Tech must shift from superficial perks to empathetic leadership and agile learning to stop AI from fueling employee burnout and anxiety.
Chris Ernst
Chief Learning Officer
Workday
A lot has changed over the past decade. Corporate culture was simpler when it was enough to have a coffee bar and values plastered on the wall, but we’re in a different era now. Workers, especially those in the tech sector, have had their lives upended in various ways, most notably through restructurings and workforce reductions. And now, leaders and employees alike find themselves in the midst of another workforce revolution: the age of enterprise AI.
We’re at an inflection point, not just from a technological perspective, but from a cultural one as well. Recent research from Workday found that organizations that translate AI productivity gains into sustained value do so by reinvesting in their people—not just in technology. Right now, most corporate cultures remain unequipped for the true impact of AI on human capability.
This cultural misalignment matters for leaders. First, there is an ethical obligation that we, as leaders, all have: a responsibility to shepherd our people through structural transformation in a way that preserves dignity and reinforces trust. Then, there is the business imperative. There is no way that an enterprise can sustainably capitalize on AI if its workforce experiences the technology only as an instrument of burnout, job insecurity, and diminished agency.
Closing this gap requires a deliberate paradigm shift. At Workday, we’re transforming corporate culture from an abstract concept into a measurable, strategic lever by prioritizing three core pillars: Focus, Fast, and Fun. Focus dictates where we direct our energy, Fast defines how we continuously learn, and Fun is the sustainable emotional fuel that keeps the entire system running.
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Most corporate cultures are not equipped for AI’s impact on the future of human capability.
When leadership teams treat AI only as a mechanism for optimization and cost reduction, they introduce several key structural risks to the enterprise:
The crux of the issue is a fundamental pacing mismatch. AI accelerates work timelines, yet human learning systems and emotional adaptation operate on a more constrained level. If leaders aren’t able to alter our learning cultures, companies will lose the competitive advantages of AI while magnifying its structural risks.
AI has rapidly expanded the volume of knowledge and capabilities available to an organization. However, when an organization can theoretically pursue everything, the premium on knowing exactly what to ignore skyrockets. In an AI-saturated world, cognitive focus is crucial for long-term survival.
From an organizational learning perspective, Focus directs resources exclusively toward strategic initiatives, provides radical employee clarity, and makes cultural transformation measurable. When teams narrow their operational focus, execution speed increases, decision-making quality improves, and employees report a significant drop in cognitive fragmentation.
In an AI-saturated ecosystem, cognitive focus is essential for organizational survival.
If Focus is centered on selecting the correct organizational challenges, Fast is defined by the speed at which an organization learns, adapts, and self-corrects based on real-world feedback.
By treating AI rollouts as quick, low-risk experiments that we can tweak on the fly, we’re able to move a whole lot faster. Instead of debating whether a tool will work for six months, our philosophy can be best described as “learning by doing:” launch a quick pilot, see how it actually performs, and fix it as we go.
Crucially, building a Fast organizational culture is a psychological safety challenge. If leaders expect employees to move quickly and share their failures publicly, they must also ensure they don’t feel their jobs are on the line if things don’t go according to plan.
When we say Fun is one of our core values, we don't just mean playing ping-pong in the break room. To us, real fun means building genuine connections, staying locked-in and engaged, and growing together as a team.
This focus on intentional relationship-building is critical in the AI era for three explicit reasons:
Real fun means building genuine connections, staying locked-in and engaged, and growing together as a team.
At Workday, our company culture priority—led by my teammate Garrett Gatlin, director of enterprise enablement—has involved the comprehensive analysis of hundreds of thousands of comments and qualitative data from employees.
This rigorous listening exercise revealed precisely where bureaucratic friction was inhibiting our agility.
“What we're realizing—and I think a lot of companies are realizing—is that when AI speeds up work, particularly knowledge work, so quickly, it reveals that the real bottleneck is people,” Gatlin says. “How we communicate, how we collaborate, how we do practical things.”
The data gathered by Gatlin and his team directly informed concrete corporate interventions, including structured focus hours, streamlined meeting architectures, and highly specific behavioral metrics that we now track inside our regular employee engagement surveys to ensure accountability.
Executive leadership teams across the globe have the opportunity to convert this cultural framework into an active operating model, just as Workday has. Here are three distinct levers that any company can start to pull immediately:
AI is moving way faster than organizations can operate. This creates a massive gap between what the technology can actually do and how people are set up to work. When that gap gets too wide, you end up with stressed-out employees, broken trust, and a ton of missed opportunities.
If we can't prove that bringing in AI can actually make people's jobs better—by creating more nuanced career paths and a more empathetic workplace—we can't expect anyone to trust the technology we're building.
As leaders, we can't slow the pace of tech innovation. But we can control how we treat our people and the culture we build around them. The real challenge isn't just building a culture that keeps up with AI; it's making sure we protect the human spirit that gives it purpose in the first place.
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