What Does a Human-Centred Organisation Even Mean?

Let me tell you about Rebecca (not her real name).

Six months ago, she joined a company and fell for it hard. Warm onboarding, Slack channels that actually made her laugh, a box of fancy chocolates on her desk with a note: “Welcome. Let’s build great things together.” She felt chosen. She walked in with years of experience, a head full of sharp ideas, and that buzzy energy you get when you’re sure you’re about to do the best work of your life.

Then, month two arrived, and she started noticing things.

Small ones, at first.

The daily “check-ins” where nobody actually checked in. People just read their to-do lists out loud in the flattest voice known to humankind. The end-of-day “check-out” emails that vanished into a void nobody read. She shrugged it off. Everyone else had been there for years, so surely it was fine. Right?

Then she did the exact thing they’d hired her to do. She spotted a broken process, gave up a weekend to build a proper proposal, researched it, pulled the data, mapped the gaps, and laid out precisely how it would make everyone’s life easier.

Her boss said, “Love this energy. Let’s park it for now.”

It was never mentioned again.

She tried the next month. New idea, same quality, same polite little death. None of her suggestions made the priority list, because the priority was always firefighting.

And I’m sure you know the kind. The “emergencies” that could’ve been prevented six months ago if anyone had the time to fix the root cause. The calls that should’ve been a two-line message. The plans she rebuilt three times because priorities shifted like sand under her feet.

So she stopped.

One evening, she opened her job description again and realised that it had almost nothing to do with her actual days. That capable, fired-up person who’d walked in on day one… well, she had long forgotten her.

She raised it with her boss. More than once.

Nothing changed.

He was certain the company was wonderful. That people were lucky to be there. But somehow, every single colleague she spoke to privately disagreed.

So she handed in her notice. When people asked whether they should stick it out, she gave them the honest version: run, and don’t look back.

Here’s the thing about Rebecca. She wasn’t fresh out of uni; she’d worked across a bunch of companies and industries, doing similar jobs for years. She knew what it felt like to be somewhere that wanted her brain, not just her output. And she knew the other feeling too: slowly drowning inside a system that looks fine on paper while quietly suffocating everyone in it.

She could tell the difference. That’s why she got out so fast.

The Part Where It’s (Probably) Actually You

I hate to break it to you, but Rebecca’s story isn’t rare.

Every year, Gallup asks hundreds of thousands of workers across 160+ countries how their working lives actually feel. In 2025, 20% said they were engaged. So picture five people on a call. One of them is really present. And then the other four are firing off check-out emails and nodding through the standup while mentally lying on a beach somewhere, dreaming about better days.

That disengagement cost the global economy around $10 trillion in a single year. Neither of us will ever see a penny of it, so forget the trillions. What I actually notice is something “smaller” and more annoying: how hard it is to find a workplace that someone intentionally designed to be good to work in.

And it’s getting worse. 2025 was the second year in a row of falling engagement, with not one region on the planet improving.

Even the managers are drowning.

Their engagement slid from 27% to 22% in a single year. So the people who are meant to notice when someone like Rebecca is checking out are too busy worrying about themselves to notice it.

It’s a bit scary. This is definitely NOT how we should be spending our one working lives.

So how did we get here? I went digging. Turns out it’s not that complicated.

We Updated Everything Except The People

Over the last 20 or 30 years, companies upgraded everything. New tech, new software, new platforms, AI-powered everything-with-a-pulse. The stack got shinier and pricier every year.

But the people part got left on factory settings.

How we structure work, make decisions, hand out authority, give feedback, define roles, measure who’s “doing well”: most of it hasn’t really budged since the early 1900s. We’re running modern companies on management ideas built for assembly lines and shift whistles, from an era that treated workers as interchangeable parts who needed watching.

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management genuinely made sense for the factories that needed it back then. My problem is that loads of modern companies still run the same playbook. They just gave it friendlier names. Command-and-control became “alignment.” Top-down became “strategic direction.” Surveillance became “visibility.” And the daily standup became a “check-in” that checks nothing except whether you look busy enough.

