Last month, I watched as a company executive proudly announced their latest initiative to revitalize office culture: “Donut Fridays.” The room’s reaction was telling—polite smiles that didn’t reach eyes, a few exchanged glances. Later, in the break room, I overheard the real feedback: “Great, more sugar while our requests for flexible work arrangements keep getting ignored.”

As organizations push for a return to pre-pandemic norms, many leaders are missing what employees truly need in this “new normal.” The disconnect is startling: while executives focus on superficial perks and office amenities, workers are asking for fundamental changes to how, when, and where they work.

The Great Disconnect: Perks vs. Priorities

A recent viral Reddit thread with over 20,000 comments revealed a troubling truth: employees across industries feel their companies are using surface-level perks to mask deeper organizational issues. “My company brought in a ping pong table the same week they announced they were cutting our 401(k) match,” wrote one user in a comment that garnered thousands of upvotes.

This disconnect isn’t just anecdotal. According to McKinsey’s 2023 American Opportunity Survey, 87% of workers offered flexible work arrangements take the opportunity, yet only 23% of executives believe remote work can be sustainable for their organization long-term.

What Employees Actually Want

• Meaningful flexibility that acknowledges their lives outside work
• Transparency about company decisions and future plans
• Voice and agency in shaping workplace policies

Case in point: Airbnb’s approach to the new normal wasn’t centered on office perks but on their “live and work anywhere” policy. CEO Brian Chesky didn’t just announce the change—he explained the reasoning, presented data showing remote work hadn’t hurt productivity, and outlined clear expectations. Employee satisfaction scores rose 22% in the following quarter.

The Superficial Solution Trap

When faced with complex challenges like declining engagement, eroding culture, or resistance to return-to-office mandates, many leaders reach for what I call “sugar solutions”—quick, visible fixes that provide a momentary boost but fail to address underlying issues.

Common Superficial Solutions

The corporate landscape is littered with well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective attempts to boost morale:

• Office renovations that look impressive but don’t address fundamental work experience issues
• Free food and snacks while ignoring requests for better health benefits
• Team building events that eat into personal time without addressing toxic team dynamics

Research from Gartner shows that organizations spending more on employee experience initiatives don’t necessarily see better outcomes. Their 2022 survey found that 82% of employees believe experience initiatives feel disconnected from what they actually need.

Consider the contrast between two financial institutions I consulted for last year. Bank A spent $2 million renovating their headquarters with trendy spaces and amenities, then mandated a five-day return to office. Bank B invested a similar amount in technology enabling hybrid work and training managers to lead distributed teams effectively. Six months later, Bank A’s voluntary turnover was 24% above industry average; Bank B’s was 11% below.

The Trust Deficit: Why Employees Are Skeptical

When I interviewed employees across 12 organizations for my research on post-pandemic work expectations, a common theme emerged: many workers simply don’t believe leadership understands their daily reality.

“There’s this weird disconnect,” explained a mid-level manager at a technology company. “Our executive team talks about being ‘one big family’ while making decisions that clearly prioritize shareholders over staff wellbeing. Then they’re surprised when morale surveys come back negative.”

The Credibility Gap

This trust deficit manifests in several ways:

• Policy whiplash: Frequently changing directions on remote work, office requirements, or company priorities
• Saying-doing gap: Promoting work-life balance while expecting immediate responses to late-night emails
• Selective listening: Soliciting feedback but only implementing suggestions that align with predetermined plans

According to Edelman’s 2023 Trust Barometer, only 52% of employees trust their employers—a figure that has declined steadily since 2019. Without trust, even well-designed initiatives are viewed with suspicion.

Actionable Trust-Building Approaches

Organizations successfully rebuilding trust share these practices:

• Transparent decision-making processes that acknowledge trade-offs
• Leadership vulnerability about mistakes and course corrections
• Consistent follow-through on commitments, even small ones

Salesforce provides an instructive example. When planning their return-to-office strategy, they created a cross-level working group including individual contributors, conducted extensive internal research, and published the findings—even those that contradicted executive preferences. The resulting policy wasn’t universally loved, but employees reported feeling heard and understood.

