Read Our Blog On Culture Change

So many marketers love data. In fact, the whole business world seems infatuated with it. Dashboards, charts, analytics platforms. You can’t open a meeting without someone throwing up a chart covered in numbers. Of course, data matters. It gives us a way to track, measure, and compare. But somewhere along the line, too much attention has been given to it, especially from senior teams.

On a building site, ‘backfilling’ means to refill an excavated hole with the material dug out of it. I think it makes a good analogy for what happens in an organisation when promotions aren’t well planned. We create the need to “backfill” when we promote someone without preparing their successor. What happens next? The newly promoted manager is stretched like a rubber band and snapped back into their old job to fix problems.

You’d think by now we’d have cracked it. After all, we’ve had years of practice. Endless Teams calls. Countless Zoom meetings. Surely, by 2025, everyone in the workplace should know how to present a document on screen.Apparently, no. For a generation raised on smartphones and social feeds, the inability to navigate a simple screen share is oddly persistent.

We spend most of our waking hours at work. That’s far too much life to live with only half of who we are. It’s time to retire the idea that being ‘yourself’ at work is risky. The real risk is pretending for so long that you forget who that self really is. Somewhere along the line, we absorbed the idea that professionalism requires performance. Cultures begin to shift when emotional intelligence becomes an everyday currency.

Strategy sets out the end goals. Every activity, no matter how large or small, must work towards those. And if some inevitable firefighting is needed along the way it should be addressed as part of that journey. Not as a separate action point. Another reason why there’s so much tactical activity at the expense of sticking to a longer-term strategy is the temptation to chase the data.

To retain people in 2025, we must stop confusing presence with participation. Leaders and their HR departments need to stop relying on reactive retention strategies like knee-jerk counter-offers, perks, or vague new job titles - and start building cultures where people want to stay. That begins with treating engagement not as an HR initiative, but as everyone’s responsibility. Attracting new members, requires little effort.