored) and what it feels like to belong.

But the communication often feels very (very) inhuman.

Flat PDFs, abstract frameworks, wording that’s been through nine layers of approval, long explanations of behaviours that people are supposed to recognise themselves in.

Not only is it inhuman, it’s also Very Serious.

Which, ironically, can make it hard for people to take seriously.

Photo by me - in my garden.

The role of The Fool

In tarot, The Fool is often misunderstood. At first glance, they look naïve: gallivanting around near a cliff edge, apparently totally unaware of the risk (in the classic Rider Waite deck, at least).

But The Fool isn’t really about stupidity or recklessness. It’s about openness, taking a beginner’s mindset and being willing to start before everything’s completely mapped out.

The Fool prompts you - and your organisation - to ask a question you might find a little uncomfortable…

What would we try if we weren’t worried about always looking serious?

So if we’re combining tarot and culture comms (who’d have thought it?), taking a Fool’s approach to culture communication might mean:

More play, less polish

Stop trying to make every culture message feel completely ‘launch-ready’. Some of the best and most meaningful conversations start with something a little rough or unexpected.

More curiosity, less certainty

Instead of declaring ‘These are our values’, try ‘Where do our values appear to you?’ or ‘What’s making our values hard to live by?’

More experiments, fewer campaigns

Rather than a large, integrated (expensive) campaign, try some smaller cultural experiments. A new meeting ritual, a team prompt, a corner of the office designed differently, or a pack of conversation-starter cards.

More metaphor, less management speak

People create meaning through stories, images, objects and moments. Not through abstract frameworks or corporate behavioural descriptors.

It’s not about taking work less seriously (although it’s not not about that either), but it’s using levity to make serious stuff more approachable.

When culture feels safe, human and accessible, people are more likely to engage with it. And play can be a vehicle to create this engagement. Operations and spreadsheet types might say it’s a distraction. It isn’t. It could be the thing that makes culture work genuinely impactful.

Quick-fire ideas for playing the fool with culture comms:

• Replace a values deck with a set of conversation cards.

• Ask teams to create “unofficial values” and compare them with the official ones.

• Use objects, prompts, stickers or postcards to make abstract ideas tangible.

• Create a ‘project funeral’ (RIP) to mark endings and share lessons learned.

• Use humour to bring tensions and unspoken issues to the surface, instead of avoiding them.

The point isn’t to make culture comms silly, but to make it a little more alive, and a lot more human. The Fool reminds us that the first step into something new rarely looks polished. Instead, it looks curious, kind of awkward and a little exposed.

Which is the perfect place to begin.

Like my work? Buy me a coffee.

If you’ve just arrived, this is a good place to begin.

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

Grounded Culture is about the human side of organisations. The conversations people have in kitchens, the stories that emerge during change, the moments that build trust (or erode it), and the gap between what organisations promise and what people actually experience.

Here are a few pieces to get you started:

How is a workplace like a forest?

Maybe work needs more ritual, not more purpose.

It’s essential you remove your boiling tap.

And if you fancy joining the conversation…

Head over to the Notes section.

That’s where half-formed ideas, observations and ponderings tend to appear before they become full articles.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here.

It’s a phrase that’s everywhere at the moment. In team meetings, leadership updates and the current race to adopt AI as fast as physically possible.

It’s an instruction, a command to move faster, push harder, reach further. Do more with less, turn everything upside down and, above all, BE MORE EFFICIENT.

To be honest, it leaves me feeling out of breath.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with ambition. It’s quite useful if we want to move forward and imagine something better than what exists now.

But I do wonder if “thinking bigger” has become a sort of reflex. An assumption that the most valuable thing is what reaches the most people, grows the fastest or looks the shiniest.

From personal experience, I’m not sure if that’s true.

Perhaps, in a world of endless striving, consumerism and, let’s face it, an AI-powered race to the bottom, a more useful invitation is the exact opposite.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Think smaller.

And then smaller still.

Because a lot of what really matters is sometimes so small it escapes notice. A quick conversation over a cup of coffee, a team outing to a new pub, a community choir that nails their Hamilton medley after weeks of blood, sweat and tears. A street hanging out flags for the World Cup. My mum finding the courage to exhibit my Dad’s artwork in her local church, giving people space to share their memories (and hilarious stories) about him.

None of these things make the global news. Or even the latest business update (the one nobody gathers around a fire for…). But each of them is where real connection, real community, what really matters, is built.

We’re living in a moment that’s obsessed with reach. By efficiency. For example, I’ve been promised that by adopting AI, I’ll have more time.

More time for what?

What if I want my time to be filled with something meaningful? What if I want a life that feels busy in a good way? That gives me a sense of purpose, of contributing to something?

In this incessant drive for efficiency, it’s very easy to lose ourselves (and the plot). Because actually, humans don’t experience life at scale. We experience it in moments, in our homes, on our pod of desks, the school playground, WhatsApp groups, our Wednesday-night Pilates class. In a familiar walk through the same park, the faces we see at choir, church, football, and our monthly book group.

Bigger can feel exciting, but trying to conquer the world will get us nowhere. Smaller is where we really belong.

The same is true at work.

Organisations often talk about culture as if it exists at the level of the whole system. The vision, strategy, and values. The annual engagement survey. The carefully worded statement about who we are and where we’re going.

And those things matter, but most people don’t experience culture at that broad level. They experience it in the way their manager speaks to them when something goes wrong. The person who notices they’ve gone a bit quiet. The meeting where it feels safe to say “I don’t understand.” The colleague who explains the unwritten rules without making them feel stupid.

That’s where culture becomes real - not in the big statements, but in the small, everyday encounters.

Which is why thinking smaller isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s not giving up on change or deciding we should go all Good Life and start our own vegetable gardens (although that does sound quite tempting…)

It’s about asking a different kind of question.

Not: how do we scale this as quickly as possible? But: what can we make better here, with these people, in this team, on this street, in this tiny patch of influence we’ve been given?

When we think bigger, there’s a tendency to turn things abstract. Into data or hypotheses. Where everything seems important but nothing actually feels real.

And I think people are hungry for things that do feel real. Local communities, team lunches in the park, managers asking how people are doing (and actually listening to the answer). Walking groups, proper tea breaks where you discuss the latest episode of Rivals (!).

None of these are world domination strategies. None of them is wildly impressive. They’re small things that might make someone feel a little less alone.

Which, when you think about it, isn’t small at all.

But when it isn’t, we worry about one thing: earning enough to survive.

It’s a bit like our health. When we’re feeling ok, we worry about things like the circumference of our thighs, the shape of our eyebrows and the dry skin on our feet. When we have food poisoning, we’re grateful to go a full hour without vomiting (and then to keep down some tea and toast).

Moments of crisis and change narrow our focus, forcing us to prioritise what really matters. Shockingly, that isn’t ’living the company values’ or ‘demonstrating our leadership principles’. It’s putting our head down, getting from one day to the next and laying the groundwork for if the worst happens.

So when the world, our industry, our company or our team is going through a period of change and uncertainty, humans are going to act, well, like humans.

While leaders are busy framing these changes through a strategic lens, using words like ‘transformation’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘growth’, employees experience it through a survival lens: ‘Will I keep my job?’ ‘How can I pay my bills?’, ‘What will happen to my family?’

It’s the gap between these perspectives where the fear lives, and where organisations start to see resistance and anxiety bubble up from people.

But really, it boils down to one key thing: We’ve become uncomfortable with talking about what work is actually for.

Organisations are great at talking about purpose, mission and vision while avoiding the obvious reality. All of these things are luxuries, and they can only exist in people’s minds when they’re supported by a sense of security.

Because people can’t focus on growth, innovation and transformation if they’re worried about paying next month’s mortgage.

When security is shaky, change feels existential.

Things like restructuring, redundancy and role changes trigger powerful reactions, not because people are irrational, but because once upon a time, losing access to resources was a life-and-death situation.

And our nervous systems have never evolved past that feeling of being left outside the cave to be eaten by sabre tooth tigers.

Organisations need to stop treating fear as resistance.

People aren’t just being stubborn when they don’t wholeheartedly get on board with the latest transformation initiative. They’re scared. And they’re trying to protect themselves.

Rather than assaulting people with upbeat comms, try:

• Acknowledging uncertainty

• Communicating honestly

• Recognising the practical impact

• Avoiding relying on corporate purpose-laden language

It’s not always inspiration people need; it’s reassurance and empathy.

The most human organisations don’t get so caught up in their future planning that they forget that behind every role is a rent payment, a school trip, a weekly Tesco shop and a family trying to build and sustain a life.

Change becomes easier to navigate when we acknowledge and appreciate what’s really at stake.

On paper, most organisations still talk about careers as if they are relatively neat things. You join, you grow, you progress, you contribute, and if all goes well, you move onwards or upwards.

It’s a reassuringly comforting idea. But it’s starting to feel a little out of date.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

For many people, working life no longer feels like a well-trodden path. It feels more like trying to traverse shifting sands or navigate the dark paths of Mirkwood (for the Tolkien fans out there…).

Roles are changing, industries are reshaping, AI is making people question the future of skills they once thought were a dead cert. Organisations are under pressure to do more with less, employees are being asked to adapt, upskill, absorb change, stay engaged and keep bringing their best selves to work, even when the ground beneath them feels worryingly unsteady.

And amongst all this change and transformation are some very human questions:

• What if my role disappears?

• What if the thing I’m good at becomes less valuable?

• What if I need a different pace of life?

• What if I can’t keep doing this?

• What if the career I built no longer fits the life I actually have?

These are personal questions, but they’re also cultural ones.

Organisational culture is often discussed in terms of values, behaviours, leadership and employee experience. Which all matters, but culture is also how an organisation helps people make sense of change.

It’s what happens when the strategy pivots, when budgets tighten, teams restructure, and roles evolve. When the future feels unclear. When people are told to be resilient, but are given very little information, space or support.

We know that culture lives in the gap between what organisations say and what people experience. Right now, that gap can feel very wide.

Many organisations are asking people to navigate uncertainty while still performing at a high level. They want agility, adaptability and growth mindsets. They want people to embrace new technology, new structures and new ways of working.

But very few people experience change as a lovely development opportunity. They experience it in their bodies. It seeps into their sleep, into conversations with partners, mortgage calculations, childcare spreadsheets and panics about identity while making a cup of tea.

That’s the part I’m interested in: the practical, emotional, slightly messy human reality of work changing shape.

Introducing After Plan A.

Alongside Grounded Culture, I’m embarking a new writing project called After Plan A.

It’s a collection of honest conversations with people whose working lives have taken an unexpected turn.

Some may have been made redundant. Some may have left a career because of burnout, illness, caring responsibilities or a change in priorities. Some may have stepped away from senior roles, retrained, taken casual work, gone freelance, moved into teaching, opened a café, started dog walking, gone back to study or built a new working life from whatever was available at the time.

I’m particularly interested in the practical side of starting again. The money bit, the confidence bit, the family conversations, the halting first steps and false starts. The things people underestimated, or wish someone had told them earlier.

Because career change is often presented in one of two - fairly different - ways.

At one end, there’s the glossy reinvention story. The ‘I quit my corporate job and now I live by the sea making handmade ceramics and running a six-figure coaching business’ version. (Which sounds lovely but feels a little out-of-reach when you have actual financial commitments and want to do things like eat food.)

At the other end, there’s the functional careers advice version. Update your CV, optimise your LinkedIn, network more, search these job titles. (Useful, but not hugely inspiring and definitely not something I want to read in bed with my cup of tea on a Sunday morning.)

I reckon there’s something in between. The story of ordinary people trying to work out what comes next when Plan A is no longer available, affordable, sustainable or desirable.

Why it matters for employers, too.

If you work in people, culture, employer brand, internal comms or leadership, I think these stories are worth paying attention to. Because they reveal what work really means to people, beyond their LinkedIn profiles and job titles.

They show how closely our jobs are tied to identity, confidence, money, belonging, family life and self-worth. They show what people need from organisations when change happens. They show the real impact of redundancy, not just as a HR process, but as an emotional rupture. They show what support is missing when people are expected to adapt.

They show why employee experience can’t just be designed around attraction, onboarding and progression. It also has to consider uncertainty, transition, endings and repair.

A healthy culture isn’t a utopia where nothing difficult ever happens - no organisation can promise that - but organisations can decide how they behave when difficult things do happen.

They can communicate with care, give people enough information to make decisions, stop dressing up bad news as an ‘opportunity’, and above all, treat employees as people with lives outside work.

Here’s what I’m aiming for.

I’m imagining After Plan A as a growing collection of practical, human stories about work and change. Some pieces will be interviews with people open and willing to share their experiences. Some might be anonymous, for those still in the thick of it or navigating tricky circumstances.

Some may look at the practicalities of redundancy, retraining, stepping back, changing sector or building a portfolio working life, while others might explore the emotional side of change: confidence, grief, shame, freedom, and identity.

I hope it becomes useful for people who are wondering what might come next, and reassuring for people who think they are the only ones lying awake trying to make the spreadsheet stay green.

And I hope it becomes interesting for anyone who cares about the future of work, because the future of work isn’t just about technology, skills and productivity. It’s also about people trying to build lives that fit into that future.

A call for contributors.

I’d love to speak to people who have experienced their own After Plan A moment.

That might mean:

• You were made redundant and had to rebuild or retrain.

• You changed career in your 40s, 50s or beyond.

• You left a role because of burnout, illness, menopause, parenting or caring responsibilities.

• You stepped back from a senior position.

• You moved from corporate life into something smaller or more flexible.

• You took casual work while figuring out your next step (maybe you’re still figuring it out).

You don’t need a neat, polished story or a perfect ending. You don’t need to have discovered your purpose, doubled your income or started a six-figure coaching business.

The honest version is far more useful (honestly).

If you’d be open to sharing your story, named or anonymously, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re someone who is currently thinking about life after Plan A, I’d love you to follow along too.

What’s that saying: ‘Life happens while you’re making other plans’. Well, yes, sometimes Plan A comes to an end. But what happens next is what’s really worth talking about.

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Technically, these messages are all ticking the box of ‘communication’. But are they really connecting?

Photo by Tegan Mierle on Unsplash

According to the IC Index 2026, employees are giving internal communication a reality check. Fewer rate it as excellent, trust in leaders has fallen, most people have less than ten minutes a day to engage with updates, and only just over half feel what they receive is actually relevant.

