Robin Schooling

We Were Told To Stop Talking About It

On the last day of January 2025, employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opened a memo from their chief information officer instructing them to remove pronouns from their email signature blocks by 5:00 p.m. This gave a workforce of epidemiologists and public health scientists the better part of one business day to delete a few characters of text that had, until that morning, troubled no one. Similar instructions went out at Transportation and Energy, and the Office of Personnel Management had already directed agencies to switch off the Outlook features that prompted employees for their pronouns in the first place. I’ve spent several decades in HR watching organizations take 18 months to update a job description, so I’ll admit to a certain grim fascination at seeing the federal government move with that kind of speed and precision to eradicate “she/her.”

That, of course, was merely the opening act. What followed over the next two years has been less theatrical and increasingly consequential.

What’s Been Taken Apart

In January 2025, an executive order revoked Executive Order 11246, the Lyndon Johnson directive that had obligated federal contractors to nondiscrimination and affirmative action since 1965. This past August, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published final rules dismantling the regulatory framework built on that order (regulations first issued in 1968 and refined over nearly six decades of rulemaking), and the rescission took effect on October 26. While they were at it, OFCCP eliminated the 7% utilization goal for individuals with disabilities along with the requirement that contractors invite applicants and employees to self-identify as disabled – which strikes me as a curious thing to discard if the stated aim is treating everyone equally, since it’s rather difficult to know whether you’re doing that without asking.

Over at the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division, established in 1957 and long regarded by its own alumni as the department’s crown jewel, has lost roughly three-quarters of its career attorneys. Last December, on the 68th anniversary of the Division’s creation (a detail I’d reject as too heavy-handed if I came across it in a novel), DOJ finalized a rule stripping disparate impact liability from its Title VI regulations and discarding a framework in place since 1973. Disparate impact, a principle in US civil rights law, occurs when a policy or practice that appears neutral on its face disproportionately harms a protected group, such as those defined by race, sex, national origin, age, or disability – even if there was no intent to discriminate. More than 200 former Division employees signed an open letter warning that the institution was close to being destroyed. And in January of this year, the EEOC voted 2–1 to rescind its 2024 harassment guidance in its entirety, including the sections identifying deliberate misgendering and the forced outing of employees as forms of harassment.

None of this rewrote Title VII of course, and employment lawyers have spent the better part of two years reminding clients that Bostock remains the law of the land and that harassment policies covering sexual orientation and gender identity should stay right where they are.

But the law and the message are two different things. And the message that’s been delivered with remarkable consistency over the last 2 years is stop talking about it.

So organizations scrubbed their websites, renamed their employee resource groups, and let the DEI job titles lapse when the last employee resigned (or was let go). They removed “equity” from the company values statement, and hoped nobody would go looking for the old version on the Wayback Machine.

Our own HR professional association, for those who don’t recall, didn’t even wait to be told. In July 2024, six months before any of the executive orders, SHRM announced on LinkedIn that it was dropping “equity” from its DEI platform in favor of “I&D,” with CHRO Jim Link explaining that there was “so much lack of certainty around the definition of what equity means” that the word had become “a distraction.” A year later, the conference that began in 1996 as the Workplace Diversity Conference, spent years as the Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition, and had more recently been trimmed to SHRM Inclusion, was reborn as SHRM Blueprint, complete with a cool blue color palette and the tagline “Compliant. Connected. Competitive.” Its headline panel that October, moderated by Johnny C. Taylor Jr., paired Van Jones with Robby Starbuck, the activist whose campaigns pushed Walmart, Harley-Davidson, and Tractor Supply to abandon or dial back their DEI programs. Kind of like booking an arsonist for the fire safety keynote and calling it viewpoint diversity.

What Didn’t Get Rescinded

The employees, it should be said, didn’t go anywhere.

The transgender warehouse lead at a 140-person distributor still clocks in every morning, as does the only woman on the night shift, the account manager in her late fifties who has noticed she’s no longer invited to the planning meetings, and the program coordinator at a regional nonprofit who requested an accommodation months ago and is still waiting to hear back.

None of these people were ever protected primarily by an OFCCP audit or an EEOC enforcement document; their working lives were shaped, for better or worse, by whether a supervisor treated them like a person, whether someone in HR returned their call, and whether the organization meant what it put in the handbook.