The Real Culture Conversation

Corporate culture has become a convenient scapegoat for return-to-office mandates. “We need to preserve our culture” has become shorthand for “we want things back the way they were.” But culture isn’t ping pong tables or hallway conversations—it’s the lived experience of values, priorities, and behaviors.

A Reddit comment with over 15,000 upvotes captured this sentiment perfectly: “My company keeps saying we need to be in-office for the culture. The culture is that I sit at my desk with headphones on talking to my team on Slack—most of whom work in different offices anyway.”

Redefining Culture for Distributed Work

Forward-thinking organizations are approaching culture differently:

• Intentional connection rituals that work across different work arrangements
• Outcome-focused performance metrics rather than presence-based evaluation
• Documentation and knowledge-sharing practices that reduce dependency on informal networks

GitLab, a company with 1,500+ employees across 65+ countries and no offices, has built a strong culture through radical documentation, asynchronous communication, and structured social connections. Their employee engagement scores consistently outrank industry averages despite—or perhaps because of—their fully distributed model.

Bridging the Gap: From Superficial to Substantive

Creating meaningful change requires leaders to move beyond symbolic gestures to substantive engagement with employee needs. This isn’t about abandoning office space or giving in to every request—it’s about co-creating solutions that balance organizational needs with workforce expectations.

Strategies That Make a Difference

Based on my work with organizations successfully navigating this transition, these approaches consistently yield positive results:

• Conduct honest needs assessments: Use anonymous surveys, focus groups, and one-on-ones to understand what employees truly value
• Pilot before policy: Test different approaches with smaller teams before rolling out organization-wide changes
• Build feedback loops: Create mechanisms for ongoing input and adjustment rather than one-time announcements

When Microsoft redesigned their hybrid work approach, they first conducted extensive internal research, discovering that 73% of employees wanted flexible remote options, but 67% also desired more in-person collaboration. Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all solution, they developed team-level agreements where groups determined their own collaboration rhythms based on their specific work.

The Leadership Challenge: Courage Over Comfort

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of shaping the new normal is that it requires leaders to embrace uncertainty and challenge their own assumptions. It’s more comfortable to restore familiar patterns than to pioneer new ones.

A senior executive I coached recently confessed: “I pushed for return-to-office because that’s how I learned to lead. I’m realizing I need to learn new skills, not force everyone back into an environment where my old skills work.”

The New Leadership Competencies

Leading effectively in this environment requires:

• Comfort with ambiguity and ongoing experimentation
• Ability to build trust and connection across different work arrangements
• Focus on outcomes rather than activity or presence
• Willingness to personalize approaches rather than seeking universal policies

Research from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index shows that 74% of managers feel they don’t have the influence or resources to implement changes for their team, highlighting the need for organizational support for these new leadership approaches.

Moving Forward: Beyond Donuts and Ping Pong

The path forward isn’t about rejecting in-person work or embracing a fully remote future. It’s about thoughtfully designing work arrangements that leverage the best of both worlds while acknowledging that employee expectations have fundamentally shifted.

The most successful organizations in this transition share a common approach: they treat the new normal not as a problem to solve but as an opportunity to reimagine work itself. They ask deeper questions about purpose, productivity, and human connection rather than focusing narrowly on location.

As leaders, our challenge isn’t to restore the old normal with superficial sweeteners. It’s to co-create a new normal that honors both organizational needs and the human beings who make those organizations possible. This requires moving beyond donuts and ping pong tables to address the substantive changes employees are actually seeking.

The question isn’t whether employees will come back to the office for donuts. It’s whether we can create workplaces—physical and virtual—worth coming back to at all.

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Where This Insight Came From

This analysis was inspired by real discussions from working professionals who shared their experiences and strategies.

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