Has the psychological contract with the workforce weakened?

Congratulations to WORKTECH Academy on the milestone of its tenth anniversary in September 2026. That’s a decade of helping to improve the workplace worldwide. It’s hard to imagine a more tumultuous time in the workplace design world than the last ten years, with the possible exception of the period when Taylorism (scientific management) focused factories (primarily) and offices (somewhat) on efficiency.

In 2016, workplaces were already evolving in many ways that continue today—although this is often forgotten in the rush to claim that the pandemic changed everything (or almost everything, depending on your perspective) about how workplaces should be designed.

Some of those present-then and continuing ‘trends’ include people doing focused work at home by choice; an urge to boost work performance with offices being fine-tuned to support collaboration but more limited support for focused work; activity-based working becoming more widespread, with residential-style elements thrown into the mix; and significant movements of employees from one employer to another.

We can also discern increasing concern for supporting the full range of workers, neurodiverse and otherwise, and a continuing renegotiation of the psychological contract between employees and employers, resulting in generally weakening ties between the two groups.

Increased attention

The renegotiation of the psychological contract has received increased attention because of the pandemic – this term has long been a popular phrase in the psychology world, but not in workplace design. The pandemic brought into sharp focus employer expectations and employee responses to those expectations.

Decades of increasingly powerful employers suppressing pay, offshoring jobs to cheaper economies, or automating roles and removing humans altogether, have resulted in fewer positive thoughts about companies on the part of employees – and even less enthusiasm for heeding employers’ wishes or demands.

This unsettling renegotiation of the psychological contract took taken place while many organisations tried to send endearing and supportive messages to employees. But many of those communiques seemed insincere and shallow and failed to stabilise employer-worker links.

Silent signals

This leads to a further point. It has become clearer than ever that ‘silent signalling’ by employers that they value the contributions that employees make to organisational success can have a more powerful influence on job satisfaction, commitment, performance and similar factors than elements of the physical design. Neuroscientists have reported this for some time, but only now are more organisations learning this lesson.

In the decade ahead, it will be important for employers and their design teams to tell the truth to their workforce about the financial, spatial and other constraints they face, including the threat of AI. Beginning an era of forthright conversations with employees may not change workplace design as much as it will significantly and positively affect the wellbeing and performance of the people who spend their days in offices. It’s all part of the psychological contract.