That paragraph tracks with what I've heard from female peers that work at Microsoft too. Microsoft talks a good game but fails to do the right thing when the going gets tough (e.g. senior leaders can, and do, retaliate against individual contributors that annoy them with the full support of HR business partners).
I'm expecting a massive backlash against the "culture-forward" style of running a company as the article describes. There's always been a lot of cynicism around things like company values, but that cynicism appears to be increasing at a rapid pace with a meaningful portion of employees (see all the recent articles about Google's internal culture). It doesn't have to be a majority of employees, 20-30% is plenty to materially affect an organization.
Personally, the reason is that a company ultimately isn't "culture-forward" unless if it's willing to take a financial hit in order preserve its culture. Few companies are willing to do that, and that's OK, we are a capitalist society after all. It just isn't OK to hammer culture like its the most important thing while twisting themselves in logical knots to justify highly-profitable activities and actions that the employees call out as being counter-cultural. Some of those conflicts become public & newsworthy (ICE contracts), most of it doesn't (retaining that effective asshole).
Importantly, whether or not senior leadership agrees with the vocal (often significant minority) employees is besides the point. It's a communication issue -- they've created an expectation that isn't being matched -- not an issue of truth. Many of these "culture-forward" companies are losing the ability to tell their employees to "shut up and work" because they've explicitly said they don't want day-to-day work to operate in that manner. But for some reason senior leadership hasn't figured out that they can't operate like that anymore either when they push a culture like Microsoft has.
I think the end game here is companies like Microsoft painting themselves into a corner where a big, big, fight over unionization is all but inevitable. Knowledge workers want a seat at the table precisely because companies have told them they should have that precisely because it improves the bottom line on a small team to be self-organizing (see: Google's project aristotle for more).
I'm expecting a massive backlash against the "culture-forward" style of running a company as the article describes. There's always been a lot of cynicism around things like company values, but that cynicism appears to be increasing at a rapid pace with a meaningful portion of employees (see all the recent articles about Google's internal culture). It doesn't have to be a majority of employees, 20-30% is plenty to materially affect an organization.
Personally, the reason is that a company ultimately isn't "culture-forward" unless if it's willing to take a financial hit in order preserve its culture. Few companies are willing to do that, and that's OK, we are a capitalist society after all. It just isn't OK to hammer culture like its the most important thing while twisting themselves in logical knots to justify highly-profitable activities and actions that the employees call out as being counter-cultural. Some of those conflicts become public & newsworthy (ICE contracts), most of it doesn't (retaining that effective asshole).
Importantly, whether or not senior leadership agrees with the vocal (often significant minority) employees is besides the point. It's a communication issue -- they've created an expectation that isn't being matched -- not an issue of truth. Many of these "culture-forward" companies are losing the ability to tell their employees to "shut up and work" because they've explicitly said they don't want day-to-day work to operate in that manner. But for some reason senior leadership hasn't figured out that they can't operate like that anymore either when they push a culture like Microsoft has.
I think the end game here is companies like Microsoft painting themselves into a corner where a big, big, fight over unionization is all but inevitable. Knowledge workers want a seat at the table precisely because companies have told them they should have that precisely because it improves the bottom line on a small team to be self-organizing (see: Google's project aristotle for more).