Article:
We Need to Radically Re-Invent the World of Work
Author: John Drummond, Co-founder, The Human Centre
Something hasn’t felt quite right with the world of work. I began asking the question “do we need to radically reinvent the world of work?” Over time the question has become a statement. I now strongly believe that for organisations to survive and thrive, radical reinvention based on our humanity is no longer an option. It’s essential. And it’s why we set up the Human Centre.
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The weight of evidence is now hugely persuasive. The main way our organisations can become more resilient is to understand the importance of our senses, to feel the importance of our emotions, to know how our neurochemicals work, to make sense of human motivation and to understand our social nature. Let’s look at the evidence.
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Each year the consultancy PwC seeks the sentiment of global CEO’s. The research shows that between 35% and 40% of CEO’s regularly say that they do not know if their companies will be economically viable over the next ten years. When asked how they would ideally like to use their time to improve their chances of success, CEO’s say their two imperatives are improving productivity and re-inventing their businesses. And both of these are dependent on human-centred behaviour change.
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Productivity is going in the wrong direction. People of working age not working costs the state £212bn a year in lost income tax, benefits payment and NHS costs according to the Keep Britain Working report of 2025. According to ACAS, conflict in the workplace costs UK businesses £28.5bn a year. This is before accounting for the potential negative impact of AI on employment.
Evidence from surveys shows the need to go way beyond a few health and wellbeing programmes. For example, eight in ten employees say a sense of community helps them to perform better at work (Randstad Workmonitor research). The main indicator of team performance is people feeling safe to take risks and to be vulnerable in front of each other (Google Project Aristotle). And over 70% of employers say greater autonomy leads to higher engagement, productivity and retention (Randstad Workmonitor, 2026).
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The second imperative according to CEO’s is transformation. Here, the case for human centred action is equally compelling. Work by EY and the Said Business School shows that putting humans at the centre of transformation projects improves the chances of successful transformation 2.6x. In addition, transformation depends on innovation and innovation depends on connection between people and between people and ideas. Yetresearch suggests that between 40% and 60% of employees are quiet innovators. That means organisations are failing to tap into the innovation of all colleagues. But it’s more than this. These ideas of meaning, belonging, connection, safety, agency and fairness are deeply built into our human nature. There are three key observations here linked to our human nature.
First, we cannot separate how we think and how we feel. It is not possible for us to leave our emotions at the door of the workplace. “There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He goes further: “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”
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Second, we are creatures that seek to make sense of our world. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, psychology professor at Cambridge University, argues that it is our search for patterns that makes us human and has led to all our innovations. This “systemising mechanism” he argues “allowed humans alone to become the scientific and technological masters of our planet, eclipsing all other species.”
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Third, we are fundamentally social creatures. Our body’s chemicals are dominantly designed to make us more social. Oxytocin and dopamine work together to initiate a contact and to keep working on a relationship. Neuroscientist Matthew D Lieberman puts it like this: “our dominance as a species may be attributable to our ability to think socially”. Why then do we dominantly manage employees as individuals. We fail to invest for example in the basic currencies of effective organisations – how to have conversations, how to connect people across an organisation or how to tell stories.
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There are many actions organisations can take to become more human, to improve productivity and reinvent their business models. They can, for example, create strategies to reduce conflict at work, re-design workplaces or create peer-to-peer networks. But we believe there is a need to be even more radical. So, here is my final question, how can organisations be more radical in order to survive and thrive?
Working within current organizational structures may reduce the likelihood of organisations securing their future.
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So, how might we organize within a company to tackle the tasks – engaging people, future-proofing the organisation, tapping into context, improving personal, team and organisational resilience, creating human-centred workplaces,creating cultures of innovation, understanding how to improve transformational change programmes and building human leadership models based on fairness, defining new “future
workforce” strategies. These are the elements we would recommend to create a fully human and resilient organisation.
It’s time for change.
Tweaking is no longer enough. We need radical re-thinking. We are working within old mental models about the world of work and the workplace. It’s time for something new. As architect Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes existing models obsolete.”