“We treat people like adults” is easy to say and rare to specify. Specified, it turns out to have three clauses, and most companies that use the sentence would sign none of them. Adults get real numbers. Adults control their hours. Adults can leave, on terms known in advance. Everything else in progressive people management is decoration on top of these.
Numbers
An adult decision requires information; withholding the information while requesting the trust is the tell of a parental deal. The clearest institutional version of the numbers clause comes from Morning Star, the tomato processor documented in Lee and Edmondson’s canonical review of self-managing organizations: since the 1990s, colleagues there have signed CLOUs, Colleague Letters of Understanding, bilateral agreements that spell out responsibilities, goals and metrics and are renegotiated at least annually. Not a vibe, a document. Each person can see what they owe, what they are owed, and how it will be measured. The contrast with the ordinary corporate arrangement is stark: objectives cascade downward, budgets are secret, and the employee is asked to plan a life on numbers they may not see.
Hours
The hours clause sounds riskier than it is, and there is a factory-floor demonstration on record. In 1985, as Ricardo Semler has told it, Semco let its factory workers set their own schedules. Management predicted the assembly line would collapse, since an assembly line is the textbook case of interdependent timing. Instead, the workers coordinated among themselves: parents took mornings, single workers took evenings, and the official policy amounted to “talk to the person next to you.” His summary was that adults do this. The deeper move at Semco came from the same period, after Semler’s own collapse at 25: stop counting hours at all and measure whether the pump was delivered. Absenteeism fell.
Modern causal evidence points the same way. A randomized controlled trial at Trip.com published in Nature (Bloom, Han and Liang, 2024; 1,612 employees) found that giving people two days a week of schedule-and-place flexibility cut voluntary quits by a third, from 7.2 percent to 4.8 percent, with no detectable difference in performance ratings or promotions across four review cycles. The experiment tested location, but the object being handed over is the same one the Semco machinists got in 1985: adult custody of one’s own time, with the work judged by output.
Exits
The exit clause is the least discussed and the most diagnostic. In an adult contract, leaving is a priced event, not a moral one: notice periods, severance terms and what happens to the relationship afterward are written down while everyone is still friendly. This clause disciplines everything upstream. A company that knows its people can leave cleanly must keep the numbers honest and the hours humane, because retention now has to be earned rather than extracted. Conversely, wherever exit is fogged, by guilt, by vesting cliffs nobody explains, by the suggestion that departure is betrayal, the other two clauses quietly degrade. Nobody audits the deal of a person who cannot leave.
The three clauses reinforce each other, which is why companies rarely hold just one. Open numbers make self-managed hours safe, because everyone can see whether the output arrived. Honest exits make open numbers credible, because information shared with people who are free to leave is information the company actually stands behind. Remove any clause and the other two start to wobble: hours autonomy without visible output becomes suspicion, and transparency without exit rights becomes a briefing you cannot act on.
It is worth saying what the adult contract is not. It is not cold. The Semco stories are full of affection, and Morning Star’s agreements are between colleagues, not strangers. The contract is what the affection stands on. Warmth without numbers, hours and exits is weather; it changes with the quarter. The three clauses are climate, and they are the only form of workplace respect that survives a bad year intact, because none of them depends on anyone’s mood to remain true.
A company can start with whichever clause it fears least. Publish the numbers people’s decisions actually depend on. Hand schedules to the people who do the work and judge the output. Write the exit terms you would be proud to read aloud. Then notice that the phrase “we treat people like adults” has become unnecessary, which is how you know it has become true.
Sources
- Bloom, Han & Liang / Nature 630 (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. RCT with 1,612 employees: two flexible days cut quits by one third (7.2%→4.8%) with no performance or promotion penalty. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2
- Lee & Edmondson / Research in Organizational Behavior 37 (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Documents Morning Star's CLOUs: bilateral colleague contracts defining responsibilities and metrics, renegotiated at least annually. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059