Humans are story-shaped

Long before organisations had channels, internal comms teams and strategies, humans had stories.

They helped us share knowledge, understand danger, explain change and remember what mattered. They also helped us feel part of a group.

Nowadays, storytelling might sit under ‘entertainment’, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was essential social infrastructure.

Organisations have confused communication with distribution

Many internal comms teams work on the assumption that once something’s been sent, it’s automatically been understood.

But the IC Index findings suggest otherwise. Employees are short on time, trust is increasingly fragile and clarity around change is patchy. The issue isn’t whether messages are reaching people; it’s whether people can actually make sense of them.

The cold comms checklist

When the comms loses the story:

The purpose disappears
People don’t understand why something matters.

The human voice disappears
Messages sound polished but robotic and lacking emotion.

The context disappears
Employees hear the decision, but not what led to it.

The employee role disappears
People don’t understand where they fit or what changes for them.

The tension disappears
Everything is made to sound smooth, even when people know it isn’t.

Everyone knows that a good story needs some tension. Something corporate comms tends to edit out.

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Six ways to introduce a storytelling ethos to your internal comms

1. Start with the human question
Before writing, ask: what are people worried about, hoping for or trying to understand?

2. Tell the story of the change, not just the detail of the change
What happened? Why now? What did we learn? What was difficult? What comes next?

3. Use leaders as narrators, not just approvers
A leader message should sound like someone taking responsibility, not just signing off a prewritten statement.

4. Equip managers to translate the story
Give them the context. The IC report is clear that managers are a key channel to build understanding, so they need more than bullet points.

5. Make the employee part of the story
What does this mean for their work, their team, their choices, their future?

6. Let stories go both ways
Internal comms shouldn’t only tell the organisation’s story to employees. It should also bring employees’ stories back into the organisation.

People aren’t looking for softer, fluffier comms

They’re looking for messages that feel more human. In a world of constant change, shrinking attention and falling trust, information alone isn’t going to cut it. People need context, honesty and to understand where they fit.

Maybe the job of internal comms is no longer to simply share what’s happening, but to help people make meaning from it.

Just like storytellers have done for thousands of years.

Like my work? Buy me a coffee

Remove the boiling water tap.

That’s right, rip it out. Bin it. And replace it with a kettle.

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash

On the surface, this sounds ridiculous. The boiling tap is a work of genius - it saves time, it’s more efficient and gets you your cup of tea far quicker.

But that’s exactly the problem.

The unstoppable rise of convenience

Modern life is obsessed with eliminating friction. One-click buys (one-click job applications), contactless payments, voice notes instead of phone calls.

It’s reached an extent where people are now deliberately introducing small inconveniences back into their lives. They’re walking to the shops instead of ordering online, ditching their Kindles in favour of hardbacks, using old-school alarm clocks instead of phones.

It even has a name: frictionmaxxing (which I hate and shall never use unless sarcastically, but I appreciate the sentiment).

It’s not because the old way we better or faster, but it was more human.

The role of the humble kettle

The kettle isn’t valuable just because it boils water (although that is very helpful). It’s valuable because it creates a shared pause in the day. While you’re waiting for it to boil, someone else wanders in. You start chatting about The Traitors, or that event you went to last week, or if you’re British like me, the weather.

You discover all kinds of things about people: that their child has started school, that they’re struggling with a pitch, or that they’ve found a great new coffee shop nearby. None of that was the purpose of making a cup of tea, but it’s all valuable.

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Going beyond the kettle

Many organisations are removing the things that create friction. They automate, streamline and optimise for efficiency. They eliminate waiting, wandering and unplanned interaction.

And then they wonder why culture feels transactional.

Research into social capital consistently shows that informal interactions play a huge role in trust, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Some of the most influential workplace studies have found that spontaneous encounters and weak social ties are often where innovation and problem-solving happen.

The famous ‘water cooler’ effect isn’t really about the water cooler itself - it’s about chance encounters, spontaneous conversations and the opportunity to build relationships.

Inefficiency is the natural state

The natural world is full of things that seem like inefficiency. Growth that slows (or appears to grind to a halt entirely) in the winter, rivers that meander rather than travel in straight lines, ecosystems that are seemingly full of redundancy and waste.

But it’s these characteristics that make them resilient.

Workplaces tend to pursue the opposite: every minute accounted for, every interaction carefully scheduled, every process continuously optimised.

But humans aren’t machines and communities are production lines. Sometimes what looks like inefficiency is actually the most valuable thing of all.

And perhaps that’s why the humble kettle matters. Not because it takes four minutes to boil water instead of four seconds, but because it creates a pause, a moment of reflection or connection.

In a world increasingly designed for convenience, perhaps we should be a little more careful of what we’re optimising away.

Even if it’s just the kettle.

If you’re enjoying my work and would like to say thank you by buying me a coffee, I would be thrilled.

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And if the connection isn’t there, the first response is to fix it with more communication, more messaging, a clearer narrative about what the organisation stands for.