Most of the organizations I spend time with – small and midsized businesses, nonprofits, outfits where the HR department consists of one overextended generalist and a shared drive – never had a Chief Diversity Officer to lay off or a DEI budget to cut. Inclusion, to whatever extent it existed, lived in the daily decisions of managers and the judgment of whoever handled employee relations. So when federal agencies signal that certain employees are no longer worth the trouble, the signal doesn’t stay inside the Beltway; it shows up in the supervisor who decides he no longer needs to bother with a colleague’s pronouns, in a complaint left unanswered because the owner read somewhere that all that DEI stuff is over, and in the employee who concludes that keeping her head down is the safest career strategy available.

Meanwhile, We Welcome the Machines

All of this is unfolding at the same moment that every vendor, consultant, and conference keynote is announcing that AI will transform work, and on that point they’re not entirely wrong, though the transformation looks rather different from the one in the sales materials. AI isn’t going to replace HR or most of the jobs HR supports, but it IS going to replace tasks. And in doing so it will force organizations to decide what work is for and where the humans fit. Those decisions get made by people, and if the people making them have spent two years absorbing the lesson that inclusion is a liability, I don’t love our odds that the redesigned workplace will make much space for anyone who doesn’t resemble the median of the training data.

In April 2025, the White House also directed federal agencies to abandon disparate impact analysis, the very tool designed to catch discrimination that happens without anyone intending it. And, of course, it did so at precisely the moment when algorithmic screening and automated decision-making have made unintended discrimination the most likely kind.

Making Room for Humans

Which brings me to why my colleague and friend Kelley Diona Miller and I are launching a joint venture named Room for Humans. Every risk-averse instinct in our profession says this is still a moment to wait and see, but this week’s midterms suggested that a good many people are done waiting, and so are we. The name works on three levels, each of them deliberate.

Room for belonging means making space for everyone, including the employees organizations have historically found it convenient to overlook. Inclusion and equity are foundational, and diversity is simply reality. Belonging never depended on a federal mandate … and so didn’t evaporate when one was withdrawn.
Room for candor means honest conversations about conflict and accountability, disagreement that doesn’t end careers, and the unglamorous work of repair after something breaks. Employee relations is where inclusion succeeds or fails in practice, and a beautifully worded belonging statement is worth very little if complaints disappear into someone’s inbox.
Room for humans at work means deciding on purpose and in advance where people fit as AI redefines the work. It’s about planning for the change rather than discovering after the fact that the efficiency gains came at the expense of the people nobody thought to consult.

Practically speaking, that means we’re doing HR advisory work, employee relations support, workshops and training, and a good deal of writing and conversation, all built for small and mid-sized organizations, nonprofits, and lean HR teams. The types of workplaces that still run on people and don’t have outside counsel on speed dial.

Ignoring the Sensible Advice

I don’t know how long it will take us to climb out of the rubble from the last several years and I’m wary of anyone who claims to know. The sensible advice would probably be to sand the edges off our messaging, call it culture work, and leave words like diversity, equity and inclusion off the website until things settle down. I understand that instinct well enough; we’ve all watched plenty of smart leaders make exactly that calculation over the past two years, some of them for perfectly defensible reasons.

But the employees at the organizations we serve were here before the rescissions and will be here after the next round of revisions, whichever direction those happen to go. And we would rather spend the interim building something for them than waiting to learn which words we can safely use once again.

******

subscribe to Room for Humans via Substack

follow along on LinkedIn and our events page

*******

Senior Vice President of Whatever

A few years ago, three finance and accounting professors went digging through a large trove of online job postings and came back with a collection of job titles that read like the staff directory of a cruise ship. They found coffee cart managers, lead reservationists, a grooming manager, an assistant bingo manager, and, inevitably, the Director of First Impressions. That one links right to a job posting down the road from my house because, by now, that’s the title we’ve apparently agreed to use for the person who answers the phone and signs for the FedEx packages.

Were these titles the handiwork of overcaffeinated branding consultants or hyped-up HR professionals? Not necessarily.

The researchers, Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School and Umit Gurun and Bugra Ozel of UT Dallas’s Jindal School of Management, were studying the provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act that lets employers skip overtime for salaried managers paid above a set threshold, and in their paper, Too Many Managers, they found that listings for salaried managerial jobs jumped 89% right around that dollar line and showed no similar spike anywhere else. Give someone a manager’s title and a salary a few dollars over the threshold, and the 60-hour week becomes, legally speaking, simply part of the job. The researchers estimated that just over 30% of the managerial titles above the line existed mainly to sidestep overtime, which saved employers roughly $4 billion a year and cost the affected workers about 13.5% of what they would otherwise have earned.

