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Good Intentions Don’t Undo Bad Workplace Systems
Organisations rarely set out to create exclusion, frustration or burnout. But good intentions cannot compensate for systems that make flexibility unsafe, support difficult to access and sustainable performance harder than it needs to be.
Good Intentions Are Only the Beginning
Few founders, CEOs or leaders begin a new organisation or role without good intentions. They have a purpose, ambitions to improve things and a belief that they are the right person to do it. The problem begins when care remains a belief instead of shaping the systems, expectations and decisions through which people experience work.
“I’m going to build the best company. We’re going to treat our employees well, and everyone is going to love working for us because we’re just like family.”
If your first intention is to treat employees like family, you may already be setting yourself up for failure. I say that as someone who works with several members of my own family and whose Ethics Doctrine states that family comes first for everyone.
Their family, not their “work family”, is always their first priority.
Good intentions are a beginning. They aren’t an ending.
Care Has to Become a Working Condition
Many companies intend to support parents. They offer health benefits, college savings accounts, childcare benefits and sometimes onsite childcare. Those things can be valuable.
But benefits do not automatically create a family-friendly workplace. That value should also be visible in whether parents can spend time with their children, respond when a child is sick and use flexibility without fearing the professional cost.
Benefits can become a gilded cage when they replace usable time and flexibility: “We cannot let you work from home for two afternoons, but we can offer a service that makes staying here more convenient.”
Some parents choose that arrangement. Others choose from limited options. Employers do not control every part of that reality, but they control more of the working environment than they sometimes acknowledge.
“We care about inclusion.” Great. That is your intention. Now show me what you built because of it.
If your organisation says it cares, show me what that looks like in action. My team and I care about many things we do not have the capacity to address. If we pursued all of them, we would finish nothing.
Caring is a valuable start. The question is whether you care because it looks good, or whether that care is visible in your daily rituals, processes and decisions.
Kay is a good example. At first, we needed overlapping hours because we were a startup still finding its path. That time together helped us generate ideas, answer questions and understand how the mission would work in practice.
But the original arrangement did not need to become permanent simply because it had once served a purpose.
As the company found a better flow, we adjusted Kay’s hours. We gave her four paid hours off on Fridays to study, allowing her to finish at lunchtime and attend school on Saturday without losing pay. When her doctor later recommended more regular, uninterrupted sleep, we changed the schedule again.
The new arrangement supported her health and gave her more time with her daughter. Productivity did not suffer. If anything, she was more engaged.
I did not see that as a special favour. It was us doing what we say we believe.
Different Routes Do Not Mean Lower Standards
Making adjustments does not mean lowering standards. When I studied at The Open University, we all had to meet the same marking criteria to achieve our grades. The route to those grades was not identical for everyone.
The university offered support options that students could use without first proving a diagnosis. Additional adjustments required medical evidence. In my case, flexible deadlines relieved enough pressure that I was often better able to meet them.
The standard did not change. The pressure valve did.
Many workplaces still miss this. Life and health sometimes get in the way. Rather than treating that as failure, you can change the timing, route or support within reasonable boundaries so the person can reach the same finish line.
Instead, organisations often see somebody begin to struggle, miss deadlines or lose capacity and immediately double down with feedback, documentation and performance improvement plans.
At U&L, when someone loses capacity, we ask them to bench themselves. If they cannot see it yet, we may make that call, founders included. They return when their current, realistic capacity allows them to contribute reliably. We do not demand maximum output.
This only works because we designed for it.
No system should rely entirely on one person. We built an intelligence library as our collective brain so knowledge does not live in one person’s head. If someone steps away, another person can see where things stand and keep the work moving.
That is not softness. It is operational resilience.
When somebody starts again, they do not arrive empty-handed. They bring experience, relationships, creativity, responsibilities, health needs and identities beyond work. A sustainable next chapter should not require them to erase those things to fit another badly designed role.
Sometimes the person did not lose their capability. The system made it harder to use or sustain. If the next employer recreates the same ambiguity, rigidity and misaligned expectations, changing jobs only changes the location of the friction.
Before You Blame the Employee, Examine the System
Not every struggling employee is a previously high-performing employee moving through a difficult period. Organisations still need standards and accountability.
But before you formally decide that the person is the problem, prove that the company has not built failure traps into the way work is designed and performance is managed.