But connection doesn’t always come from what’s said. Instead, it often grows out of what’s shared.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Humans are hard-wired to belong.

Psychologists describe it as a fundamental need, rather than a nice-to-have. The need to feel part of a group, to be recognised within it, and to experience things alongside other people.

And when that need isn’t met, it results in things like disengagement, low trust, and feelings of distance from the work or the people around us.

Humans have traditionally met that need through ritual.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described ritual as something that creates social cohesion through shared experience.

More recent studies have shown that even small, repeated rituals can:

• increase feelings of belonging

• strengthen group identity

• reduce uncertainty and anxiety

• make experiences feel more meaningful

Rituals help people feel connected to something beyond themselves.

Now, I’m not one to glorify the past. Work was hard, relentless and unforgiving and it’s only really in recent times that organisations have started to care at all about the people who work for them.

That said, there were probably more shared structures around it.

Clearer starts and stops, more visible transitions and more moments to experience things collectively.

Modern work has made things a little more distributed, digital, flexible and autonomous. Which, in many ways, is great. But it does mean fewer opportunities for connection.

According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, the majority of time at work is now spent in fragmented communication (emails, messages, meetings), even when we’re technically ‘working together’.

This is where ritual becomes useful again.

It doesn’t have to be something nostalgic or symbolic (or heaven forfend, cringeworthy), but something functional that brings people together.

It gives shape to our days and our work:

• this is the start

• this is the end

• this mattered

• we did this together

The challenge, of course, is when they feel imposed or enforced. There’s a big difference between an ‘initiative’ that’s been thrust upon people and something that emerges more organically.

One of the best and simplest I read about years ago was an organisation that had a 15-minute tea break at the same time every day. That’s it. But it gave everyone the chance to down tools, stop staring at a screen, brew up and have a chat. People spoke to colleagues outside of their teams, shared snippets of their lives and connected in a completely natural way.

It could also be:

• Walking meetings

• A weekly trip to the pub (big fan of this on my team)

• A two-question wrap up at the end of each project (“What went well? What could we have done better?”)

• Five minutes at the start of team meetings to catch up on each others’ weekends

So maybe the question isn’t: “How do we get people to believe in our purpose?”

Maybe it’s: “Where are the moments where people actually feel like they belong?”

And what would it look like to create more of those? Not as formal or overthought programmes or processes, but as simple rituals that people recognise as their own.

But in the workplace, we’ve designed something totally removed from this rhythm. Organisations that expect constant, uniform output, regardless of time, energy or what’s going on in people’s lives (or the wider world, which let’s face, can feel like a bin fire at times).

What results is a system that looks like a well-oiled machine on the surface. But when you look a little deeper, you’ll find people and teams that are burned out and struggling to stay afloat.

Research shows that half of employees report feeling ‘used up’ at the end of the day.

And who can blame them? Humans aren’t machines; we’re cyclical. Our energy fluctuates across the day, week, month and year. It ebbs and flows with different stages of our lives, but the way we design work assumes a level of consistency that’s just not possible.

We’ve designed for permanent summer.

“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer.”

- Katherine May, Wintering

In nature, summer means growth, energy, output. Beautiful displays of flowers, birds in full flight, the sun providing warmth until late in the evening.

At work, everything is treated like summer. Organisations, teams and people are expected to be always on, always productive, always delivering.

But winter gets forgotten.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt.”

- Katherine May, Wintering

In nature, winter is a time of rest, recovery and renewal. Nobody walks through a forest in January, sees the bare branches and thinks it’s failing. We know it’s an essential part of the turning wheel of the year, and in a few short weeks, those bare branches will be full of fresh green leaves and blousy blossom.

At work though, rest is something people feel ashamed of. Something to squeeze in between meetings, emails and output. It’s left for individuals to manage, and rarely baked into the systems and ways of working.

But winter still happens.

So what does ‘winter’ look like in your organisation?

‘Winter’ isn’t necessarily about just doing less; it’s about creating the conditions for something better to happen later.

But there are small, realistic ways to honour rhythms at work.

Create intentional ‘low intensity’ periods

Rather than assuming everything happens at pace all year round, identify some quieter periods and deliberately reduce intensity. It could mean lighter meeting schedules, longer lunch breaks, time to think more deeply or strategically about challenges, the chance for people to shadow other teams or explore development and training opportunities.

Build reflection into the system

In nature, winter means a time to pause. At work, we deliver, we move on, we repeat. By building in ‘what did we learn’ sessions after projects, regular team wrap-ups and end-of-year reflections, there’s time and space to learn from one another and see where things could be made better.

Protect thinking time

People need space to think, not just respond. Protect their time with ‘no meeting’ blocks, provide quiet working spaces and recognise the value of strategic and creative thinking, not just delivery.

Redefine productivity

When your organisation is in a ‘winter’ phase, broaden your definition of ‘productive’. Learning, experimenting, innovation, improving processes, mentoring and simplifying can all make a positive impact.