I bring all this up because job seekers have lately been taking a fair amount of heat for what they do to their own titles. A resume.io survey released in July found that nearly four in ten people who’d gone job hunting in the past year admitted to bending the truth on their resumes, with an inflated title or padded responsibilities at the top of the list. Recruiters and hiring managers (I’ve been both) have been known to sigh at a LinkedIn profile on which a three-person marketing team somehow produced two Heads of Marketing. But organizations have been handing out inflated titles as a substitute for money for years, so the candidate who edits “Marketing Coordinator” into “Marketing Manager” is arguably just finishing a job her employer started.

Titles as Currency

The timing of all this matters. Raise budgets for 2027 are coming in essentially flat, with WTW’s latest survey putting the average U.S. salary increase budget at 3.4%, and employers describing their approach as cautious in the face of cost pressures. When the merit pool barely moves, the title becomes the cheapest instrument in the compensation toolkit.

You might expect a sluggish economy to make companies stingier with their titles, but it tends to work the other way around; the less money there is to hand out, the more appealing a free promotion becomes. The overtime study bears this out as well, since the title inflation Cohen, Gurun, and Ozel documented was more pronounced at firms under financial strain and in regions where workers had fewer places to go.

Employees have noticed. MyPerfectResume’s Title Inflation Report, released last year, found that 92% of the 1,000 workers it surveyed believe companies use titles to manufacture the appearance of career growth. Thirty-nine percent said they’d been handed a more senior title without a raise, and two-thirds said the practice has become more common than it used to be. Another 15% admitted to accepting less money in exchange for a better-sounding title — sort of like agreeing to a pay cut in return for a nicer sign on your office cubicle. (That these findings come from a company in the business of rewriting resumes adds a certain symmetry to the whole enterprise.)

The varieties of job titles are familiar to anyone who has spent time studying an org chart. We have Vice Presidents with no direct reports and no budget authority. We have Senior Directors whose seniority resides entirely in the word itself. And we’ve all witnessed the steady creep of “Senior,” “Lead,” and “Principal” onto roles whose scope hasn’t budged an inch. The startup world has an outsized contribution to the genre; it’s from those tech startups where a receptionist first became the Director of First Impressions and a customer service rep was christened the Customer Happiness Hero.

Granted, some of the motive is recruiting, since a smaller firm that can’t match a competitor’s salary can at least try to match its letterhead. And some of it is for the benefit of clients; anyone who has staffed a consulting engagement knows that a proposal listing three Senior Managers and a Principal lands very differently than one listing a team of capable people in their late twenties.

The posting problem runs in both directions, too. A job advertised as “Vice President” at a 40-person company tends to attract applicants who were Vice Presidents somewhere much larger and expect to be paid accordingly. Then, on the other side, the perfectly qualified manager who reads the same posting assumes she isn’t ready and never applies.

Can I Get a ‘What What’?

Titles aren’t trivial, of course, which is exactly why the trick works so well.

In a 2014 study published in the Academy of Management Journal, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant, then-doctoral researcher Justin Berg, and London Business School professor Dan Cable looked at employees of the Make-A-Wish Foundation who had been invited to create their own playful job titles, and were surprised to find that the self-chosen titles reduced the staff’s emotional exhaustion. A follow-up field experiment inside a health care system found the same effect five weeks after employees had chosen their titles. This led the researchers to describe titles as identity badges — something people carry home with them and use to introduce themselves at dinner parties.

Interestingly enough, a title that captures what someone does and why it matters can make the work feel lighter, but a title handed over in place of a raise asks an employee to wear an identity that feels false. Those employees, who know the real scope of their own jobs, can see the gap between the title printed on the badge and the falsity of the paycheck. And those are the sorts of things that will show up later in engagement surveys and exit interviews.

And then the title-inflated Senior Director goes looking for her next role and discovers she may be screened out as overqualified for the job she can do and underqualified for the one her title implies. In the MyPerfectResume data, 41% of workers said a title had made them look over- or underqualified to recruiters, and 34% described themselves as “title trapped.”

Title Trapped may be the most accurate job title in these surveys.

Who Gets to Decide?

