Are We Promising Employees More Than We Can Deliver?

Organisations make some extraordinary promises about employment.

Build a career. Grow with us. Do meaningful work. Be empowered. Have a voice. Belong. Find your purpose. Unlock your potential. Be recognised, rewarded and supported. Become part of something extraordinary.

Some even promise that you will become part of their family.

By the time the promises have finished, employment sounds less like a working relationship and more like a fairy tale.

That is quite a lot to promise about a relationship that does not yet exist.

At this point there is no employee. There is a candidate considering whether to become one. Candidates can research the organisation, meet people, read reviews, ask difficult questions and look for evidence. They still cannot know what it is actually like to work there.

The organisation can.

It knows how decisions really get made. It knows whether flexibility is genuinely flexible, whether empowerment comes with authority, whether careers actually move and whether development survives a difficult budget. It knows whether employee voice remains quite so welcome when people say something inconvenient.

Then it produces the careers site.

Lights. Camera. Action.

Spend enough time on corporate careers sites and it becomes difficult to understand where all the ordinary organisations have gone.

Everyone appears to have an exceptional culture. Everyone develops their people. Everyone has inspiring leaders, meaningful work, brilliant opportunities and deeply empowered employees.

Statistically, this seems unlikely.

Employment needs selling. Organisations compete for capability, and presenting an attractive proposition is part of that competition. The problem begins when the proposition moves beyond presenting the best of the organisation and starts describing an employment experience the organisation cannot reliably deliver.

The claim needs to survive contact with the organisation.

Development sounds considerably less impressive when it consists primarily of mandatory compliance training.

Empowerment becomes difficult to recognise inside an approval process requiring six signatures.

Flexibility feels rather different when its availability depends entirely on which manager an employee happens to work for.

Career opportunity becomes increasingly theoretical when there is nowhere to go.

Employee voice looks slightly less authentic when leadership enjoys hearing it only while employees are saying agreeable things.

The free coffee may also turn out to be a machine in the corner producing something that has only a passing relationship with coffee.

None of this requires deliberate deception. Organisations can become remarkably good at repeating things about themselves that nobody has recently tested.

The employment promise begins before the employment relationship does

The candidate eventually accepts. The contract is signed. Employment begins.

Now the employee gets to compare the promise with the evidence.

The psychological contract describes the unwritten expectations and perceived obligations that sit alongside the formal employment contract. It is built through what organisations and employees say, do and interpret.

The employment contract records the terms. The psychological contract records what each side believes the relationship will deliver.

The distinction matters. Salary can be correct. Holiday can be correct. Notice can be correct. Every contractual obligation can be perfectly intact while employees still conclude that the employment they joined is not the employment they were led to expect.

That conclusion does not necessarily arrive dramatically.

Development meets workload.

Empowerment meets decision rights.

Flexibility meets management judgement.

Career opportunity meets organisational structure.

Belonging meets restructuring.

Purpose meets commercial reality.

Employee voice eventually meets something leadership would rather not hear.

This is not evidence of organisational failure. It is evidence of employment.

Organisations are messy human systems. Strategies change. Markets move. Managers differ. Budgets tighten. Technology changes work. Opportunities disappear. New ones emerge. Employees change as well.

The problem is not that reality contains imperfections.

The problem is selling an employment experience so polished that ordinary reality begins to look like a broken promise.

Research in South Korea gives an interesting glimpse of this recalibration. A study following 222 newcomers in major Korean companies found that perceptions of employer promises and perceived breaches both reduced as people accumulated real experience of the job. The researchers linked this partly to incomplete initial understanding and the adjustment of expectations through experience.

There is something almost painfully obvious in that finding.

People discover what employment is like by being employed.

Perhaps the proposition should survive that discovery.

People remember broken promises

Organisations spend extraordinary amounts of money trying to understand why people disengage.

Surveys. Listening groups. Culture diagnostics. Engagement platforms. Action plans. More surveys to discover whether the action plans worked.

Sometimes the answer may be considerably less mysterious.

The organisation told people one thing. They experienced another.

People tend to notice.

Experimental research involving expatriate employees in the UAE found that failure to fulfil employment promises affected perceptions of breach, feelings of violation, job satisfaction, organisational commitment, turnover intentions and performance.

A broken promise does not simply damage the promise that was broken. It changes the credibility of the next one.

When organisations say development matters but repeatedly remove the time and money required for it, the next development announcement lands differently.

When they say employee voice matters but punish inconvenient challenge, the next listening exercise lands differently.

When flexibility is part of the proposition but becomes inaccessible in practice, the next statement about trust lands differently.

Credibility is cumulative.

So is disbelief.

An organisation can refresh its employee value proposition afterwards. Employees still remember what happened.

The cost does not begin when somebody leaves

Turnover is the visible cost of a damaged employment relationship. It is not necessarily the first one.

Employees can remain long after they have stopped giving an organisation their best. Discretionary effort reduces. Challenge disappears. Ideas stay unspoken. Good people spend more time considering whether to leave and less time thinking about what they could build if they stayed.

The salary continues to be paid.

The value received in return may already have changed.

Gallup’s 2024 meta-analysis, drawing on 736 studies across 347 organisations, 53 industries and 90 countries and covering more than 3.3 million employees, found consistent relationships between employee engagement and business outcomes including profitability, productivity, turnover, absenteeism, customer outcomes and quality.