Ask yourself: If (and when) your organisation has a winter, what’s one thing you could change?

What would stop? What would slow down? What could get more attention? What would people have space to think about?

Nature doesn’t treat rest as a luxury that needs to be earned. But organisations are yet to catch up.

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Most organisations don’t think of themselves as living systems. But they are. And if you looked at your workplace the way you’d look at a forest, you might start to see the problems a little more clearly…

A healthy forest isn’t managed through targets and instructions; it thrives because the conditions are right. The same is true of organisations.

Forests and workplaces are both systems made up of interdependent parts.

To survive, they rely on relationships, conditions, balance, cycles and constant adaptation. In fact, when those things are in place, they thrive. But when they’re not, the whole system weakens (no matter how strong individual teams or leaders might be).

Right now, many organisations are showing symptoms of a system under strain. Global engagement levels remain depressingly low, with just 20% of employees feeling engaged at work.

Conditions drive growth

In a forest, nothing grows without the right conditions. Whether it’s soil, water, light, or space, all are essential.

At work, however, we expect people to start being innovative, taking ownership, or collaborating without changing the conditions they’re working in.

You can’t demand growth if the environment isn’t set up to support it. Research from Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the single biggest factor in high-performing teams. Not talent or structure, but the environment.

You also need to ask yourself: what are we actually making easy, and what are we making hard?

Everything is interconnected

In a forest, the trees, the soil, water, and fungi are all connected. Changes in one part affect the whole ecosystem.

At work, we tend to treat things in isolation. It could be engagement, performance, wellbeing or culture - we set up a task force, put our blinkers on and take a long hard look at what’s going on and what needs to change.

But they’re all linked. Trying to fix one without looking at the bigger picture is doomed to fail - you can’t isolate culture from how work actually happens. You need to stop looking at ‘people initiatives’ as separate from operations and instead, look at how systems reinforce (or undermine) each other.

Diversity creates resilience

In a forest, monocultures are fragile. Diverse ecosystems are stronger and more adaptable to change.

At work, we say we value diversity, but often design for sameness, conformity and ‘cultural fit’.

Resilience is born out of difference, not uniformity. You need to ask yourself whether you’re truly enabling different perspectives or rewarding people who do the same thing (in the same way) over and over?

Nothing operates at full capacity all the time

In the forest, there are cycles. Seasons of growth, rest, decay and regeneration.

At work, we design for constant output, consistent performance and always-on availability. But systems that don’t allow for recovery eventually fail.

The World Health Organisation now classifies burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ linked directly to chronic workplace stress, not an individual weakness.

You need to look at where recovery is built into your system, what ‘winter’ looks like in your organisation and how people are supported to thrive at different stages of their lives.

Regeneration feeds growth

In the forest, decay and dead matter are nourishment for the next season or generation of growth.

At work, we avoid failure. We rarely take the time to pause and reflect on what went wrong and how it can fuel improvement.

But organisations that don’t learn can’t evolve and regenerate. You need to create space for reflecting and learning, rather than moving on to the next deliverable.

Growth has limits

In a forest, growth is balanced. It doesn’t happen endlessly in one direction.

At work, we often pursue constant growth, increased output and expansion at any cost, without asking what’s sustainable. Over half of employees report feeling ‘used up’ at the end of the workday (APA Work in America survey), a clear sign of systems that are extracting more than they sustain.

Unbalanced growth weakens the entire system. You need to look at what you’re optimising for - short-term output or long-term health?

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Most organisations are run like machines

But the question for leaders isn’t: ‘How do we improve performance?’ It’s: “What kind of environment are we asking people to grow in?”

Because if the conditions are right, growth happens naturally.

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I’ve seen it over and over again. Organisations where the only real way to progress is to manage people.

But not everyone wants to be a manager. And not everyone should be a manager. Everyone knows someone who’s brilliant at their job. Reliable, innovative, highly skilled. So guess what? They get promoted. Now they manage a team of people and they’re terrible at it. Plus, they spend less time doing the stuff they’re actually good at, so everyone suffers. Including the person who was promoted in the first place.

In too many organisations, progress follows an archaic and predictable path. Employee, then manager, then leader. It doesn’t even seem like there’s an alternative.

And it’s not what a lot of people are looking for. Research shows that 40-50% don’t actually want to move into people management. They’re simply not motivated by the thought of managing others.

(I’m one of them, can you tell?)

But it’s not just about individual preferences. It’s about what happens when management becomes the default measure of success. If becoming a manager is the only way to progress, then ultimately, people are going to do. Not because they have a burning desire to lead and nurture a team, but because they want to grow.

And that’s how you end up with reluctant managers, who do the absolute minimum. Or worse, resentful managers, who can actually harm the people they’re supposed to be leading.