Most of the work we do now (the thinking, the creative problem-solving, the relationship-building, the stuff that actually makes money) needs exactly the things factory management was built to remove: autonomy, judgment, initiative, trust. So, of course, it’s not working.

Rebecca walked in with all four. The company didn’t rip them out of her- it just never made room for them, and that was enough for her to leave.

There’s An Actual International Standard For This

Okay, this is the part that surprised me a bit.

There is a real, official international standard for human-centred organisations. Published in 2016 by ISO. It’s called ISO 27500.

I went to read it. You have to buy it. This tells you everything about why most leaders have never heard of it. The guidance exists, but it’s not really that easy to access.

No worries, though. Someone else bought it and kindly summarised it. So here’s the summary of the summary:

Treat people’s differences as a strength, not a headache. Stop designing around some imaginary “standard person.” Build roles around real strengths. Notice that one person thinks best out loud in a meeting while another needs 24 hours to send you something three times better, and roll with it.

Make usability and accessibility actual goals. Before you unleash a shiny new internal tool, ask the people who’ll live in it whether it makes their work easier or harder. Then (revolutionary, I know) act on the answer.

Fix the system, not the symptom. Low morale? The reflex is to bolt on a wellbeing perk. Bad communication? Book an away day. But the struggling team is almost never the actual problem. It’s usually something upstream: fuzzy priorities, clashing incentives, a feedback loop that loops back to nowhere. Patch the symptom, and it grows back. Fix the root, and it doesn’t.

Treat health, safety, and wellbeing as real priorities, not a mindfulness app that pings you a breathing exercise at 2 p.m. while you’re in back-to-backs until 6. Make workload an actual conversation. Train managers to spot someone struggling before their output tanks, not after.

Give people work that means something. When people get why their work matters, not just what to ship, they show up with a completely different kind of attitude. Build roles around real contribution. And when priorities shift (they always do), someone explains the why, not just the what.

Be actually open, not performatively transparent. Watch out for “transparency theatre,” where you share loads of information but only the flattering bits. Real openness flows up as well as down, and bad news should travel as fast as the good stuff.

Be socially responsible as standard, because companies that act as if they exist in a bubble eventually find the bubble works both ways: in talent, trust, and reputation.

So that’s the standard to aim for if an organisation wants to be considered human-centred. Which basically means it’s built around how people actually think, feel, and work, instead of forcing them to contort themselves around systems designed for an era long gone.

And it’s a good start except... that I think it’s just the bare minimum.

In the same way, minimum wage and statutory holidays are the bare minimum. People are grateful to have them, but nobody’s out there thriving just because the company does what’s legally required of them.

So here’s the rest of what I’ve found. The pieces that actually make people flourish, dug out of decades of real research. I’ll go fast.

What Humans Actually Need at Work

Three psychological needs run the whole show. Autonomy (I do things how I want to do them), competence (I’m growing and my skills get used), and relatedness (real connection, not forced fun). Meet these, and people get motivated, creative, and resilient. Starve them, and people check out, burn out, or turn into compliance robots that don’t really care. This is Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, and it’s about as close to a law of human motivation as we’ve got.

Resources buffer demands. High demand plus high resources? Exhilarating. High demand plus low resources? The exact recipe for burnout. Most small companies fixate on managing demands (workload, priorities) while stripping the resources (cutting feedback, micromanaging away autonomy, never explaining the why). Match the two.

Burnout is systemic, not a personal failing. Maslach found six culprits: too much workload, too little control, not enough reward, broken community, unfairness, and a clash between your values and the job’s. Spot which one’s biting and fix it before it becomes a resignation letter.

Our brains treat social threat like physical danger. When our status is threatened, when a role is unclear, when we have no control, are feeling left out, or when we are treated unfairly, our brains react as if we were in actual danger. Cortisol spikes, the calm, creative part goes offline, and our thinking shrinks. Not ideal. Also pure biology. That’s David Rock’s SCARF model. Design work to turn the threat down and turn safety, progress, and competence up.

How to Protect People’s Focus and Energy

Async by default, live only when async is not cutting it. Write things down with enough context that a question can be answered without a meeting. The burden of being clear sits with the sender (we’ve all had the no-context message and lost 30 minutes guessing what was meant. I’ve also sent them, so no judgment). That always-on, reply-this-second pressure is one of the most reliable predictors of cognitive overload.

Keep a predictable rhythm. Give the week a clear, shared shape: when decisions get made, when you collaborate, and when deep work is protected. Predictable time lowers everyone’s mental load, because nobody’s braced for a surprise meeting they don’t want to have landing at any moment. It doesn’t mean identical schedules, just a skeleton everyone can plan around.

Protect deep work like it’s oxygen (please). Knowledge work really needs it. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. And by one much-quoted estimate, pointless meetings cost US businesses around $37 billion a year. On top of that, most of us only have about 4 to 5 hours of truly focused work in us a day, not 8+. Being “always on” is bad for people; design against it.

Design for recovery, not just output. Bodies run on roughly 90-minute focus cycles, so allow people to work in blocks and then actually rest. Protect real breaks (a walk, a chat, something you genuinely enjoy, not doom-scrolling while eating at the desk). Honour working hours, discourage after-hours pings, and treat holidays as a real right.

Respect chronotypes. Shoving everyone into the same 9-to-5 box creates a mismatch between when people are expected to perform and when they actually can. Evening types forced into early starts can perform up to 30% worse. So offer flexible start and finish times, keep the collaborative stuff in the midday overlap when everyone’s awake, and trust people to build their deep work around their own energy.

Test a four-day work week. It won’t fit everywhere, but the big 4 Day Week Global UK pilot in 2022 (61 companies, around 2,900 people) saw staff turnover fall 57%, burnout drop for 71% of people, and sick days fall 65%, with revenue holding flat. Afterwards, 56 of the 61 companies kept it. It’s about cutting performative busyness, not doing less of the work that matters.

How to Structure The Company Itself

Stay small on purpose. Small companies shouldn’t try to mimic big ones. Their superpower is speed of learning and how tight-knit they can be. The ideal knowledge team is 4 to 6 people, because communication links explode as you grow (5 people is 10 links, 10 people is 45), and psychological safety gets shaky above 8 to 10. Bezos called it the two-pizza rule: if two pizzas can’t feed the team, the team’s too big.

Push decisions to where the information lives. Founder dependency is the classic small-company trap. Let the person doing the work make the operational call within clear guardrails. Some teams use the advice process: you can make the decision, you just have to get advice from the experts and the people it’ll affect first.

Get roles right. Clear enough that people know what they own, loose enough that they can reach past it. Role ambiguity is a real stressor (cue low-level, all-day anxiety), but people who feel they can stretch beyond their job title are more proactive and engaged. So give people a clear core plus an open invitation to expand. Everybody wins.

Let people craft their work. Within their role, let people reshape the tasks they do, who they work with, and how they think about why it matters, to fit who they are (researchers call it job crafting). A simple recurring question does most of the work: is there a way we could shape this so it fits you better? It costs almost nothing and quietly lifts engagement.

Lead by serving. Servant leadership, where the leader’s actual job is the growth and effectiveness of their people, is linked to higher engagement, more trust, more creativity, and less turnover and burnout. The real work: clear the blockers, hold the meaning, grow people, guard the boundaries of what the company stands for, and notice when something’s off before it’s too late.

Anchor the company in purpose and accountability. Be clear about why the company exists beyond profit, and hold yourself accountable to the people your decisions affect (workers, customers, community), not just shareholders. This is the heart of what B Corp checks and what Scotland’s Fair Work Framework treats as a two-way deal between employer and worker. Companies that weave purpose and accountability into how they actually make decisions tend to keep their values when revenue dips, exactly when it’s easiest to quietly drop them.

How To Build a Culture People Don’t Want to Leave

Build psychological safety on purpose. Edmondson found that it’s the strongest predictor of team learning and performance, even above raw talent. You build it by going first as a leader (admit you’re unsure, own your mistakes, ask for help), treating work as learning rather than a test, reacting well to the first time someone brings bad news, and actively pulling in the quieter voices.

Make disagreement and feedback normal. Safety is the foundation; this is what you build on top of it. Spread the talking so it isn’t just the loudest two voices (balanced turn-taking is a marker of smart teams - don’t force quiet people to speak up, but definitely ask if they would like to contribute either in the meeting or afterwards), ask more than you tell, debrief failures instead of hunting for someone to blame, and make feedback small, frequent and two-way rather than a dreaded once-a-year event.

Default to transparency. Share the meeting notes, document the reasoning behind decisions, give access to the financials, and make the roadmap visible. People hate being kept in the dark, and information lets them act on their own initiative. Write things down as a form of care, not bureaucracy, so people who weren’t in the room can still act, and new starters can get going without draining your most experienced folks.

Onboard newcomers like they actually matter. The first 90 days decide whether someone ends up capable, connected, and clear, or confused, isolated, and halfway out the door. Structured check-ins, a buddy who isn’t their manager, real work early (not just watching from the sidelines), and an honest tour of the unwritten rules. Non-negotiable.

Design for real inclusion, not assimilation. Belonging plus uniqueness equals inclusion. Belonging minus uniqueness is assimilation, where everyone conforms to the dominant group: the person with ADHD masks their style, the introvert performs extraversion in every meeting. It looks like harmony to you, but it feels like suppression to them. Build for difference as a genuine resource.

Treat neurodiversity as design, not accommodation. Around 15 to 20% of people are neurodivergent in some meaningful way, often with real strengths in pattern recognition, hyperfocus, and divergent thinking. Accommodation says, “We’ve got a standard system, and we’ll make exceptions for you.” Design says, “We’ll build for different brains from the start.” Multiple ways to communicate, options for solo deep work, flexible routes to the same result. And please don’t frame it as “something’s wrong with you, and we’re being kind.” They belong in the group because they’re part of the group.

Pay fairly and recognise specifically. Fair pay, transparency where you can manage it, and serious investment in recognition that ties effort to actual impact. A generic “great job!” does nothing. The specific stuff gets remembered for years.

Invest in growth, because stagnation rots people. When people stop growing, they start leaving. In their heads first, then for real. Deliberate practice aimed at real weak spots, stretch assignments with support (not chucking people in the deep end, which is trauma, not development, and yes, I’ve watched it happen and lived it), and learning built into the actual week instead of a budget nobody is brave enough to touch because they’re too busy.

Design the space and the place. People need quite a bit of control over their immediate environment. Open-plan offices often do the opposite of what’s promised. Natural light, plants, quiet, and a sane temperature (productivity peaks around 21 to 22°C) beat a windowless room with a pool table any day. And let people choose office or remote work where the work allows. People value that flexibility as much as an 8% pay rise, and productivity and happiness tend to climb too.

What it Actually Feels Like Inside One of These

If you ever land inside a company built this way, here’s what changes.

You stop performing busyness because you’re measured on outcomes and growth, not on how visibly present you look. People push back on ideas comfortably and offer their own all the time. Attention stops being fractured and reactive, so there’s actual room for deep thinking where real problems get solved instead of endlessly managed.

You get treated as a person, not a role-holder. Your particular strengths are known and used, your struggles are known and supported, and the work bends a little to fit you instead of you contorting to fit it. Bad news travels early because everyone knows early beats late. People rave about the place to their peers. They actually want to be there.

And, idealistically, people leave work happier and more whole, and carry that out into the rest of their lives. I know the last one sounds far-fetched. But it’s what I believe, and it’s why I keep digging into this and writing it all down.

So let’s change the world by making companies more awesome. One small company at a time.

And if you’re sold on this, you can find more on how to build a human-centred organisation yourself right here: https://www.linamileskaite.com/a-human-centred-organisation