Oscillating between extremes is a familiar pattern for organizations and the concept of the cultural pendulum illustrates how workplace values shift over time. These shifts often swing between opposing ends before eventually finding a balanced middle ground. In recent years, however, disruptions like the pandemic, technological acceleration, social movements and evolving work expectations have significantly amplified these swings. We’ve witnessed organizations shift from hierarchical to flat structures, traditional workplaces to fully remote setups, hustle culture to well-being focus, uniformity to hyper-personalization and stability to relentless innovation.   

Cultural oscillations don’t just disrupt workflows. They drive disengagement and attrition. Reports indicate that 90% of UK employees feel disengaged, with many opting for ‘quiet quitting’ a term used to describe doing only the bare minimum at work in order to prioritize life outside of it. Global turnover climbed to 20% in 2024, while the average tenure has dropped to 4.2 years.   

While change is inevitable, constant pendulum swings are exhausting, disruptive and rarely optimize the return on human capital investments. For organizations to achieve sustainable success, cultural balance is essential, leveraging the best of extremes while aligning with internal and external factors. This is not just a CHRO concern, but a critical agenda for CEOs and business leaders striving for uncommon growth. By fostering stable and resilient cultures organizations create the conditions for innovation, engagement and long-term competitive advantage.   

What Companies are Getting Wrong   

As the cultural pendulum swings again, organizations must take heed of the extremes shaping today’s workplace. 2025 presents a pivotal opportunity to find equilibrium and thrive, but the examples we’re seeing from major companies serve as cautionary tales. 

The Cost of Retreating from DEI   

Recent headlines have revealed unsettling shifts. Companies like Ford, Walmart and McDonald’s have scaled back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commitments, a move criticized for prioritizing short-term savings over long-term growth, equity and engagement. These retrenchments risk derailing progress and eroding trust.   

Action is critical: Rather than retreating from these crucial values, focus on ways to embed inclusivity at every level, from recruitment to performance management and leadership development. If you can no longer set goals for achieving diversity at senior levels, review consistency of career development plans, promotions and performance ratings across diverse groups as well as attrition rates. Equip your leaders with these insights to ensure DEI is at the core of all decisions to deepen engagement and create an environment where diverse voices shape the future of the business.  

The Return to Office Dilemma   

Another tension point is the resistance to strict in-office mandates being enforced by Amazon, JPMorgan, PwC and others. After years of remote work, many employees expect flexibility, yet in-person collaboration remains vital for building trust and sparking creativity.   

Here’s the way forward: Rather than forcing employees back into full-time office environments, listen to your employees’ perspective on when and how they feel most productive layered on top of the needs of teams, functions and ultimately the business. There’s not a one-size-fits-all as there may be cyclical needs for teams to come together in person. Employees who are just starting off their careers, or those new to a business, may feel a greater need to spend more time amongst colleagues in-person learning how things work. Flexibility often in the shape of a hybrid-first approach balances autonomy with intentional in-person interactions is increasingly a requirement top talent are looking for from employers. Thoughtfully designed on-site events, such as brainstorming sessions and team-building activities, can create meaningful connections while preserving the flexibility employees value.   

Breaking the Cycle of Cultural Extremes   

The pendulum effect isn’t new. It impacts multiple facets of organizational culture.  Decision-making for instance, often swings between rigid top-down control to decentralized autonomy or vice-versa, sometimes losing clear direction in the process. Uber’s shift from centralized to decentralized, and then back again, illustrates the risks of extremes.   

The key to a balanced culture lies in anchoring your organization in its core values. Values-led organizations are uniquely equipped to navigate change, maintain consistency and are perceived more authentically even in the most turbulent times. The results speak for themselves. Costco’s unwavering commitment to its values has led to industry-leading retention rates, while IKEA’s steady growth is fuelled by value-driven decisions in areas like product innovation and sustainable supply chains. By prioritizing long-term impact over reactive trends, these organizations demonstrate the power of living their values.  

Unfortunately, for many organizations, values remain little more than words on a page. That’s why we work hand-in-hand with our clients to ensure values are not just defined but embedded into the fabric of the organization, influencing everyday behaviors, rituals and processes. Using our Human-Centered Transformation Model, we align every aspect of an organization with its core values, helping clients like Chick-fil-A and Encompass Health turn their values into actionable practices that drive sustainable growth and engagement.

