Perhaps we’ve spent decades trying to improve engagement, culture and retention without ever stopping to define the relationship we’re trying to improve.
The employment relationship may be one of the most significant relationships we enter into during our adult lives.
We spend more waking hours at work than we do almost anywhere else. The people we work with influence our confidence, our stress levels, our financial security, our sense of achievement and, increasingly, our identity. Careers shape where we live, the opportunities available to our children and the lifestyle we can afford. They influence our health, our relationships and, in many cases, how we measure success.
Yet despite the importance of work, we rarely stop to ask a deceptively simple question.
What is the employment relationship actually supposed to be?
The future of work isn’t about creating better engagement. It’s about creating a relationship that both employers and employees willingly choose every day.
We talk endlessly about engagement, culture, psychological safety, flexibility, productivity and leadership. Organisations invest millions trying to improve employee experience while employees search for organisations that align with their values and aspirations.
But underneath every one of those conversations sits something much more fundamental.
An exchange.
Not the legal contract signed on the first day of employment. That document outlines pay, hours, leave entitlements and notice periods. It establishes legal obligations, but it tells us almost nothing about the relationship itself.
The real relationship is governed by an unwritten agreement.
One that neither party signs.
One that is almost never discussed.
One that quietly determines whether people trust one another, whether they remain committed when circumstances become difficult and whether they decide the relationship is worth continuing.
It is, for want of a better description, the social contract of work.
For much of the twentieth century, this contract remained relatively stable.
Employees worked hard, demonstrated loyalty and expected to build long careers with one employer. Organisations, in return, offered stability, career progression and the reasonable expectation that commitment would be recognised and rewarded over time.
It was never a perfect arrangement. Employers always held more power than employees. But broadly speaking, both parties understood the exchange they were entering into.
Today, I’m not convinced that shared understanding still exists.
Instead, we seem to be operating from entirely different assumptions about what work is, what employers owe employees and, equally, what employees owe employers.
Perhaps we’ve spent decades trying to improve engagement, culture and retention without ever stopping to define the relationship we’re trying to improve.
The conversation has become increasingly polarised.
Business leaders speak about declining loyalty, increasing entitlement and unrealistic expectations.
Employees speak about burnout, poor leadership, stagnant wages, insecure employment and organisations that prioritise profit over people.
Both conversations contain elements of truth.
Both also miss something important.
Perhaps neither side is behaving irrationally.
Perhaps both are responding to a contract that has fundamentally changed without anyone ever acknowledging it.
For decades, organisations have quite rightly made commercial decisions based on market conditions.
Industries expand.
Markets contract.
Consumer behaviour changes.
Technology disrupts established business models.
Economic conditions deteriorate.
Every business, regardless of size, has a responsibility to remain commercially viable. Sometimes that requires difficult decisions. Restructures. Redundancies. Hiring freezes. Organisational redesign.
No sensible person would argue that organisations should ignore commercial reality.
But commercial decisions have consequences beyond the balance sheet.
They teach people how the relationship works.
Take the mining industry.
Anyone who has spent time in Western Australia has seen the cycle repeat itself. Commodity prices soften, projects slow and workforces reduce. Twelve or eighteen months later the market recovers, recruitment accelerates and organisations once again compete aggressively for talent.
From a commercial perspective, both decisions make perfect sense.
From the perspective of the employee, however, a different lesson is learned.
Employment exists while commercial conditions support it.
That isn’t a criticism.
It’s reality.
But when you’ve experienced that cycle several times, your relationship with work inevitably changes.
If you have a mortgage, children and financial commitments, loyalty begins to feel like a considerably riskier investment than it once did.
Eventually the question shifts.
Instead of asking, “How do I build my career here?”
People begin asking, “Is staying here still the best decision for me?”
That shift is often interpreted as a decline in loyalty.
I’m not sure that’s what it is.
I wonder whether employees have simply become more honest about the calculation employers have always made.
For decades, organisations have asked entirely reasonable commercial questions.
Can this person add value?
Will they improve productivity?
Are they worth the investment?
Will the return justify the cost?
Nobody considered those questions offensive.
They were accepted as prudent business practice.
Today employees are asking remarkably similar questions.
Is this organisation worth my effort?
Is this leader worth following?
Will I leave this role more capable than when I arrived?
Does the flexibility compensate for the lower salary?
Will this organisation support me when circumstances become difficult?
Is the opportunity worth what it asks of me?
In other words…
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Every employee, consciously or otherwise, performs this calculation.
Not once.
Repeatedly.
The equation is rarely just financial.
Salary matters, of course.
But so does trust.
