Company culture has become a bunch of marketing nonsense

“Amazon’s culture of innovation and scale powers world-changing ideas and creates a safe, inclusive environment that allows employees to do their best work.” “Are you ready to embrace the challenge? Come build the future with us.”

Those are direct quotes from Amazon’s corporate website. In January, Amazon laid off 18,000 employees in the largest job cut in the company’s history. In March, Amazon laid off 9,000 more. “As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities,” the company said in November. “These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives.”

Like people.

It’s been estimated that the average person will spend about 90,000 hours of their lives working (much more than that if you’re Ryan Reynolds). Given this commitment of time at our jobs, management wants to make it a nice place filled with friendly, like-minded people. That used to be enough. Now, we have company culture.

Companies love their culture, their ethos, why they’re different, how they saw some need, filled some gap, took that risk, gave their life so that we may live. Evidence of this culture is confirmed by their team of changemakers, artists, rebels, thinkers, doers, rock stars, ninjas, and innovators.

The signal is that if you make it in, you’ve made it — access to some elite tribe, the family you’ve always been searching for. You are told that who you are is more than what you do, so be who you are, and do it here. And who are we? Just the most diverse, equitable, inclusive, impactful, collaborative, carbon-neutral, LGBTQ-friendly, people-first, pet-positive, safest space around!

It’s all just marketing nonsense.

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“Working at Citi is far more than just a job,” according to the financial behemoth’s website. “At Citi, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community, and make a real impact.” “Whatever your background, culture, role or experience, there is a place for you at Citi.”

After laying off roughly 7,000 employees so far this year, Citi called the cuts the “right steps to align our structure with our strategy.” For the full year 2022, Citigroup reported net income of $14.8 billion on revenues of $75.3 billion.

It’s unfair to expect companies to never fire or lay off employees, but it’s equally unfair to adopt a tone of altruistic goodness when you need to attract talent, and then unceremoniously off-load that talent when profits are threatened.

When the public-facing message doesn’t match the actual office environment, workers notice.

That’s one of the major flaws in many companies’ return-to-office plans. Because what is company culture? Who “created” yours, and how does it endure? Without a strong grasp of that answer, HR managers will never convince workers to return to the office on their own. Instead, they’ll resort to threats, like we’re seeing now from companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, which have begun tracking employees’ badges to ensure they show up to the office, and noting in their performance review if they don’t.

For all that we lose in our virtual work world, the thing I mourn most is that younger workers can miss out on the trauma bonding that happens in a physical office you’re not allowed to leave — when nobody wants to be there, when it’s late, when you’re hungry and annoyed and stressed, and you’re stuck. You learn how to wait, how to deal with frustration, how to be creative under pressure, and how to manage personalities. It’s a time for killing time, for storytelling, for jokes. We’d work for our freedom, that sweet release, that exhale on the elevator, that door opening into the cool night air.

Loyalty and culture are built from those moments. They are debts to friends, not to the company, and those feelings can’t be manufactured. Ask anyone in the military, ask a nurse, ask a firefighter — bonds are formed in downtime and forged in combat.

What companies don’t realize is that a banner is something you rally around because it represents the people you care about. You don’t care about the banner. Burn the banner and we’ll find a new one. In life and in work, our only culture is each other.

In life and in work, our only culture is each other.

After tens of thousands of people lost their jobs in 2023 due to poor resource planning and bad leadership, I’m hopeful we can reduce the short-term thinking, frenzy hiring, and talent pandering that has taken over the C-suite.

Workers are not an inexhaustible resource; they’re an exhausted resource — and mass layoffs are something we’ve all gotten a little too used to. In the year ahead, here’s hoping management begins aligning actions to values and starts putting people before profits.

Sean Carney is the CEO of Wentwell, a strategic communications firm.