What 2025 Taught Us About Cultural Health (And What We're Still Learning)
2025 has been a big year for organizations. Glassdoor just announced that the word of the year for the labor market is fatigue, and perhaps that's fitting for many corporations too, navigating intense market pressure and political and regulatory uncertainty.
At Heart Management we work toward a vision of a world free from unhealthy workplace culture. This year, we've supported leaders in high-stakes industries who've had to navigate these waters while trying to transform elements of their culture to perform with integrity.
As we close out the year, we sat down to reflect on what surprised us about culture work in 2025. You can listen to the full conversation on the Leading Transformational Change podcast.
The performance vs. reality gap
One pattern stood out clearly: the gap between performative culture work and real cultural health became impossible to ignore. As political and economic winds shifted, many organizations quietly abandoned sustainability commitments, diversity initiatives, and cultural priorities they'd championed just years earlier.
"We're seeing companies respond to pressure in very different ways," Caterina observed. "Some are investing everything into scaling technological change. Others are refocusing on culture and behavior because without that, staying true to who they are becomes incredibly difficult."
The organizations that continued genuine culture work showed renewed resilience. But as Tobias noted: "A lot of what seemed like culture work was actually just shaped by the environment of 2020. When that environment changed dramatically by 2025, it clarified what was really there all along."
The human cost of AI
Perhaps the most striking insight from our behavioral assessments this year was what Caterina calls "a shift toward a transactional psychological contract." The narrative around AI-superhuman technology with humans perpetually "not quite enough", is having profound effects.
"There's a disillusionment happening," Caterina explained. "Organizations abandoned culture commitments in haste to meet technological change. People experience job insecurity, loss of status, loss of meaning in their work."
The irony? The technology creating this sense of inadequacy was developed by humans. And 92% of AI implementations are failing, not because of the technology, but because organizations haven't focused on culture and change readiness.
Speed and shortcuts
With pressure to innovate faster and integrate technology faster, organizations face a dangerous tension. Culture can enable rapid adaptation, but it can also enable dangerous shortcuts.
"You have organizations stuck in traffic on one hand," Tobias reflected. "On the other, you have the truck that crashed into the bridge because it took a shortcut. Both dangers are real right now."
The organizations managing this well are honest about the dilemmas. They're not hiding trade-offs or pretending difficult decisions are easy. They're creating space for people to navigate grey zones and speak up when something feels wrong.
Moving forward
As we head into 2026, our hope is straightforward: that more organizations move from performative culture work to the real work of cultural health. That they recognize no technological innovation is a silver bullet when humans are still in the loop.
"There's no mission so important that it's not equally important to look at the health of how you're pursuing it," Tobias concluded. "We need to be diligent about the things that want to corrupt leadership and organizational culture."
The real work isn't glamorous. It's about treating humans with dignity in times of rapid change. It's about being honest about dilemmas instead of pretending they don't exist. It's about building soil that enables healthy behaviors to grow.
That's the work that sticks. That's the work that matters.
Listen to our full year-end reflection below, where we discuss these insights in greater depth and share our hopes for 2026.
