For a brief window — roughly 2021 to 2023 — employees had leverage. The labour market was tight. Resignation was a viable strategy. Companies competed on flexibility, benefits, and culture. The phrase “people-first” appeared in job ads written by the same companies that would, eighteen months later, conduct mass layoffs by email.
The correction was not subtle. Meta laid off 21,000 people across two rounds and called it an “efficiency year.” Amazon cut 27,000. Google laid off 12,000 while posting record profits. The layoffs were not primarily driven by financial necessity. They were driven by a recalibration of power.
“Nobody wants to work anymore” was never an observation. It was a grievance. And the layoffs were the remedy.
The narrative is familiar because it recurs. Every time labour gains temporary leverage, capital responds with a correction framed as discipline. The language is always the same: people have become entitled, expectations are unrealistic, we need to return to a performance culture, we’ve been too soft.
The framing converts a power dynamic into a moral judgement. The employee who wanted flexible working wasn’t exercising a preference. They were being lazy. The employee who asked for better pay wasn’t responding to inflation. They were being ungrateful. The employee who set boundaries wasn’t protecting their wellbeing. They were forgetting how to work.
The “high performance culture” rebrand is the most elegant version of the correction. It sounds aspirational. Who could argue against high performance? But the implementation tells you what it actually means: stack ranking returns, bottom 10% are managed out, expectations increase while resources decrease, and the phrase “we’re raising the bar” becomes indistinguishable from “we’re reminding you who’s in charge.”
The people who have not forgotten how to work are the people doing the work. The people making the claim are the people managing the narrative. Between those two groups sits the entire performance gap that the “high performance culture” will never close, because closing it would require listening to the first group rather than disciplining them.
This is the protection problem in its most visible form. The organisation felt exposed when employees had power. The organisation is now restoring the conditions that prevent that exposure from recurring. It is not building a better culture. It is rebuilding the old one with updated language.
The employees haven’t forgotten how to work. The organisations have forgotten that the brief period when they had to listen was not an aberration. It was a preview of what happens when people have options. Take the options away and you don’t get a better workforce. You get a quieter one. And quiet is not the same as productive. It is the same as silent.