Respect.
Growth.
Recognition.
Autonomy.
Purpose.
Flexibility.
The quality of leadership.
The opportunity to do meaningful work.
Employees don’t experience these things separately.
They experience them collectively as the overall value of the relationship.
Which perhaps explains why engagement has become so difficult to understand.
We often speak about engagement as though organisations create it.
As though better leaders, stronger cultures or more sophisticated employee experience initiatives somehow produce engaged employees.
I’m beginning to think we’ve confused the outcome with the cause.
Perhaps engagement isn’t something organisations create at all.
Perhaps engagement is a judgement.
A decision employees make about whether the exchange remains fair.
Not perfect.
Fair.
I’ve met deeply engaged employees working twelve-hour shifts in remote Western Australia.
The work is physically demanding.
The hours are long.
The conditions are harsh.
Yet they believe the relationship is equitable.
They trust their supervisor.
They feel respected.
They know what’s expected of them.
They’re recognised when they perform well.
The work is difficult.
The relationship isn’t.
I’ve also met employees working comfortable office jobs who are actively disengaged despite reasonable salaries and manageable workloads.
They don’t feel trusted.
Their contribution goes unnoticed.
Development has stalled.
Communication is poor.
The work isn’t particularly difficult.
The relationship is.
Perhaps that tells us something.
Maybe engagement isn’t about happiness.
Maybe it has always been about fairness.
If people believe the exchange is fair, they willingly invest more of themselves.
If they conclude it isn’t, discretionary effort quietly disappears long before the resignation letter arrives.
This is where I think the conversation becomes even more interesting.
At precisely the same time organisations have become more commercially disciplined, society has dramatically expanded what we expect work to provide.
A generation ago, employers were expected to provide employment, reasonable remuneration and opportunities for advancement.
Today we ask considerably more.
We expect organisations to provide purpose, belonging, flexibility, psychological safety, coaching, career development, wellbeing initiatives, inclusion, meaningful work and leaders capable of navigating increasingly complex human relationships.
Many of those expectations are entirely reasonable.
Some are essential.
But they also represent a remarkable shift in what society now expects from work.
Fifty years ago, belonging and identity were rarely found in one place.
They came from families, neighbourhoods, sporting clubs, churches, community groups and civic organisations. The Third Place Theory – read more about it here
Today many of those institutions have weakened.
Work has remained.
Perhaps without fully recognising it, we’ve transferred many of our social expectations onto the workplace.
The modern organisation has become more than an employer.
It has become a community, a learning institution, a support network and, for many people, one of the primary places where they seek purpose and connection.
That isn’t a criticism of employees.
Nor is it an argument that organisations shouldn’t meet those expectations.
It is simply an acknowledgement that the social contract of work now carries a weight it was never originally designed to bear.
And yet, despite all of this, we continue talking almost exclusively about engagement scores, retention rates and employee experience initiatives.
I can’t help wondering whether we’ve skipped a far more important conversation.
Perhaps we’ve become so focused on measuring the health of the employment relationship that we’ve stopped examining the relationship itself.
Employee engagement surveys tell us whether people feel recognised, whether they have opportunities to learn and grow, whether they trust their manager and whether they would recommend the organisation as a place to work. Exit interviews tell us why people leave. Culture surveys tell us how employees experience the organisation.
All of those things matter.
But they are measuring the quality of an exchange without ever asking a more fundamental question.
What exactly are we exchanging?
For all the language surrounding employee value propositions, culture and employer branding, very few organisations ever articulate the social contract they are actually offering.
What do we promise our people beyond paying them correctly and complying with employment law?
What should an employee reasonably expect after five years with us?
What kind of commitment are we asking for?
What kind of commitment are we prepared to give in return?
What promises would we continue to honour if market conditions became difficult?
Those questions aren’t about policy.
They’re about integrity.
Because every organisation has a social contract, whether it chooses to acknowledge it or not. It exists in every promotion that was promised but never delivered. Every redundancy handled with dignity or without it. Every difficult conversation avoided. Every high performer who quietly leaves because nobody noticed what they contributed. Every leader who says people are their greatest asset before cutting learning and development at the first sign of financial pressure.
People don’t learn what an organisation values from its values statement. They learn it by watching what leaders consistently choose to protect.
That is the real contract.
Not the one displayed on the wall.
The one demonstrated in practice.
Perhaps that’s why trust feels so fragile today.
We often describe trust as though it’s something leaders build through authenticity, vulnerability or communication. Those things certainly matter, but trust has always been built on something much simpler.
Consistency.
When words and actions align over time, trust grows.
When they don’t, people adapt.
