.avif)
Steve Cadigan, the first Chief Human Resources Officer at LinkedIn and founder of Cadigan Talent Ventures, advises companies on how to rethink the social contract between employer and employee. The conversation focused on how the aftershocks of the past several years pushed leaders to question almost every assumption about office life, career growth, and what good work feels like.
The pandemic era did not invent these tensions. It exposed them. Long commutes, output measured by attendance, performance reviews that rewarded visibility, and managers trained to monitor rather than coach all came under scrutiny when the office stopped being the default. HR leaders are still working through what to keep, what to retire, and what to build new.
The reset HR leaders face is not a return to a previous normal. It is a redesign. The companies that handle it well will treat the moment as a chance to make work more honest, more flexible, and more focused on outcomes than optics.
The new social contract HR has to write
Steve has argued that the old promise of long tenure in exchange for loyalty has frayed beyond repair. What replaces it is a contract built on growth, transparency, and the assumption that employees will move on when the next role serves them better. McKinsey research on the great attrition made clear that pay alone does not hold people. Meaning, growth, and fair treatment do.
For HR teams, that means revisiting how performance, mobility, and recognition fit together. A strong employee engagement program connects those threads into a story employees can see themselves in. A static handbook does not.
The contract also changes what managers owe their people. They owe clarity about what the role looks like, honest feedback when something is off, and a credible answer to the question of where this experience leads. None of that is new. The bar is just higher now.
How HR should respond
What should leaders stop doing first?
Stop measuring presence as a proxy for productivity. Time in seat, late nights, and visible busyness have always been weak signals. Hybrid work made them weaker. Replace them with output metrics tied to the role, then trust managers to read context.
Stop treating engagement surveys as the whole picture. They are one input. Pair them with stay interviews, manager 1:1 notes, and employee net promoter score trends to triangulate what is actually happening on the ground.
What should leaders start doing?
Start writing down the operating model employees can expect. How decisions get made, how feedback flows, how performance is judged, and how someone moves up or sideways. The most retention-positive thing a company can do is reduce the surprise factor.
Start investing in manager craft. Most managers were promoted for reasons that have nothing to do with managing. A short, recurring training cycle on coaching, feedback, and difficult conversations pays back faster than almost any other people investment.
What actually works
Treat tenure as a feature, not a target
Companies that obsess over four year average tenure miss the point. The right metric is whether employees grow more valuable while they are there and whether alumni become advocates after they leave. Gallup engagement data shows that the conditions that retain people are the same conditions that produce strong work, regardless of how long someone stays.
An alumni network is one of the most underused assets HR has. Former employees boomerang, refer candidates, become customers, and tell honest stories about what working there is like. Treat their last day as the start of a new relationship, not an exit from one.
Make career conversations recurring, not annual
A career conversation that happens once a year, attached to a performance review, is too late and too high stakes. The better cadence is a quarterly check on what the employee is learning, what they want to learn, and what role might come next. Use career path conversations to keep the long view in the room.
Use those conversations to surface internal moves before the employee starts looking outside. SHRM research on internal mobility consistently shows that people who move internally stay longer than those who do not.
Build trust through predictable response
Trust is built one closed loop at a time. When an employee raises a concern, the response cycle should be visible: acknowledgment within a day, a plan within a week, an outcome within a month when feasible. Use transformational leadership habits as a model for how senior leaders show up in those moments.
The point is not speed for its own sake. It is the predictability that signals the company takes voice seriously enough to organize around it.
Where Employee Relations Fits
A reset of priorities forces HR to revisit how concerns flow through the organization. AllVoices supports that work with an employee relations function that gives ER teams a single workspace for intake, investigations, and pattern recognition, plus an HR case management product that keeps every case auditable.
The link between case quality and trust
Employees decide whether to speak up next time based on how they were treated this time. ER teams that respond consistently, document carefully, and follow up visibly tend to see more reports come in earlier, which is the goal. The blog on building a transparent workplace culture goes deeper on the practice.
Frequently Asked Questions About Resetting HR Priorities
Where do we start if our list is too long?
Pick three things: how performance is measured, how managers get trained, and how concerns get heard. Those three reach almost every other priority through second order effects.
How do we know the reset is working?
Watch voluntary attrition by tenure cohort, manager effectiveness scores, and the share of employees who say they would recommend the company. Three signals beat any single dashboard metric.
What does this mean for return-to-office decisions?It means the policy matters less than the rationale and the application. Employees forgive a clear, consistently applied rule. They do not forgive arbitrary changes that punish certain teams.How do we handle managers who resist?
Coach them once, support them with peer examples, and act when the resistance turns into a quality problem. Manager development is most credible when it is paired with manager accountability.
Is HR the right owner of the reset?
HR should drive the work and the executive team should sponsor it. Without sponsorship, the reset becomes another HR program. With it, the reset becomes how the company runs.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Steve Cadigan is right that the upheaval of recent years gave HR a once in a generation chance to redesign the experience of work. The companies that take it seriously will replace performative norms with concrete operating practices.
The path forward is not flashy. It is a series of small, durable habits practiced consistently. Better managers, better feedback, better response loops, and a clear story about what the company offers and asks in return.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)