After years of crisis and technological change, office work is in ruins. A perfect storm has wiped out the old office as we knew it, and the new is yet to emerge. A proxy war is raging over working from home and returning to the office, but the real conflict is not about where we work; it’s about the work itself. Office work is eroding due to automation and virtualisation, pressure on efficiency and productivity, and a worrying tendency to treat workers as tools.

Thanks to IT, automation is a long-term trend that continuously eliminates repetitive, predictable paperwork (if you even want to call it that, given its digital nature these days). Instead of doing this kind of work, people employ machines for it. Machine learning and generative AI are only the tip of the iceberg. A complex landscape of systems and tools defines today’s work.

The same systems and tools have almost eliminated the need for a physical office. People still require desks and screens, but these can be anywhere. Since the pandemic, it has become clear that the only tasks that can’t be done remotely involve direct, physical proximity and interaction. Ironically, this has become rare on office days filled with video calls and screen time.

The pressure on efficiency and productivity is partly due to automation and virtualisation and partly due to the polycrisis and permacrisis of recent years. This is a toxic combination, and with office culture being a thing of the past, people are increasingly on their own. Still, there is no way back to 2019. We will not get the toothpaste back in the tube.

It goes beyond the office

These trends are culminating in what social scientists have long dubbed “organisational dehumanisation”:

employees’ perceptions that their organization reduces them to mere tools or instruments at its service.

Now this goes beyond the office. It also applies to the factory, where automation and virtualisation reign as well, and even to social services such as healthcare, which are constantly burning out their employees. At the same time, employment in Germany is still near its all-time high, with 46 million people engaged in economic activity – despite a stagnating GDP, a broken business model and a collapsed government.

People deeply feel the pressure; they doubt their economic future and the safety of their jobs. Thus, they resort to tactics like acting their wage:

Employees are now rethinking their relationship with work—rather than doing more than they’re supposed to in desperate moves to advance their careers, they are “acting their wage.”

This is in part still a post-pandemic phenomenon, but as Accenture’s Life Trends 2025 report points out, it goes deeper:

Having realized the benefits of flexibility, many are reluctant to make the concessions that were previously accepted as a standard part of working life, affecting office culture, productivity and performance. But with only 29% of employees trusting that their company’s leaders have their best interests at heart, it’s not difficult to rationalize their unwillingness to make sacrifices.

A question of trust

The work crisis is a question of trust. There is a lack of trust in employers, in job security and the job itself, and in one’s own agency in the face of change. AI only adds to this burden. It often comes into the workplace as a new tool, another system that people have to learn and integrate into their daily routines. And then it also threatens to make their whole job redundant.

People rightly expect the upskilling necessary for a sustainable career path from their employers – but that’s lacking, too:

Cutbacks to employee welfare schemes, financial incentives and training make people feel like their leaders aren’t willing to invest in their development anymore. In the United Kingdom, companies have reduced investment in training by 28% since 2005 despite 75% of employees referencing improved training and development as key to boosting their engagement at work.

With productivity, performance, and efficiency now high on the corporate agenda, the employee experience – a buzzword for quite a while – has suffered:

Like consumers, employees were primed on more than a decade of talk about the employee experience. Many have come to expect more than a transactional relationship with their employer. The deeper context here is an ongoing re-evaluation of the value, benefits, and social function of work. This re-evaluation has multiple fronts, but they all push towards growing feeling that human agency and dignity needs to be reasserted in the face of a challenged work culture.

A new challenge for leaders

This is first and foremost a challenge for corporate leaders (not so much for managers). In economic terms, it means that the value exchange between employers and employees needs to be readjusted and rebalanced. Money is only one part of this exchange, and sometimes a mere hygiene factor. The whole package is up for negotiation, and this includes way more than what corporate lingo dubs “compensation”.

Purpose, vision, culture, a decent mid-term and long-term perspective, training and personal development, flexibility and work/life balance, remote work as well as a thriving physical office are all part of this. The crisis is, in the words of the Life Trends report, about the dignity of work:

People want to feel like their contribution to work matters. Work is a way to realize one’s potential and labor movements throughout history have been in pursuit of dignity.

Today’s leaders need to adapt to today’s context, including leading teams across all metrics the organization is demanding of them, while cutting costs. Critically, they should balance this with employees’ engagement and well-being. These factors directly impact the company’s performance, reputation and ability to attract and retain talent—ultimately influencing long-term success and profitability.