Which brings me back to the candidate tinkering with her resume or her LinkedIn profile. If her employer could rename her role to save on overtime, or to soften the news that the raise pool had run dry, shouldn’t she be allowed to nudge it toward something the market will recognize? Employers decide what a title means inside their own organization, but the market decides what it means everywhere else. And right now the market is discounting damn near everything. Recruiters mentally downgrade, candidates preemptively upgrade, and we all spend a remarkable amount of energy trying to get aligned.

I’ve sometimes thought the cleanest fix would be to make titles honest about the circumstances of their creation. So the SVP of Whatever becomes the Senior Vice President, Pending Budget Approval, and the Director of First Impressions becomes the Receptionist, Overtime-Exempt.

Nobody would accept those titles, of course, which may be the best evidence that they’re the accurate ones. And I’m still not sure who would be more uncomfortable seeing them on a business card — the people holding the titles, or the people who handed them out.

Open Enrollment Is a Foreign Language

When Pam first went into HR, she pictured herself across the table from nervous job candidates as the company representative who would calm their jitters and help them navigate a successful job offer process. She imagined having career conversations with high-potential employees and the occasional difficult performance discussion that would leave a manager better at managing people when he left her office than when he had walked in.

What Pam did not imagine, at any point during her coursework in organizational psychology or the two summers she spent interning, was that she would one day spend 7 days standing beside a folding table in the breakroom, flanked by the broker’s rep and a bowl of branded stress balls, explaining to a warehouse supervisor why his free preventive visit produced a bill because the doctor also asked about his knee.

And yet every October, there she is, fluent (or fluent-ish) in a language she never set out to learn and wondering, somewhere between her tenth and fifteenth explanation of coinsurance, whether plunging the salad fork from her desk drawer into her eyeball might offer a merciful exit from open enrollment season.

Pam, if you haven’t guessed, is a composite of nearly every HR generalist I’ve worked alongside. And more than once she’s been me.

A Language Re-Learned Once a Year

Each fall, organizations ask employees to make some of the most consequential financial and medical decisions of their year using a vocabulary (deductibles, coinsurance, out-of-pocket maximums, HSA versus FSA) that most people are never formally taught and yet need to relearn every autumn. It’s a bit like being handed a phrasebook at the airport in Paris and being told that you have until mid-November to negotiate a lease, a car loan, and a surgical consent form entirely in French. (You also come to understand that you’ll then forget all of it by spring and be handed a slightly revised phrasebook next year.)

The research on this all is interesting. In 2013, Carnegie Mellon behavioral economist George Loewenstein and a team of colleagues surveyed a representative sample of Americans who had private health insurance, and more than 90% of the survey respondents felt confident they understood copays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket maximums, and 57% said the same about coinsurance. The confidence of all involved was misplaced; measured comprehension fell well below what the respondents believed they knew, as a mere 14% of survey participants turned out to be adept in their self-declared understanding.

The PUSH/PULL of the Norman Door

And yet HR’s instinct, and I say this with love and a fair amount of personal guilt, is to treat benefits illiteracy as a failing by the employees. They didn’t read the email. They skipped the webinar. They opened the benefits guide – saw a stock photo of a family laughing on a beach – and promptly closed it. But when a majority of reasonably intelligent adults consistently struggle with understanding the language and then ultimately choosing insurance options, perhaps the problem sits with whoever designed the choices.

Cognitive scientist Don Norman made this argument decades ago in The Design of Everyday Things, and designers now use the term “Norman door” for any door so poorly built that someone must tape a sign reading PUSH to the glass. A door that needs instructions is a badly designed door. By that standard, the American health plan is a Norman door with a forty-page user manual, and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health plans and insurers provide a standardized Summary of Benefits and Coverage along with a uniform glossary of terms is essentially the federal government taping PUSH to the glass. (When a product requires a legally mandated glossary, we’ve got some problems. Know what I mean?)

Pam in HR can simplify the menu and redesign the comparison charts in her pamphlets all she likes, but she’s still speaking in a language that nobody uses the other eleven months of the year.

How in the World Did This Land in HR’s Lap?

Nobody sat down, once upon a time, and decided that the person who recruits your engineers should also explain your prescription drug formulary. The arrangement arrived by accident, in stages, and mostly because of a war.

