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If 2021 was the year of worker empowerment, 2025 is shaping up to be the polar opposite.
With continued calls for a return to office being met with resistance from workers who see no reason to return other than to prop up the value of commercial real estate, CEOs are no longer in the mood for negotiation, preferring instead to lose those that are unwilling to buy in to their new office-based vision.
The rhetoric from the C-suite is growing bolder, and more hostile. With economic uncertainty driving leadership priorities, top executives are asking more from smaller teams, and making no apologies for it.
Forget the carefully worded memos and morale-boosting town halls. Today's message is increasingly blunt - work harder, stop complaining, and be thankful that you still have a job.
There has been a marked power-shift in employer-employee relations, with significant implications for HR leaders tasked with maintaining culture and engagement.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal recently, Emma Grede, co-founder of Skims and CEO of Good American, put it to employees this way: “Work-life balance is your problem.”
It’s a sentiment that has been echoed across a number of major firms, including Starbucks, where CEO Brian Niccol recently told staff to “own whether or not this place grows” after more than 1,000 jobs were cut.
Return-to-office and rising demands
At JPMorgan, CEO Jamie Dimon was even less restrained, voicing clear frustration with staff pushback on office mandates. “I’ve had it with this kind of stuff,” he said. “I’ve been working seven days a week since Covid, and I come in, and… where is everybody else?”
And then there’s his sweary town hall rant.
This increasingly combative tone comes as many white-collar roles face consolidation, with fewer people expected to carry more responsibilities. It also coincides with the tightening of perks and benefits. Uber, for example, raised the eligibility threshold for a month-long sabbatical from five years to eight, while also upping its office attendance requirement from two days a week to three.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi didn’t waver. “We recognize some of these changes are going to be unpopular with folks,” he said. “This is a risk we decided to take.” For employees unhappy with the new terms, he added, “it is what it is.”
Uber’s CPO Nikki Krishnamurthy even stated the company would be speaking to staff who had been “disrespectful” in voicing concerns.
The message, it seems, is that resistance is increasingly futile.
For HR professionals, such moments represent a growing tension between leadership’s bottom-line focus and employee expectations shaped during the pandemic. Many employees are operating under the belief that it is still 2021, expecting leverage they no longer possess.
Efficiency over empathy
The challenge for HR leaders is how to manage the transition pragmatically. More pragmatically than their leadership at least. A harsher tone may help satisfy investor demands and drive short-term productivity, but it risks eroding long-term engagement, especially as labour markets inevitably fluctuate.
Some executives seem willing to risk morale in exchange for compliance. At MillerKnoll last year, CEO Andi Owen faced intense backlash for telling staff worried about bonuses to “leave pity city.” She quickly apologised. But similar comments today barely cause a ripple. The cultural moment has changed.
AI disruption adds pressure
Adding to the weight on staff is the growing push toward automation and AI. Some companies have decided that new hires should only be approved if managers can show that AI could not do the job instead. After years of depicting Klarna as an AI-first company, however, the fintech’s CEO has just reversed himself, telling Bloomberg the company was once again recruiting humans after the AI approach led to “lower quality’, something certain industry commentators predicted they would end up doing at the time.
Even government work has come under this scrutiny. Elon Musk demanded federal employees submit weekly reports to prove their productivity, calling it a “pulse check.”
In the short term, the hard line is likely to resonate with shareholders and cost-conscious boards. But the longer-term consequences for engagement, loyalty and innovation remain unclear. HR leaders must now operate in an environment where the people agenda is being drowned out by financial urgency.
Stanford’s Charles A. O’Reilly told the WSJ, however, that the cycle will eventually swing back toward employee leverage. “When the market turns around, and job opportunities are plentiful, then CEOs will start to talk more about how important employees are,” he said. “And employees will take advantage of it.”
So, there’s a need to keep agile in anticipation of that pendulum swing.
Until then, the prevailing message from the top is one of survival, not sentiment. For people teams across industries, the shift in leadership attitude demands a recalibration of culture strategies, and a readiness to manage the fallout from employees who feel increasingly marginalised.
The war for talent hasn’t ended. The battlefield is the same, but the rules of engagement now look very different.
