Every organization has rituals, and rituals are not the problem. The anniversary post, the offsite, the branded fleece: harmless, sometimes even binding. Theater begins at the substitution point, the moment a ritual is deployed instead of a term. The company that cannot move on salary bands ships a wellness app. The company that will not publish its numbers prints values on the stairwell. The ritual is real; what it replaces was realer.
The jury and the kombucha
Ricardo Semler has told a story about serving on the jury of a best-workplace award. The winner was a bank where the tellers were not allowed to sit down. The vice president served kombucha. He drew the general lesson about culture certifications: they are paid products. The company pays the fee, runs its own survey, and hangs the plaque in reception. Semco, he noted, never had a plaque; it had a hammock in the middle of the office. The hammock was not a symbol of rest, it was rest, usable at 2 p.m. by an actual person. That is the entire distinction between an artifact of culture and an advertisement for one: whether anybody can redeem it.
The kombucha bank is not an outlier; it is the business model of loyalty theater. Certification pageantry, engagement surveys whose results are curated before release, town halls with pre-screened questions: each produces the evidence of a good workplace without the expenditure of one.
Why theater gets bought
The economics are straightforward. Terms are expensive and rituals are cheap. Moving a pay formula, granting schedule autonomy, opening the books, writing severance worth reading: each transfers money or power, permanently, and shows up in someone’s budget. A gratitude campaign transfers nothing and shows up in a deck. For a manager judged quarterly, the ritual dominates every time, which is why theater is less a character flaw than an incentive gradient. It is also self-concealing: the more elaborate the performance, the harder it becomes internally to say that nothing underneath has changed.
The aggregate results of two decades of culture investment suggest how little the performances purchase. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 measures global employee engagement at 20 percent, the lowest since 2020. The same report finds that in best-practice organizations 79 percent of managers are engaged against a 22 percent global average, a gap Gallup reads as evidence that engagement is a design outcome, not a mood or a market condition. Design means terms: who decides, who knows, who gets paid what for what. Rituals aim at mood. The instrument and the target do not match.
The audit
The test for any given practice takes one sentence: if this disappeared tomorrow, what would change in an employee’s decisions? Cancel the awards dinner and nothing changes; no one’s mortgage, schedule, information or options moves. Cancel the profit-share formula, the self-set hours, the open ledger, and everything changes at once. By this audit, most of what is called culture in corporate life is weather effects, and the small remainder is climate. A useful corollary: anything that must be photographed to exist is probably theater. Terms do not need photography; they are visible in payroll and in calendars.
Employees, for their part, run this audit instinctively and silently. Nobody resigns over a canceled pizza day, but people notice within weeks whether the things that would change their decisions exist here or only their photographs do. The workforce’s collective conclusion is what the engagement surveys then measure, at which point the theater expands to manage the survey.
None of this argues for joyless workplaces. Rituals built on top of real terms are the best rituals there are; a party thrown by a company that shares its profits is an actual celebration, since there is something to celebrate and everyone knows their share of it. The order of operations is the whole argument. Terms first, then theater, and the theater becomes true.
Loyalty, meanwhile, should be read the way an accountant reads it: as a lagging indicator of terms. Where it is high and the terms are good, the terms did it. Where it is demanded and the terms are poor, what looks like loyalty is inventory awaiting a better offer. No plaque changes the count, though the hammock, being real, might.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Global engagement at 20% (lowest since 2020); in best-practice organizations 79% of managers are engaged vs. a 22% global average, pointing to design rather than conjuncture. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Edelman Trust Institute (2026). Edelman Trust Barometer 2026. Employer trust is the highest-performing institutional relationship, an asset built on performance rather than symbolism (33,938 respondents, 28 countries). https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer