Why CHROs Regret Pandemic Workplace Changes But Won’t Admit It

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Hey everyone, welcome to another Five Minute Leader.

I just finished wrapping up and submitting my manuscript for my brand new book. It'll come out in January 2026, and tentatively, it is called The Eight Laws of Employee Experience: How to Build a Future Ready Organization. It's not available anywhere yet. You can't search for it. There's no pre-order, nothing like that. I'll share more info about that, and I'll give all of you who are subscribers to my Substack a sneak peek to the book when I have more materials to share with you.

But today, one of the things that I wanted to do is share an insight in it. I guess you can call it an insight that I gleaned from the book. So, I interviewed 100 Chief Human Resource Officers at companies around the world, and one of the things that really shocked me was that when I would interview these Chief Human Resource Officers, a lot of them were very candid with me in terms of sharing things like they believe during the pandemic that we went too far in terms of workplace flexibility. They believe that they went too far in terms of perks and benefits. They believe they went too far in terms of unintentionally creating a coddled workforce.

And they weren't being mean or dismissive or against a particular generation. They were just basically saying that, hey, we kind of… we did too much, and now we're having a hard time getting back to the basics of work, because we created, unintentionally, this kind of Pinocchio's Island inside of our organization where employees are asking for crazy perks. They want more money. They don't want to show up to the office anymore. We over-invested in psychological safety to the point where if anybody gets offended, they get upset, we can't criticize their ideas. They unintentionally created these environments.