Mr. Roboto
On mandatory everything and the humans nobody bothered to include.
There is someone sitting at their desk right now reading a company-wide memo about AI adoption. Mandatory training. Required usage. Metrics to follow. And somewhere underneath the nodding along, a quiet and reasonable question is forming.
Has anyone ever mandated that my manager learn how to actually talk to me?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable. In fact, I think it might be the most important question no one is asking.
But sure. Let’s go all in on the AI thing.
You have a very specific and consistent relationship with the word “mandatory.” You love it. You reach for it the way my partner reaches for the remote when I’m watching WWE. Return to office? Mandatory. AI adoption? Mandatory. The two day team building retreat where everyone did an improv exercise and then never spoke about it again?
Take a guess.
Nailed it. Mandatory.
What is conspicuously, and I’ll be honest, impressively absent from your list of mandates is anything related to the actual human experience of working for you. There is no company-wide memo about listening. No required training in how to make the person across from you feel like their presence in the room means something. You have looked at the full complexity of human disconnection at work, the loneliness, the invisibility, the epidemic of people who feel like that Eames knock-off chair they’re breaking their back in, and decided that what this situation calls for is a better chatbot.
Seriously. You surveyed the wreckage and said, “I think we’ve nailed it. Prompt engineering!”
And listen. When it comes to getting people back in the office, I understand the impulse. Truly. Something must be done. You did something about it. You got everyone back in the same room and ordered Papa John’s on Fridays because nothing says “we value you as a human being” like... uh… Hmm. There may actually not be a metaphor that can be as rough as Papa John’s. The point is you created the conditions for connection and labeled it culture.
Do you want to know what your employees are talking about while eating that pizza?
Whether anyone up in the C-suite is actually thinking about them at all.
Proximity is not connection. 27,000 people ran the LA Marathon last year side by side for 26 miles. Do you actually think at the end of the race everyone regrouped and said, “OMG, we should all get together and write a pilot!”
The mandate was never going to fix what the mandate helped create.
And now here comes AI. Same instinct. Different memo. You are once again reaching for the visible thing, the trackable thing, the thing you can put in a deck and show to a board and watch people nod at like it constitutes a strategy. You can track AI adoption. You can run reports on it. You can call it transformation and put it in the subject line with an exclamation point and everything.
Human connection does not generate a slide.
Belonging does not have a dashboard. The feeling an employee gets when someone senior treats their question like it deserves a real answer does not show up in your quarterly metrics. And so you have decided, with the full confidence of people who will never personally experience the consequences of this decision, that it doesn’t count.
Here is the good news. And I mean this without an ounce of sarcasm.
The solution is not complicated. And it doesn’t require a consultant or a rebrand or a two day offsite with a goddamn ropes course. It requires treating human connection with the same urgency you are currently applying to AI adoption. Not as a perk. As a mandate. A real one. With accountability attached to it. You want your people fluent in the tools shaping the future? Then also make it non-negotiable that your managers know how to make a person feel seen. Run them in parallel. Invest in both with equal seriousness and watch what happens to your numbers, your retention, your culture, and every other thing you claim to care about.
The companies that figure this out will not be remembered as the ones who mandated the most. They will be remembered as the ones who understood that the person using the tool still needs to feel like a person.
To the person eating that pizza right now and quietly wondering if anyone up there is thinking about them.
They should be.
And if they’re not, find someone who will.
I’m here if you need me.
Pump Up the Volume: On Confidence, Self-Doubt, and the Voice in Your Head That Can Go Straight to Hell is coming soon. Foreword by “The Man” Becky Lynch. Blurbs by Jimmy Kimmel and Chris Regan (Family Guy, The Daily Show).