Make 2025 Your Year of Culture Balance   

A balanced approach to culture creates stability and a much-needed foundation for businesses, especially those navigating change, growth and transformation. Let’s face it, this is something most businesses are grappling with most of the time. Creating a clearly understood and communicated view brings greater trust, tolerance and engagement that supports business performance during the most turbulent times.    

Here are our top 5 strategies to support cultural balance for the long term:  

1. Keep culture front and center on the executive agenda: Being intentional about measuring employee sentiment, both internally and externally, is critical for understanding emerging expectations and how to respond to them. By making culture a regular agenda item, you’re more likely to make ongoing adjustments, reducing the need for major overhauls.  
2. Stay anchored in values: Use your core values as a guide for decision-making and clearly communicate how they impact decisions that are taken. Consistently integrate these values across the employee eco-system from attraction and recruitment and performance management to rewards, recognition, promotions and development.     
3. Prioritize employee listening: Regularly seek and act on employee feedback to create policies that reflect their evolving needs and expectations. A culture of listening builds trust, strengthens engagement and ensures employees feel valued and connected.  
4. Develop leadership for balance: Equip leaders with the tools and skills to navigate tensions, balance autonomy with collaboration and adaptability with accountability. Strong, values-aligned leadership is the foundation for stability and engagement.   
5. Make incremental changes: Introduce small, manageable adjustments to build change resilience and ensure long-term impact, rather than relying on one-off initiatives. This measured approach ensures resilience, reduces resistance and drives sustained impact.   

Everyone acknowledges that orchestrating organizational change is a crucial component of successful business transformations, so why is it always the Achilles heel?

Business Transformation

Many organizations have struggled to meet the challenges of the modern business landscape, where stakeholder and customer needs and demands continue to change dramatically and new market entrants threaten disruption. Companies need to ask themselves the following:

• “What would our organization look like if it had been designed in the last 10 or 20 years?”
• “In what different ways might an organization like that create value?”
• “What customers would it serve and how?”
• “How might you work backwards from that vision to build a roadmap for bringing your digitally transformed organization to life, properly leveraging the assets and value they already have in hand?”

Customer-led Transformation

No matter how digital organizations become, it will still be humans who ultimately run the organization. Many organizations – some digitally native and some not – understand and treat their humans well. But we’ve also observed that some of those companies have lost track of some equally important humans outside of their organization: their customers! The products, services and experiences they are offering are frustrating the very people who will ultimately determine the survival of the business.

These organizations need to change dramatically to continue to have relevance in the marketplace. They need to inculcate a customer-centric mindset and identify if skills gaps are preventing them from creating more relevant products and experiences. They need to understand where and how their operating model might need to change to support the kinds of pivots and adaptations needed to reconnect with customers and other important stakeholders.

Prophet’s Human-Centered Transformation Model

We view all organizations as a macrocosm of the individual: having a collective DNA, Body, Mind and a Soul. An organization’s culture needs to be understood as a holistic ecosystem and successful transformation today requires leaders to think about every aspect of this ecosystem.

DNA

The DNA is comprised of things that provide direction and tend to change infrequently. The elements that define the destination and direction of travel such as the corporate purpose, values, brand, strategy and employee value proposition.

Soul

It is the elements of the Soul which motivate employees to believe in the DNA. Those are the mindsets and the daily behaviors and ways of working those mindsets motivate; and it’s the stories and symbols that are used to signpost what an organization will and will not embrace.

Mind

The skills and capabilities of an organization’s talent are the Mind of the organization and when properly cared for and nurtured, enable goals to be achieved.

Body

The Body is how collective efforts can be directed. It’s the operating model and organizational design, and the governance, processes, systems, and tools which enable it to cohere.

“An organization’s culture needs to be understood as a holistic ecosystem and successful transformation today requires leaders to think about every aspect of this ecosystem.”

Why We Use the Model

Transformations frequently stumble on cultural roadblocks, which is best expressed in the time-honored truism attributed to legendary business theorist Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

We apply our Human-Centered Transformation Model as a lens for unpacking and refocusing the complexities of organizational and cultural dynamics into specific components that can be more easily digested, explored and understood.

We believe that our model’s holistic nature enables us to look clearly at all the interrelated elements that ultimately manifest in the experience of an organization’s culture. It ensures that our understanding is appropriately layered, helping us to make connections between the explicit and implicit elements that sometimes go undiscussed. Most importantly, it supports nuanced diagnoses of organizational challenges and helps us to design a clear roadmap for change, against which progress can be measured.

If you’d like to discuss taking a human-centred approach to your transformation, then our expert team can help. Contact us today.