Workplace Strategies Watercooler 2025: Bringing People Together During Changing Times

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Luther Wright, Jr.: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on what time you’re listening to this particular podcast. My name is Luther Wright, Jr. I’m the managing shareholder of Ogletree’s Nashville office and also the Assistant Director of Client Training for our Ogletree Deakins Learning Solutions Team. I want to talk to you today about some highlights from a presentation that I just did just a few minutes ago on bringing people together during changing times.
Times are always changing. The one thing, and I think you all have probably heard this before, the one constant that you can count on is that there’s going to be change. Let me establish a couple of biases that I have when I talk about this topic of bringing people together during changing times. First, I believe that the absolute best way to learn how to be successful with anything is to learn from other organizations or people who have been successful.
You can learn from your mistakes, you can learn from the mistakes of others, but I think it is much more powerful when we learn from a successful example. So, that’s a bias that I have when I talk about this subject matter. The other bias that I have is I am the son of a mother who worked for the same organization for exactly 50 years. And when I say exactly 50 years, 50 years to the day, June 18, 1972, to June 18, 2022.
So, I’ve come up in this home life where I believe you’re supposed to work for your employers for a long period of time. And I think we can all agree that a lot of things changed in the world between 1972 and 2022. So, change is constant. It’s always going to happen, and I submit to you that it’s happened before. The last five years, we’ve had COVID shut down. You guys remember the George Floyd issues.
We’ve had a couple of contentious elections. One of the things we don’t think about as being a significant change is that Gen Z is entering the workforce, and the emergence of AI. That’s something that we all should be looking into in terms of a change. It doesn’t really matter what the change is. What really matters is how we respond to those changes. And so, I submit to you all that the biggest issue right now isn’t the particular change.
Our biggest issue, or our biggest challenge, is actually having the capacity to see beyond ourselves. See, right now, the data tells us, and this is another bias because I don’t believe that numbers lie, fully engaged employees perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to quit. Two million professionals leave their jobs each year because of perceived unfairness in the workplace.
These departures cost employers an estimated, and y’all listen to this, $64 billion annually just in hiring costs. When I look at those numbers, and I think about those percentages and the massive amount of money that’s being spent to replace those two million professionals who leave organizations each year, my thought is, hey, we’ve got to do better. Not only can we improve our organizations through whatever changes are coming, but we can save a massive amount of money.
So, I want to share with you five observations related to bringing people together in changing times. But more importantly, I want to also offer you five solutions. My first observation is this. One of the biggest issues that we have in bringing people together during changing times is the fact that we forget who we are organizationally. And what I mean by that is changes can sometimes distract us from our core values, our mission, and our purpose.
And that distraction, if you will, can lead to an identity that lacks cohesion, and that lack of cohesion leads to three very bad D words: division, dissatisfaction, and departures. The solution that I propose to observation number one, we forget who we are, is that we remember what I call the Wakanda principle. Those of you who may be fans of the movie Black Panther will remember an iconic moment in that movie where King T’Challa says, “Let’s show them who we are,” as they’re about to go to war.
And I want you to think about that when you’re managing change and bringing people together. Let’s show the folks in our organization who we really are. Let’s make sure that we make the main thing the main thing. And what I mean by that is let’s make sure that we put our organization in a position where we are solely focused on the thing that we were created to do, regardless of what type of organization you may be.
Let’s make sure that we celebrate, educate, and appreciate employees. And if someone or something is eroding the culture, please, oh, please make it stop. Show your employees who you really are as an organization, and I guarantee you that will be a constant reminder of what your organization truly is. My second observation is this: Employees are more complicated than we typically recognize.
We tend to think about employees’ identities in one dimension only, right? We think about folks in terms of maybe race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or age, physical abilities, and we don’t think about all of the other identities that individuals have in addition to those identities. So, think about this, for example. You can take any person in your organization.
And once you get past some of the obvious identities, there are a ton of other identities that can be associated or maybe not associated with that individual. I would direct your attention, if you have access this moment, to just put in the words identity wheel. And you’ll see, in addition to those things that we traditionally think about as identities, you’ll see things like marital status, military experience, job classifications, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, thinking styles, parental status, level of education, work background.
