Business has taken a wrong turn. Since the 2008 financial crisis, best practice has led companies to believe that the route to driving greater productivity and performance is to establish a workplace culture that prioritises purpose, meaning, and how people feel. As a result, organisations have become increasingly inward-looking, preoccupied more with symbolic purpose statements and curated internal experiences than delivering real value to the business or its customers. However, in today’s challenging economic climate, and with UK productivity at an all-time low, this navel-gazing approach is not only proving ineffective, but is also actively holding companies back. What began as a well-meaning shift towards cultivating happier employees has become a harmful distraction from genuine employee engagement and performance.
This cultural drift didn’t happen overnight. It was fuelled by over a decade in which cheap capital and historically low interest rates reduced the pressure to perform, while a wider cultural shift towards more inclusive teams and the introduction of remote work further encouraged organisations to turn their gaze inwards.
The aim – to engage employees and encourage contribution – was the right one. But what went missing was the crucial link between productivity, culture and strategy. Instead of aligning purpose with performance, we over-indexed on how people felt. Culture resembled more of a mood board than a business strategy, and companies became more focused on internal conversations than external impact.
This hasn’t delivered results or engaged employees. According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, UK workers are some of the most disengaged in Europe, with only 10 percent (down from 20 percent in 2009) saying they felt engaged at work in 2024.
This misunderstanding around company culture has shaped how companies respond to the productivity crisis. In a bid to re-engage workers, many organisations have doubled down on getting staff back to the office by creating a feel-good culture, offering pizza Fridays and inspirational values etched on office walls.
However, high-performing employees don’t want superficial fun or perks; they want a clear framework of what success looks like. They want to feel understood, recognised, and acknowledged. They want to know how their work contributes to the business’ success, and that their effort matters. This is not achieved through beanbags or branded values, but through clarity, direction, and alignment.
Talent shortage or management failure?Â
This breakdown in performance culture hasn’t just distorted how businesses think about values, but also eroded how they operate. Over time, many organisations have lost the ability to manage effectively, attributing performance issues to a lack of talent rather than a failure to align and direct.
Rather than equipping managers to drive outcomes, businesses have defaulted to top-down communications that cascade through layers of leadership without any real accountability or follow-through. As a result, managers are no longer held accountable for managing people, projects, and performance effectively. Instead, they defer upwards, escalating everyday decisions and seeking constant sign-off, creating a bottleneck at the top and disempowered teams at the bottom.
The consequence of this is that leaders assume the issue with their organisation’s productivity is a lack of talent, when in fact it’s a structural and managerial failure. In response, businesses often turn to consultants or double down on tech solutions to circumvent the issue, rather than rebuilding the core capability they’ve lost: competent management that links culture to outcomes.
Realigning workplace culture with performance
What companies need is a renewed focus on a workplace culture that explicitly links employee contributions to performance, growth, and customer values. That doesn’t mean going back to the days of top-down, rigid corporate rulebooks. It means building a culture that is transparent, meritocratic, and unafraid to manage poor performance and to have the hard conversations where necessary.
This means setting a business strategy that the whole organisation understands and prioritises, ensuring that every employee’s efforts and activities are focused on driving it forward.
A key element of this involves cultivating an inclusive environment in which employees from all levels feel that they are both able, and encouraged to contribute to the business’ overall objective. This doesn’t mean a feel-good culture of vague values, quasi-spiritual gobbledegook and superficial fun, but one where clarity, direction, and honest feedback are embedded into the daily routine of performance practices and expectations.
Managers must unlock the contributions of their teams not only through encouragement but through accountability. If leaders want to make room for new potential, they must be willing to manage exits when performance doesn’t serve the business strategy.
A successful workplace culture isn’t an internal project, but a strategic asset. It is grounded in meritocracy and external relevance, always looking outward to customers, competitors, and evolving market shifts. Culture is not perks or ping pong, but a clear and consistent environment where people are aligned to the organisation’s goals and purpose, where people’s contributions are both understood and heard, and where performance expectations are the shared language.
David Snell is the co-founder of Arrival
May 9, 2025
Ping pong, perks, pizza and beanbags won’t get you a better workplace culture
by Daniel Snell • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design
This cultural drift didn’t happen overnight. It was fuelled by over a decade in which cheap capital and historically low interest rates reduced the pressure to perform, while a wider cultural shift towards more inclusive teams and the introduction of remote work further encouraged organisations to turn their gaze inwards.
The aim – to engage employees and encourage contribution – was the right one. But what went missing was the crucial link between productivity, culture and strategy. Instead of aligning purpose with performance, we over-indexed on how people felt. Culture resembled more of a mood board than a business strategy, and companies became more focused on internal conversations than external impact.
This hasn’t delivered results or engaged employees. According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, UK workers are some of the most disengaged in Europe, with only 10 percent (down from 20 percent in 2009) saying they felt engaged at work in 2024.
This misunderstanding around company culture has shaped how companies respond to the productivity crisis. In a bid to re-engage workers, many organisations have doubled down on getting staff back to the office by creating a feel-good culture, offering pizza Fridays and inspirational values etched on office walls.
However, high-performing employees don’t want superficial fun or perks; they want a clear framework of what success looks like. They want to feel understood, recognised, and acknowledged. They want to know how their work contributes to the business’ success, and that their effort matters. This is not achieved through beanbags or branded values, but through clarity, direction, and alignment.
Talent shortage or management failure?Â
This breakdown in performance culture hasn’t just distorted how businesses think about values, but also eroded how they operate. Over time, many organisations have lost the ability to manage effectively, attributing performance issues to a lack of talent rather than a failure to align and direct.
Rather than equipping managers to drive outcomes, businesses have defaulted to top-down communications that cascade through layers of leadership without any real accountability or follow-through. As a result, managers are no longer held accountable for managing people, projects, and performance effectively. Instead, they defer upwards, escalating everyday decisions and seeking constant sign-off, creating a bottleneck at the top and disempowered teams at the bottom.
The consequence of this is that leaders assume the issue with their organisation’s productivity is a lack of talent, when in fact it’s a structural and managerial failure. In response, businesses often turn to consultants or double down on tech solutions to circumvent the issue, rather than rebuilding the core capability they’ve lost: competent management that links culture to outcomes.
Realigning workplace culture with performance
What companies need is a renewed focus on a workplace culture that explicitly links employee contributions to performance, growth, and customer values. That doesn’t mean going back to the days of top-down, rigid corporate rulebooks. It means building a culture that is transparent, meritocratic, and unafraid to manage poor performance and to have the hard conversations where necessary.
This means setting a business strategy that the whole organisation understands and prioritises, ensuring that every employee’s efforts and activities are focused on driving it forward.
A key element of this involves cultivating an inclusive environment in which employees from all levels feel that they are both able, and encouraged to contribute to the business’ overall objective. This doesn’t mean a feel-good culture of vague values, quasi-spiritual gobbledegook and superficial fun, but one where clarity, direction, and honest feedback are embedded into the daily routine of performance practices and expectations.
Managers must unlock the contributions of their teams not only through encouragement but through accountability. If leaders want to make room for new potential, they must be willing to manage exits when performance doesn’t serve the business strategy.
A successful workplace culture isn’t an internal project, but a strategic asset. It is grounded in meritocracy and external relevance, always looking outward to customers, competitors, and evolving market shifts. Culture is not perks or ping pong, but a clear and consistent environment where people are aligned to the organisation’s goals and purpose, where people’s contributions are both understood and heard, and where performance expectations are the shared language.
David Snell is the co-founder of Arrival