A recent Robert Walters survey shows that 82% of UK professionals believe “culture rot” has arrived in their workplace. Cost-cutting, inappropriate automation and time-shifted communication all play a part – but there’s a deeper issue: leaders underestimate the power of small human touchpoints.
Before the old, proud merchant bank Hill Samuel was merged out of independent existence, there used to be a role you no longer see: the tea-lady (it usually was a woman, and this is what they were called, but the key was her personality and attitude, not gender).
One day, some terribly clever manager saved 20 grand by removing the trading floor’s tea-lady, Gloria. Never mind that £20,000 is a rounding error on a trading floor. On a spreadsheet the positive budget variance no doubt appeared pleasingly efficient.
The trouble is, organizations aren’t driven by spreadsheet formulae; they run on patterns of interaction. The traders knew something that their bosses didn’t. Gloria wasn’t simply delivering tea that they could fetch for themselves (instead of trading!) – she was delivering cadence, warmth and continuity. Her daily rounds were a reset, a momentary lift, a reminder that people were seen. In a pressured banking environment, that mattered (in organization theory it might be called “the stabilising effect of simple, repeated acts”. Most people just call it “Culture”).
When Gloria disappeared, the balance shifted. Staff didn’t just lose tea; they lost a cue that connected them to one another. These little cues – not slogans and values statements – are the very thing that creates and maintains culture. Remove enough cues like that and a system becomes brittle: communication loses context, coordination degrades and small frictions start to compound. Culture degrades long before the effects show up in performance.
Given the Robert Walters survey and other similar findings, plus a lot of what I’m hearing anecdotally, it’s clear that this is where modern leadership in the UK – and probably elsewhere – needs to raise its game. Technology can streamline, accelerate and enable. But it’s Touch that creates identity, trust and resilience.
High-performing organizations don’t choose between the two – they design the mix, and they do so on purpose.
The risk today is that, in the pressure to cut costs or in their excitement to automate, leaders delete the touchpoints that enable everything else: the roles, rituals and micro-interactions that keep teams aligned and the atmosphere buoyant. These don’t show up on a spreadsheet, but they shape whether people bring energy, judgement and commitment to their work.
Every organization has its equivalent of Gloria’s tea round – easily overlooked factors with outsize impact. The opportunity and responsibility for leaders is to spot them and protect them.
Because Gloria wasn’t overhead. She was capacity.