Managers are a huge influence on people’s experience of work. When I think back to previous jobs, it’s not the clients, the work, or the office that stands out in my mind - it’s the manager. When they’re good, they can make even the most difficult clients and days in the office easier. When they’re bad, they make you dread starting the day.

Research backs this up. Gallup has repeatedly found that managers account for up to 70% of team engagement.

Essentially, managers matter.

And yet we create them based on how someone’s performed in an entirely different role. (Spoiler alert: just because someone’s a spreadsheet whizz, it doesn’t automatically make them a great people manager.)

So what’s the alternative?

Well, there is one, and it’s a term that’s been growing in popularity over the last few years - the idea of the ‘squiggly career’.

Popularised by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis, squiggly careers move away from the concept of a straight ladder, acknowledging that careers aren’t always linear, aren’t always focused on upward growth and are more about exploring different directions.

So why do so many organisations still function as though the ladder is the only option? They talk about flexibility, growth and breadth of opportunity, but they do things like give pay increases based on management responsibilities, tie status to team size or recognition to leadership roles.

So even though alternatives exist, they don’t feel like real options.

But what if progress at work wasn’t defined by how many people you manage? What if it was about deepening your expertise, expanding your skillset, growing your influence or solving more complex challenges?

These are all forms of growth - they’re just less visible in traditional organisational structures.

One attribute that tends to get totally lost in ladder-based careers is (drumroll please) curiosity.

In knowledge-based work, it’s curiosity that drives exploration, which drives growth and innovation. In fact, in a squiggly career, curiosity is one of the most valuable skills you can have. But when faced with a tried, tested and predictable career path, it tends to fall by the wayside.

So what should organisations do?

Create meaningful progression for individual contributors. Recognise and reward different types of contribution. Stop measuring success by team size and make lateral moves as legitimate as upwards ones.

Not everyone needs to manage people to grow. But they do need to feel like they’re moving forward.

Not everyone wants to be a manager. And that shouldn’t be a problem. What it should be is a sign that we need a broader definition of what progress looks like. Especially in a world where the most interesting careers aren’t necessarily the most linear ones, but the ones driven by a spirit of curiosity.

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A new employer brand is launched. The messaging is clear, the visuals are strong and there’s a feeling that something big has happened.

And then… everything continues in exactly the same way.

The same meetings, work processes, decisions, habits.

The employer brand exists. It’s made the walls look lovely and given the intranet a facelift. But it doesn’t seem to have changed very much.

Employer brands are designed to shape culture. To attract the right people, engage them and give them a reason to stay. And they usually do a good job. At least, on the way in.

Nearly 90% of candidates say they consider employer brand before applying. People are paying attention and making huge, life-changing decisions based on what organisations say about themselves.

But once people are inside, something changes.

Globally, only one in five employees feels engaged at work. This suggests that whatever employer branding is doing externally, it’s not consistently translating into how work actually feels day-to-day.

Part of the problem is where employer branding tends to stop.

A lot of time and effort goes into researching the organisation, defining the EVP, crafting the narrative, designing the creative, launching the campaign. All this work goes a long way in giving organisations clarity, a shared language and a sense of identity.

But it doesn’t necessarily create change.

Because culture doesn’t live in messaging - it lives in what people see, feel and experience every single day. In how decisions are made, in what gets rewarded (and what doesn’t). In what’s tolerated and in how managers role model behaviours (good and bad).

In fact, Gallup’s research suggests that 70% of team engagement is driven by managers. They account for a significant proportion of how people experience work day to day. Not the brand, not the campaign, not the posters on the wall, but the behaviour.

Which means you can have a beautifully articulated employer brand, and still provide an everyday experience that doesn’t quite match it.

So the question isn’t: “How do we communicate this employer brand?”

It’s: “What needs to change for the employer brand to feel true?”

This is where we move from EVP to everyday.

Here’s a simple way of thinking about it:

Say → Do → See

Say: what we say about ourselves

Do: what actually happens

See: what people learn to believe

Most employer branding focuses exclusively on the first part, but people experience the second. And over time, that becomes the third.

Take something simple like “we enable ownership”. As a line on a careers site or in a job ad, it sounds promising. But if employees need multiple layers of approval to make a decision, or if people are constantly second-guessed, then what they see is something entirely different. And what they believe becomes: “This isn’t somewhere I can actually take ownership”.

No amount of messaging can fix that.

Of course, the opposite is also true. If decision-making becomes clearer, if managers take a step back and if people are trusted to try (and fail), things start to shift. People begin to see ownership in reality and over time, they start to believe it.

Building and launching an employer brand doesn’t require a complete overhaul of how an organisation works. It can be much smaller than that. Because it’s in the moments that happen every day - meetings, feedback, decisions, recognition - that change can be felt and an employer brand can truly come to life.

It gives us a way of asking “if this is what we say about ourselves, where would we expect to see it?”

Not on the walls or on LinkedIn, but in the work.

People don’t believe employer brands because they read them; they believe them because they see them, day after day.