The prehistory begins in 1929, when Justin Ford Kimball, an administrator at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas, offered local schoolteachers a prepaid plan covering a set number of hospital days for a modest monthly fee, a model that eventually grew into Blue Cross. The real turning point came during World War II, when Congress passed the Stabilization Act in October 1942 to freeze wages and prices and hold down wartime inflation. Tucked inside was a carve-out that exempted “insurance and pension benefits in a reasonable amount” from stabilization, and employers who were desperate for workers but forbidden to raise pay did what any enterprising employer would do and started competing on benefits instead. In 1943, the IRS ruled that workers didn’t owe taxes on premiums their employers paid, and the National War Labor Board reaffirmed that fringe benefits were outside the wage freeze.

And thus, what began as a clever wartime workaround hardened into permanent HR infrastructure.

Melissa Thomasson, an economic historian at Miami University who has studied this period extensively, told a Senate committee in 2017 that when the tax exclusion was codified in the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, it prompted employers to enrich existing plans and more firms to begin offering coverage, cementing the employment-based system along with several distortions, including lower wages and workers afraid to leave jobs for fear of losing coverage. Somewhere along the way, the personnel department inherited the paperwork, and the paperwork eventually became a profession.

Today, employer-sponsored insurance in the U.S. covers 154 million people under the age of 65, and the average annual premium for family coverage reached $26,993 in 2025, with workers contributing $6,850 of that on average. Pam, who wanted to spend her days coaching managers, is now the primary customer-service representative for what amounts to a $27,000 annual purchase per family, made on behalf of people who didn’t even get to pick the vendor.

HR’s Been Deputized

The translation work is exhausting, but it’s the enforcement work that troubles me more. Over the past two decades, employers have been encouraged (by brokers, carriers, and the steady upward creep of premiums) to manage costs by managing employees’ bodies, and HR has been handed the badge.

So now we administer the tobacco surcharge and collect the signed affidavits. We run the biometric screening events, track the wellness points, levy the spousal surcharge, and cheerfully promote the step-count challenge in the company newsletter. And then, on a different day and in a different meeting, we ask those same employees to trust us with their complaints about a manager, their accommodation requests, and their candid thoughts about their career goals.

It’s difficult to be a strategic advisor, a professional confidante and the health police – and I’ve never been convinced that employees consider all of those to be compatible roles for one person.

Of course, most of the developed world decided long ago that none of this should run through the employer. Coverage in the UK, Canada, France, and the Nordic countries doesn’t hinge on where you work, and even Germany, whose system is funded through payroll contributions, lets people choose their own sickness fund rather than asking an HR generalist to curate a plan menu and teach coinsurance in the breakroom.

I’d happily trade our arrangement for any of theirs.

Workers could change jobs without doing an actuarial calculation first, employers could compete on wages and work design rather than on formularies, and Pam could go back to recruiting. But that isn’t the system we have, and it won’t be the system we have during this fall’s open enrollment season.

Translating Anyway

So every HR professional learns to translate, and the best HR teams I know have gotten remarkably good at it. They pare down the menu offerings, set sensible election defaults, and replace the convoluted coverage grids with real-world scenarios that walk through what happens if you break your arm, have a baby, or fill a monthly prescription. They talk about HSAs throughout the year instead of cramming the whole curriculum into two weeks in the fall. And those top HR teams have also stopped assuming that when an employee makes a poor choice, or can’t remember what her coverage entails, it’s because she didn’t care or was lazy.

What bothers me, though, is that every single improvement Pam makes renders the arrangement a little more tolerable – and a tolerable system is far easier to leave alone than a broken one. The better HR becomes at explaining a language that shouldn’t exist in their world/role, the less pressure anyone feels to stop speaking it. And honestly … I’m not sure whether Pam’s hard-won fluency is part of the solution or one of the reasons we’re still stuck with the problem.

Your “Best Practice,” According to Whom?

Every mattress I’ve owned has arrived with a small white tag stitched into one seam, warning in capital letters that it must not be removed under penalty of law. For years I left those tags alone, as did nearly everyone I know, because the wording carried enough menace to discourage any further inquiry. Only much later did I learn that the warning was aimed at manufacturers and retailers, and that I, the person who had paid for the mattress and slept on it every night, was free to snip the thing off whenever I liked.

The phrase “best practice” works on HR people in much the same way. It sounds official, it discourages follow-up questions, and very few of us could tell you who decided it or whom it was meant to govern. So when someone asks me which HR best practice I think is nonsense (and someone always does), I find I can’t answer without first taking issue with the premise.

