There's a conversation I keep having. Different people, different industries, different organizations — but the same thread running through all of it. I was talking with Tracy Chernoff recently and we touched on it briefly, and I haven't been able to let it go since.
During COVID, something remarkable happened in American workplaces. Almost overnight, employers who had spent years resisting remote work figured it out. Policies changed. Practices shifted. Schedules got flexible. Leadership extended grace in ways that, frankly, many employees had been asking for long before a pandemic forced anyone's hand.
And it wasn't just about where people worked. Employers genuinely acknowledged that their employees were full human beings navigating a world that had turned upside down. Parents were suddenly homeschooling. Adult children were managing the healthcare needs of aging relatives. People were grieving, caregiving, and parenting — all while trying to do their jobs. Employers saw that. And for a season, they responded to it.
Then something shifted.
The Post-COVID Reversal Nobody Wants to Talk About
As industries and organizations worked to establish what people started calling "the new normal," a quiet reversal started happening. The empathy and accommodation that defined the early pandemic response began to evaporate. Employers slowly — and in some cases not so slowly — returned to the beliefs and practices that existed before COVID. The same rigid expectations. The same one-size-fits-all policies. The same underlying assumption that employees should separate who they are from what they do.
Here's what troubles me about that: COVID did not create the need for empathetic, human-centered workplace practices. It revealed it. The need was always there. Employees were always navigating layered lives. What changed during the pandemic is that employers had no choice but to see it and respond to it. The curtain got pulled back.
Now that the curtain is back in place, too many organizations are pretending what's behind it doesn't exist.
According to McKinsey, organizations that prioritize employee experience — including flexibility and wellbeing — are 1.3 times more likely to report outperforming their competitors. And yet, post-pandemic, many small and mid-size organizations have retreated to the very practices that drive disengagement in the first place.
Your Employees Are Not Who They Were
Here is something every CEO, founder, and executive director needs to sit with: the person sitting across from you today is not the same person you hired three, five, or ten years ago. Life has moved. And that matters to how you lead and support them.
Early-career professionals who entered the workforce during or after the pandemic have different expectations around work than any generation that came before them. Their sense of career purpose, their relationship with work-life balance, their motivations — these are shaped by an experience that fundamentally changed how they understand what work should feel like. Pretending otherwise is not leadership. It's avoidance.
Mid-career employees are navigating something entirely different. Many are in the thick of midlife — managing physical changes, shifting family responsibilities, evolving personal priorities. The person who gave everything to your organization a decade ago may now be sandwiched between raising teenagers and caring for aging parents. That is real. That is not a distraction from performance — it is the context in which performance happens. And leadership that ignores that context is leaving human capital on the table.
For late-career and tenured employees, the stakes are just as high. These are often your institutional knowledge holders, your cultural anchors, your most experienced practitioners. They are also, in many cases, thinking about retirement, managing their own health, and recalibrating what the final chapter of their career looks like. Expecting them to show up with the same motivations they had when they first joined your organization is not just unrealistic — it's a missed opportunity to leverage the depth of what they bring.
SHRM research consistently shows that employee engagement is directly tied to whether employees feel their needs are acknowledged and supported. The data is not new. What's new is whether leaders are willing to act on it.
This Is Not About Lowering the Bar
I want to be clear about something, because this conversation often gets misread. Acknowledging that employees are whole people with evolving needs is not the same as releasing them from accountability. Employees are still responsible for their performance, their professionalism, and their commitment to the work. That does not change.
What I am saying is that the employer's responsibility does not end at recruitment and onboarding. It extends into how you support, develop, and engage people across the arc of their career — and their life.
This is actually where the real opportunity lives. When employers stop treating human support as a concession and start treating it as a strategy, something shifts. Engagement goes up. Retention improves. People bring more of themselves to the work because they feel seen within it. That is not a soft outcome. That is a business outcome.
This does not have to be an either/or. The organizational bottom line and the human needs of your workforce are not mutually exclusive. They are, when managed well, a match. COVID showed us a version of what that match looks like when employers are forced to make it work. The question now is whether you are willing to make it work by choice.
So What Does This Actually Require?
It requires leaders to stop assuming that what worked before COVID is sufficient for the workforce that exists post-COVID. It requires honest conversations about what your employees actually need — not what you assume they need based on what worked a decade ago. It requires building people practices that account for the reality that your workforce is made up of individuals at different life stages, with different needs, and different levels of capacity at any given time.
And it requires acknowledging that when you invest in your people in ways that are actually meaningful to them — not just convenient for your organization — you are not being soft. You are being strategic.
COVID pulled back the curtain. What you choose to do with what you saw is on you.
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Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources Podcast hosted by Traci Chernoff
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