This is where I think we’ve misunderstood loyalty.
Organisations often speak about loyalty as though it is something employees owe the business. A character trait. A virtue. Something that should exist independently of circumstances.
I’m not convinced that’s ever been true.
Loyalty has always been conditional.
We simply didn’t talk about the conditions.
People stayed because the relationship worked.
Because they were developing.
Because they felt valued.
Because they believed tomorrow would probably be better than today.
Loyalty wasn’t the starting point.
It was the outcome.
Trust isn’t built by what organisations promise. It’s built by the promises they keep when circumstances become difficult.
Perhaps that’s still true.
The difference is that today’s employees are less willing to offer trust before it’s earned.
Previous generations often entered organisations assuming the relationship would be reciprocal until proven otherwise.
Increasingly, employees begin from a different position.
Show me.
Show me that development isn’t just something mentioned in recruitment.
Show me that flexibility applies to everyone, not only high performers.
Show me that values still matter when the business is under pressure.
Show me how people are treated when they make a mistake, when they disagree with their manager or when they decide it’s time to leave.
Show me the relationship before you ask me to commit to it.
That isn’t cynicism.
It’s discernment.
And perhaps organisations should welcome it.
Because employers are making exactly the same assessment.
Every interview is an attempt to determine whether a candidate is worthy of trust.
Can they perform?
Can they learn?
Will they contribute?
Will they strengthen the organisation?
The relationship has always involved mutual evaluation.
We’re simply more willing to acknowledge it now.
Which brings me to HR.
For years our profession has spoken about employee engagement, employee experience and workplace culture as though they are destinations.
Something to be achieved.
Something to improve.
Something to optimise.
Yet I wonder whether we’ve accidentally become preoccupied with the symptoms while overlooking the cause.
Culture is not the relationship.
Engagement is not the relationship.
Employee experience is not the relationship.
They are all consequences of the relationship.
Perhaps the real work isn’t creating engagement.
Perhaps the real work is designing an exchange that both parties willingly choose to continue.
An exchange built on fairness rather than assumption.
On clarity rather than implication.
On consistency rather than slogans.
Imagine if organisations spent as much time defining that exchange as they do writing values statements.
Imagine if leaders could confidently answer questions like these.
What do we genuinely owe our people beyond a salary?
What should our people expect to gain from spending five years here?
What do we ask of them beyond competence?
What does commitment actually look like in this organisation?
What will we never compromise, even when commercial conditions become difficult?
If someone left after several years with us, what would we hope they say they gained beyond a pay cheque?
And perhaps the most confronting question of all.
If every employee had complete freedom to choose again tomorrow, would they still choose us?
Not because they have a mortgage.
Not because there aren’t other jobs.
Not because it’s comfortable.
Because they genuinely believe the relationship is worth continuing.
That question is uncomfortable because it forces organisations to confront something many would rather avoid.
Retention isn’t proof of commitment.
Sometimes people stay because they are engaged.
Sometimes they stay because they are financially trapped.
Sometimes they stay because change feels risky.
Sometimes they stay because they haven’t yet found something better.
Length of service tells us remarkably little about the quality of the relationship.
Choice does.
Perhaps this is where the conversation about work needs to evolve.
Not towards more perks.
Not towards more performative wellbeing initiatives.
Not towards another engagement strategy.
Towards something far simpler.
Honesty.
An honest conversation about what employers can reasonably expect from employees.
An equally honest conversation about what employees can reasonably expect from employers.
Not promises that cannot be kept.
Not aspirational statements written to attract talent.
Real expectations.
Real commitments.
Real accountability on both sides.
Because the strongest employment relationships have never been built on perfection.
They’ve been built on a shared understanding of the exchange.
Perhaps that’s what has been missing.
We’ve spent decades debating flexibility, engagement, retention and culture without ever pausing to ask the question sitting quietly beneath them all.
What is the employment relationship supposed to be?
Until we can answer that together, we’ll continue trying to improve a relationship that neither side has ever properly defined.
And maybe that’s the real work.
Not persuading employees to be more loyal.
Not persuading organisations to care more.
But having the courage to make the unspoken contract explicit.
Because when both employer and employee understand the exchange, trust has somewhere solid to stand.
And perhaps that’s the point.
Not creating workplaces where people never leave.
Creating workplaces where, if someone looked back after giving you five years of their working life, they could honestly say it was time well spent.
If we can create more organisations like that, perhaps we won’t need to spend so much time trying to manufacture engagement.
It will simply be the natural consequence of a relationship that both sides believe is fair.
And isn’t that what every worthwhile relationship is built on?