A Conduit to Conformity

In Real HR I wrote that best practices are a conduit to conformity, and I haven’t changed my mind. At their most useful, they’re a starting point for thinking, but far more often they become a way for HR to borrow someone else’s answer without doing the work of understanding our own question. A practice that works beautifully at a 40,000-person manufacturer was built around that company’s history, its workforce, and its particular dysfunctions, so when we lift it wholesale and drop it into a 200-person software firm, we shouldn’t be surprised when it lands with a thud.

Part of the problem is that HR has been conditioned to reach for the template. Understandably so, since we’re asked to move fast, do more with less, and avoid risk at every turn — and a downloadable or borrowed-from-a-friend best practice promises all three at once. But replication isn’t strategy, and what we frequently end up copying is the homework of a classmate who also got a C, since many of the organizations whose practices we borrow aren’t executing them particularly well themselves.

I’d much rather HR professionals think of themselves as artists working with the materials in front of them than as lab technicians faithfully replicating someone else’s experiment. Nothing at all against lab techs — I used to hire them — but those are very different jobs.

Still, for purposes of this blog post, I’ll play along and pick a few of the most ridiculous best practices, provided you keep the premise at arm’s length while I do.

Longevity Masquerading as Evidence

The annual performance review earned its best-practice status largely through longevity. We keep doing it because everyone else keeps doing it, and everyone else keeps doing it because we do. When Deloitte tallied the cost of its own process roughly a decade ago, the firm found it was spending close to two million hours a year on forms, meetings, and ratings, and it redesigned the whole thing from the ground up.

The more instructive part of the story is what happened next. Deloitte’s shift, along with Adobe’s earlier decision to abandon annual ratings, was promptly written up, packaged, and circulated as the new best practice, to be adopted by organizations whose problems bore little resemblance to either company’s.

In the years since, and in true HR fashion, we’ve managed to turn a rejection of conformity into a fresh opportunity to conform, except that we now do it through quarterly check-ins and an annual sync-up conducted from our phones.

A Peculiar Welcome

The 90-day introductory period is another best practice that’s treated as sacred in employee handbooks across the country, even though in an at-will environment it offers little in the way of legal cover and, if it’s worded carelessly, can imply that anyone who survives the first three months has earned a form of job security the organization never intended to promise. Mostly, though, it signals to new hires that they’re on some sort of provisional trial, which strikes me as an odd and faintly unwelcoming way to greet people we’ve spent months (and a fair amount of money) persuading to join us.

Naturally, the evaluation of a new hire happens whether there’s a policy or not, and as most of us have learned, the ones we should keep an eye on rarely wait for day 89 to reveal themselves.

Doors and Hallways

Then we have the open-door policy, which declares that any employee may walk into any leader’s office at any time to raise a concern. We adopt it because we like to think we’re transparent (we often aren’t) and that our leaders are friendly and approachable (they often aren’t). It also reads well in the handbook even though it bears little resemblance to calendars booked solid for weeks, or to the career consequences that everyone understands come with going over your manager’s head.

As I noted a few weeks back when writing about workplace nostalgia, the person most fond of the open door is very often the one sitting behind it, at the far end of a vestibule guarded by an executive assistant, with the door itself closed more often than not. And anyone who has spent time working in an organization knows that even if the door is open, the hallway leading to it is often a minefield.

Feelings, Annually

And finally, the much-dreaded annual engagement survey, in which we ask people how they feel once a year, spend three months analyzing the results, and then roll out an action plan to a workforce whose feelings have long since moved on to something else. The survey itself isn’t the trouble so much as the cadence, which treats employee sentiment as though it were a fiscal-year metric rather than something that shifts every time a manager leaves, a reorg lands, or the parking lot gets repaved.

Leaving the Tag On

I’ll grant that not every inherited practice is decorative. As I wrote recently about the rules nobody remembers writing, some of them exist for sound reasons that simply went unrecorded, and telling the structural from the ornamental takes more effort than we usually budget for.

But I suspect the deeper appeal of a best practice has less to do with its results than with the protection it provides. A borrowed practice comes with built-in cover — if it fails, we can point out that we did what everyone else does — whereas a practice we designed ourselves fails with our name attached. That’s a considerable comfort, and it may explain why so many of us leave the tag stitched in place long after learning we’re free to remove it. What I can’t quite work out is whether we’d make better decisions with the tag cut off, or simply more visible ones.

____

I was thinking about best practices last night because the topic was front and center on Q Chat yesterday. Come join us one of these weeks!