The precise financial effect will differ by organisation. The relationship between engagement and commercial performance is considerably harder to dismiss.

A broken employment promise therefore creates more than a retention risk. Once the resulting loss of trust affects engagement and behaviour, it can create value leakage while employees are still sitting at their desks.

The eventual resignation merely makes some of the cost easier to see.

What can an organisation reasonably promise?

There is another promise embedded in much of the language of employment: continuity.

Organisations may not explicitly promise that employment will last, but the language surrounding careers, belonging and long-term development often carries that implication.

That creates a more fundamental question.

What can an employer reasonably promise when neither organisation nor employee can know how long the relationship will last?

The employment relationship has changed substantially while much of its language still carries echoes of permanence.

Harvard Business Review was examining this tension more than a decade ago. Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh argued that the old compact of stability and lifetime loyalty had weakened, while a purely transactional replacement served neither employer nor employee particularly well.

Their alternative was built around alliance and reciprocity. Employees contribute capability and adaptability. Employers invest in capability and future employability. Both seek to create value for the other.

The relationship can be mutually valuable without either side pretending it will necessarily last forever.

That matters because organisations restructure. Strategies change. Businesses are acquired. Roles disappear. Technology redistributes work. Artificial intelligence is accelerating questions about which activities and capabilities organisations will need at all.

Employees change too. Careers move. Ambitions change. Skills develop. Lives change.

Neither party knows how long the relationship will last.

That is not a failure of commitment. It is a limit of prediction.

Security still matters enormously. Mortgages have not become conceptual. Bills remain surprisingly committed to arriving every month.

Valuing security is not the same as an organisation being able to guarantee it indefinitely.

Perhaps the stronger employment promise is therefore the more honest one.

Promise what is within the organisation’s gift

An organisation cannot credibly promise that every role will always exist.

It cannot promise that strategy will never change, a promotion will appear at precisely the right moment, technology will not alter the work or employees will still want the same careers five years from now.

There is plenty it can promise.

Professional respect.

Fair reward for work done.

Clear expectations.

Honest information.

Good management.

Meaningful opportunities to contribute.

Development that creates genuine capability.

Fair processes.

Straight conversations when circumstances change.

Dignity when things end.

These promises look less spectacular on a careers site.

They may be considerably more valuable in an employment relationship.

A 2025 Harvard Business School discussion with ManpowerGroup Chief Executive Officer Jonas Prising explored exactly this territory. Prising described an employer promise that does not depend upon guaranteeing decades of employment: people should leave better equipped and better skilled for their future careers than when they arrived. Professor Bill Kerr described that as an important promise on the employer side.

That is a serious proposition.

Employees may not spend their entire careers with an organisation.

Their careers should be stronger because they did.

It also brings the argument back to reciprocity.

Employees bring capability, effort, judgement and adaptability. Organisations provide fair reward, opportunity, development and an environment in which that capability can create value.

Both have obligations.

Employees perform. Contribute. Learn. Adapt. Exercise judgement. Take responsibility for their careers. Leave organisations stronger because they were there.

Organisations should aim to do the same for them.

This is not a colder version of employment.

It is a more adult one.

People can care deeply about colleagues, purpose, belonging and the organisations they work for without pretending employment is unconditional. Calling employees a family does not make the relationship more humane. Families do not normally make people redundant when the operating model changes.

Professional relationships do not become meaningless simply because they may end.

The ambition should be mutual value without manufactured permanence.

Staying is not the same as succeeding

This changes how organisations think about retention too.

An employee can remain for fifteen years while disengaged, underperforming, frightened of leaving or simply comfortable enough not to move.

Another can spend five exceptional years building something important, developing others, creating substantial value and becoming markedly more capable, then leave for an opportunity the organisation cannot provide.

The first employment relationship lasted longer.

That does not make it more successful.

Tenure tells us how long employment lasted. It does not tell us whether it was worth having.

Organisations routinely celebrate retention and treat departure as evidence that something went wrong. Sometimes something did. Sometimes the relationship simply reached a successful conclusion.

Former employees can become advocates, clients, referrers, consultants, sources of future talent or future employees. They can also become people who speak well of the organisation when nobody is paying them to do so.

That may be one of the more interesting tests of the employment promise.

A good employment relationship should be capable of surviving its own ending.

Treat the employment promise like a commercial promise

Boards would be uncomfortable discovering that the client proposition promised capabilities the operating model could not deliver.

The employment proposition deserves similar scrutiny.

What are we actually promising people?

Which parts can we evidence?

Where does the lived organisation contradict the proposition?

What happens when one of those promises becomes inconvenient?

Are employees more capable when they leave than when they arrived?

What do former employees say about the organisation once it stops paying them?

The question is not whether an organisation has an employee value proposition, a careers site or an employer brand.

The question is whether the employment it describes is recognisable to the people experiencing it.

There is nothing unambitious about honesty.

Organisations should create exceptional places to work. They should develop people, build careers, create belonging, reward contribution and give talented people reasons to stay.

Aspiration is valuable.

It is not the same as a promise.

The employment relationship matters too much to be built on promises neither party can reasonably expect to hold forever.

Make fewer promises casually.

Take the important ones much more seriously.

Promise what is within the organisation’s gift.

Keep it.

The employment promise should not be that the relationship will last forever.

It should be that it was worth having.