Did you hire the right person for the role and environment? Did the reality match the job advertised? Was onboarding effective? Did their manager have the time, authority and training to manage them? Were expectations and feedback clear enough to act on?
Or did they arrive in chaos, receive conflicting priorities from an overwhelmed manager, spend half the day in meetings, struggle to find uninterrupted time to work and then get blamed when the work slipped?
We have redesigned our weekly meeting process whenever we could see friction. Briefs now go out in advance and in different formats because people absorb information differently. Technology makes that accessibility manageable.
People enter the meeting with what they need, in a form they can understand, so the conversation can move towards decisions and action.
The result has been greater efficiency, lower stress and, finally, room to plan.
Removing friction does not always require an enormous transformation programme or budget. Sometimes it requires enough patience to improve an imperfect solution instead of reaching for the next shiny system.
Start with what already exists.
Ask employees where work becomes unnecessarily difficult. Ask managers where they spend their time and what prevents them from managing. Ask leaders what they already know is not working. Then look for the overlap.
If employees cannot find uninterrupted time, managers spend all day chasing deadlines and leaders know there are too many meetings while projects slip, you have an obvious place to start.
Design Work Around What You Actually Need
The same principle applies to office design.
I am not anti-office. Important things happen in person: new employees learn the ropes, small questions get answered, ideas form and relationships grow. Collaboration improves when the right people are in the room.
So make those days meaningful.
If you want focus, provide uninterrupted space. If you want collaboration, create the right conditions. Bring people together with their actual teams when possible. Do not make someone commute into a lonely office to sit on video calls amid background noise and call that collaboration.
Stop romanticising every desk interruption as a “water cooler moment”. Sometimes somebody is eating lunch. Sometimes they are doing the focus work you will later ask why they did not finish.
The question is not whether offices are good or remote work is good. It is whether the environment you designed matches what you say you want people to do.
Tell People the Truth About the Workplace
One of the biggest failure traps begins before an employee joins. We work so hard to sell a great workplace that reality sometimes fails to match the promise.
That is not always deliberate. Sometimes the company has moved on but the message has not. You are selling a memory of the culture before the layoffs, restructures, new leadership or “strategic pivots”.
The person you hire is still walking into a reality they did not knowingly choose.
No employer will advertise, “I’m demanding, people hate working here, I underpay everyone and reduce the workforce every few months. Please observe the miserable faces screaming at you not to apply.”
But there is plenty of room between brutal self-destruction and polished misrepresentation.
An organisation can be traditional, office-centred or highly demanding. Not every workplace will suit every person, and not every role can offer the same flexibility. Be honest about what you are building.
Know what your values, mission and vision look like on an ordinary Tuesday. What do you expect from people, and what can they expect from you? What do flexibility and high performance mean here? What does family first mean when a child is sick? What does inclusion mean when someone needs a different route to the same standard?
Then tell the truth and let the right people choose whether to work with you.
That alone removes a significant amount of friction.
Do not call yourself family-friendly when parents are terrified of what happens if their child gets sick. Do not advertise flexibility that nobody can safely use. Do not call yourself inclusive if inclusion disappears the moment it inconveniences the system.
Do not assume a high company-wide engagement score proves everyone is having the same experience.
I want to know who is missing from the averages. Who leaves, advances or refers people they care about? What do turnover and customer experience reveal? Did your training change anything? Can employees say when they need something different, and does anything meaningful happen when they do?
If the numbers do not match the story the company tells about itself, understand the gap before you defend the intention.
What Did You Build Because of It?
Inclusion is not convincing everybody they will love working for you. It is understanding the workplace you built, being honest about it and creating enough flexibility within its real limits for different people to succeed.
Do you care enough to act on what you learn?
If the answer is yes, remove unnecessary friction piece by piece, at a pace people can navigate. Begin with quick wins that cost little beyond patience, attention and the will to make them work.
If the answer is no, be honest about that too.
Good intentions matter. I would much rather begin with a leader who cares than one who does not.
But caring is the beginning.
What did you build because of it?
If your policies say one thing but the everyday experience of work says another, the problem may not be your intentions. It may be the systems carrying them.
Our Inclusive Systems Review identifies where unnecessary friction is preventing people from performing at their best. Work With Us
Authored by Lois Baynham
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