The work doesn’t stop when the brand guidelines are signed off and saved on the server.

This is where it begins, by making it visible in the way people work, interact and grow.

This is where it moves from EVP to everyday.

It’s a familiar scene. After months of hard work and research, first drafts and redrafts, the HR team have agreed on a refreshed set of values.

The posters have been printed, the intranet page updated and the launch deck is polished and ready to go.

The writing is quite literally on the wall.

But in organisations where people are already drowning in communication, does anybody actually stop to read it?

The internal comms deluge

Employees are saturated with information. The average office worker receives around 120 emails a day and 153 Teams messages per week. They’re interrupted by digital notifications every two minutes - that’s around 275 interruptions a day.

In this environment, new cultural messaging isn’t received as insight or a call-to-action. It’s received as Just More Noise.

In theory, the launch of a cultural initiative is supposed to clarify what matters and focus people’s attention. In reality? It just adds another layer to the organisational wallpaper.

Words alone rarely change behaviour

Culture isn’t language. It’s behaviour.

Words might tell employees what matters, but it’s behaviour that shows them. Leaders might say ‘we value collaboration’ but exclusively recognise individual achievement. Innovation might be ‘encouraged’, but behind the scenes, mistakes are punished. ‘Wellbeing matters’, but managers praise late-night emails.

Over time, employees learn something important: culture isn’t what gets written down. It’s what gets reinforced.

From big idea to wallpaper

The problem with culture change in comms-heavy organisations is that posters, headlines, decks and messaging look like action. Yes, they make culture visible, but they don’t make it real. In fact, they turn culture into branding.

And just like they do with banner ads, corporate jargon and lengthy mission statements, employees learn to filter it out, and it quickly fades into the background.

Where culture change really happens

Culture shifts when behaviour shifts. And this happens based on what leaders notice, what managers reinforce, what gets rewarded and (most importantly) what gets tolerated.

So instead of painting ‘ownership’ above the reception desk, leaders could publicly praise someone for taking initiative or change a decision-making process.

Instead of posters shouting about ‘collaboration’, they could redesign team meetings to encourage idea sharing, celebrate cross-team wins or find creative ways to bring people together.

Comms still matters

But it can’t do everything. What it can do is explain behaviour change, reinforce examples, tell stories about real actions and impact.

The most powerful culture communication isn’t aspirational messaging. It’s storytelling around real behaviour that’s already happened.

There’s nothing wrong with writing culture down. It’s a great starting point: it clarifies intention and signals a shared direction. But if culture lives exclusively in messaging, it quickly becomes part of the furniture. Another poster, another section in some guidelines, another page on the intranet.

The writing might be on the wall. But unless behaviour changes alongside it, few people will bother to read it.

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

If you’ve spent more than five minutes scrolling Substack this year, you’ll have been urged to go analogue. It makes sense: after years of doomscrolling and neck tech, we’re all itching for a more offline, hands-on lifestyle.

But can this great analogue shift translate to workplaces?

I reckon it can (and probably should).

It’s the great paradox of modern work: we have access to more tools and technology than ever, yet people are increasingly more tired, more distracted and more disconnected.

Digital doesn’t differentiate anymore. Nobody’s impressed with great messaging apps or virtual onboarding sessions. Being able to connect to colleagues, no matter where you are, is a baseline expectation. Like a ‘competitive salary’ (cough cough).

What does make a workplace stand out - and will increasingly do so - is how human it feels.

But what does going analogue actually mean?

It doesn’t mean rejecting technology and romanticising the age of the fax machine. It doesn’t mean enforcing five-day-a-week office mandates that penalise anyone with any form of neurodiversity, disability, long commute or caring responsibilities.

It means valuing physical, in-person experiences, creating meaningful shared moments and slowing down decision-making and conversations.

So what could this look like for your workplace?

It looks like real-life conversations instead of email broadcasts. Live workshops rather than webinars. Immersion days instead of virtual onboarding. Guest speakers instead of e-learning. Employer brands that go beyond nice headlines and inform people’s lived experience. Culture that isn’t simply values on a wall but how a workplace feels in the moments that matter.

Because I’m a brand strategist and love a framework, here’s a handy way to think about it. Introducing (drumroll please) the Four Ps of Human Work…

Presence. Being fully there, rather than keeping one eye on emails.

Participation. Getting people involved, instead of simply observing.

Physicality. Using materials, movement and surroundings to inspire new ideas.

Pace. Creating space for longer conversations and deeper thinking.

Where could you introduce more of these four things into your workplace? Think about moments or places where people naturally gather, reflect and chat - that’s usually a good place to start.

Technology is only going to keep accelerating, so culture has to deepen. The best workplaces won’t be the ones moving the fastest; they’ll be the ones cultivating genuine connection and giving people space away from screens.

Start small. A proper conversation instead of another Slack thread. A notebook instead of a new app. A walk in the park instead of a status meeting.

What’s one way you could make your workplace feel more analogue this month?