Rethinking the enterprise

When companies only put people at the centre in words (and how to change)

We need the courage to reunite what the system has separated: words and deeds, decisions and their consequences

by Emiliano Pecis*

22 May 2026

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

There is a phrase that recurs frequently in press releases, in corporate values documents, in presentations to new hires of almost every large organisation: 'Our company puts people at the centre'. You find it everywhere, from office walls to CEO interviews. The question arises: at the centre of what, exactly?

Because in the same company that puts people at the centre, a woman with skills equivalent to those of her male colleague continues to receive a lower salary, exactly as before the gender equality programme. In the same company that promotes flexibility as a core value, a new parent is denied smart working because the policy simply does not provide for it. In the same company that claims to reward merit, promotions follow networks of loyalty and proximity to power, in a mechanism that everyone knows and no one names. In the same company that funds programmes on psychological well-being and speaks of a safe environment, dismissals are conducted with legal techniques designed to emotionally destabilise the person and make them accept unfavourable conditions in a state of vulnerability.

Hypocrisy as architecture

These contradictions might appear to be isolated incidents, flaws in the execution of basically well-intentioned organisations. The Swedish sociologist Nils Brunsson, in his seminal work "The Organisation of Hypocrisy", has shown that it is instead a structural mechanism, and more importantly has given us the tools to understand why.

Brunsson distinguishes three fundamental outputs of any organisation: talk, decisions and actions. Talk addresses the market for social legitimacy: it serves to make the organisation acceptable in the eyes of employees, the public, investors and regulators. Decisions, formalised in policies, committees and programmes, function in practice as products in their own right: the decision to launch a gender equality programme, to set up an innovation lab, to administer an engagement survey already satisfies the need for legitimacy in itself, regardless of what happens next. Actions, finally, respond to day-to-day operational pressure and follow their own logic which rarely coincides with the first two.

Organisational hypocrisy, in Brunsson's reading, is the rational response to contradictory demands: the market demands efficiency, employees demand sense, regulators demand conformity. Satisfying all these demands with actions is very difficult; satisfying them with words and decisions is relatively simple. The symbol prevails because it costs less and, above all, it exhausts the moral conscience of those who produce it: after shooting the self-promotional videos, obtaining certification and launching the programme, management feels fine.

The price people pay

The most paradoxical consequence is that this mechanism produces exactly the opposite of what it promises. The company claims to put people at the centre in order to obtain involvement and belonging, and instead it generates cynicism, detachment, and progressive disengagement. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation for a long time knows this dynamic: by dint of hearing proclamations belied by everyday reality, people simply stop believing in them. They stop bringing ideas, stop pointing out problems, stop investing energy in a place they perceive as incoherent. The bare minimum becomes the rational response of those who have realised that their commitment will not be reciprocated by the same coin. It is a self-feeding spiral: the more the organisation raises the volume of rhetoric, the more people lower that of participation, because each new proclamation sounds like yet another confirmation of the distance between saying and doing. The Gallup figure that in Italia only 10% of workers declare themselves involved in their work is also the product of decades of systematic organisational hypocrisy, the cumulative result of betrayed promises that have taught indifference as a form of protection.

Certification as an alibi

It could be argued that the problem is contained by external certification mechanisms. Yet even this level has been captured by the same scheme: certification, in Brunsson's triad, is a decision that produces legitimacy without requiring a change in actions. A company can obtain UNI PDR 125 certification on gender equality without ever having addressed the real pay gap, because that certification measures processes, not outcomes. The same applies to ESG ratings, where billion-dollar funds call themselves sustainable because of ratings produced by agencies whose business model depends on the very companies they rate.

Rethinking the pact

How do we get out of it? If the very architecture of organisations produces hypocrisy by design, cosmetic adjustments are not enough. What is needed is the courage to re-couple what the system has separated: words and deeds, decisions and their consequences. It means practising radical transparency on the real outcomes of policies, making data that today remain hidden visible to all: pay gaps, promotion rates by gender, concrete survey results. It means reversing the logic of certification, measuring what has changed in people's lives, not what processes have been adopted. It means introducing accountability from the bottom up, where it is people who evaluate the organisation's coherence with its proclamations, and where that evaluation has real consequences.

The real question is whether organisations are willing to rethink the pact that binds them to their people, accepting that it can no longer stand on words. As long as they choose the symbol because it is free and silence because it is convenient, the distance between what they declare and what they do will remain where it has always been. And people will continue to discover that being put at the centre means above all this: being at the point where all contradictions converge, and where the burden of holding them up falls on those who have the least power to change them.

*AI & Organisational Strategist