Work feels far more complicated than it used to be. Navigating the incorporation of AI. Multiple generations in the workplace. Divisive politics. Upskilling, downskilling, reskilling. Whenever something starts to feel overly complex I go back to Rule #1: When things seem overly complicated, they probably are so simplify.
So let’s go back to basics.
What is work, really? What is a job? Strip away the org charts, the PowerPoints, the mission statements, and the Monday morning all-hands. At its core, work is an agreement. You provide services and are compensated. Hopefully in a way that meets your needs. It doesn’t matter if you’re a full time employee of 30 years or on a part time contract. The mechanics are the same. A boring, technical agreement — and the foundation of everything else.
Think about a house. When cracks show up in the drywall, the problem usually isn’t the drywall. It’s the foundation shifting underneath. The house didn’t suddenly get worse, something got out of alignment below the surface.
Work is the same. The agreement is the foundation.
But there is a whole other side of work that causes more problems than anything else: expectations. If agreements are the foundation, expectations are everything built on top of it. Sometimes shared, sometimes not. The most dramatic problems happen when expectations shift outside of the agreement. When the layout of the house isn’t supported by the foundation it’s a recipe for disaster.
When expectations drift away from the agreement and people are asked to do things that feel outside their deal, or when employers assume enthusiasm for things nobody signed up for, the cracks start to show. A little at first. Then more. Then you’ve got a workplace full of disengaged employees and frustrated managers, and nobody can quite name why.
The foundation isn’t bad. It’s just been forgotten.
If you’re reading this thinking the other side is the problem it’s time to check your own expectations too. Expectations aren’t created by one person. The employer has them. The employee has them. And in most cases, neither side has ever actually compared notes. The problem isn’t expectations themselves, it’s the unstated ones. The ones that live underneath the surface, assumed to be obvious, never written down, never said out loud.
Take loyalty. It’s one of the most common unstated expectations in any workplace and one of the most loaded. Employers often expect a certain degree of loyalty without ever defining what that means. Employees expect something similar in return. Nobody names it. Nobody negotiates it. It just sits there, quietly, until something disrupts it. Then someone resigns and their colleagues feel oddly betrayed. A company restructures and employees feel blindsided. Nobody did anything technically wrong. But the unstated expectation of loyalty got broken, and because it was never named, there’s no way to make sense of it. It just feels bad.
This happens at smaller scales every single day. What do you expect from your people that you’ve never actually told them? And on the other side, what do you expect from your employer that you’ve never said? Are those expectations actually built on the foundation of the agreement? Or have they drifted into something nobody ever agreed to?
Go back to the agreement. What did both sides actually sign up for? Then look at the expectations sitting on top of it. Are they stated clearly? Are they built on that foundation? Do both sides understand them the same way?
If not, that’s where the cracks are coming from. You don’t have to blow up the house. You just have to check the foundation and be willing to have the conversation you’ve been avoiding.