We have to stop thinking about employees as being one-dimensional. They are multidimensional. And see, when we fail to realize that, we prevent employees from finding common ground with each other, and that further stereotypes and the creation of solutions that are largely ineffective in solving employee issues. So, how do you change that? I know this is going to sound outrageous, and you’ll listen to this, and you’ll be saying, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he just said we actually need to communicate, and we actually need to have more and better lines of communication.”
I’m a big fan of surveys and town halls, giving people an opportunity to speak out on issues. I also love routine communications with frontline supervisors and with human resources. I’m an even bigger fan of climate assessments and free response opportunities because that gives your employees an opportunity to really talk and tell you about how these differing identities interact and impacts their views.
My third observation is this: We frequently misconstrue employee workplace concerns. I contend that there are four universal workplace questions that impact every single employee, regardless of who they are: Am I safe here? Can I trust you? Will you treat me fairly? Do you care about me as a person? Regardless of a person’s identity or background, those four questions have to be answered in the affirmative every single time.
So, how do you do that? Here’s my solution to that third observation: Control what you can, and admit what you cannot control. See, the things that you can control as an employer are fairness, consistency, opportunity, transparency, and workplace resources. Those are exclusively in the control of employers. You can also control safety parameters, physical safety, right? The security that you have at your locations.
Psychological safety, making sure that folks are not being terrorized by their coworkers or their leaders in the organization, and they’re free from psychological tyranny. But also intellectual safety, the idea that I have the freedom and the ability as an employee in this organization to come up with ideas, new thoughts, new techniques, new technologies without fear that someone is going to try to take that away from me because my creativity or my ability somehow threatens them in their positions.
The things that you cannot control are the outside world, politics, and you all know that’s true. And you can’t control various “isms” that exist in the world: racism, sexism, any other thing that has “ism” in it. Y’all feel me when I say that. You can’t control those things as much as you want to, as much as it would be awesome if we could say, “Organizationally, we’re going to make sure that there’s no more misogyny in the world.”
You can’t control those things, but what you can do is control the things that happen within the confines of your organization. Let me give you a really simple thing to remember, and this is what I say to all of my clients. As an employer, as an organization, you cannot heal the world, but you can keep the band together, and that’s all you’re really concerned about in the workplace.
I can’t control what’s going on outside of these walls, but to quote the famous now deceased rapper DMX, I can control what goes on up in here, up in here. And if we get focused on what’s going on up in here and not what’s going on in every other place, I guarantee you, you’re going to have a much more cohesive workplace, and you can manage through change.
My fourth observation is this: We fear asking hard questions. I think everybody accepts that Albert Einstein was one of the smartest individuals who has ever lived. He had a quotation that I want to introduce you to, if you’ve never heard it, and it goes like this: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend 55 minutes to determine the proper question.”
In other words, if I need to solve a problem, I’ve got to ask questions to figure out the dynamics of the problem. And we fail to do that many times as employers. We’re off trying to find solutions. We hadn’t even asked the right questions. And we definitely have avoided asking what I call those hard questions. And so, my solution is organizationally, make sure that you are asking hard questions frequently.
For example, does the organization communicate its commitment to a healthy workplace enough? Is that communication resonating? Has the business justification for employee engagement been made so that it is viewed as a key business goal? Are there sufficient resources committed to this effort? Are we having the right conversations about, and you all hear me when I say this, life-work balance?
Not work-life balance, but life-work balance. See, I contend that we have to ask the question in that way to put the emphasis on the importance of your life and understanding that your work supports your life goals and not the other way around. Are there hardened attitudes against change or an insistence on preserving the status quo in your organization?
Is the organization resistant to external recommendations and criticisms? Are there organizational barriers that prevent open and effective communication? And finally, is the organization listening to its employees? We have to be in the habit of asking these hard questions consistently, frequently, so that we can figure out how to solve the issues that we have in terms of bringing people together.
My fifth and final observation is this: Changing times require new solutions. Think about these following points in terms of changing times. Millennials are now 70% of the workforce, and Generation Z will be 30% of the workforce by 2030. A lot of baby boomers are retiring, and a lot of folks, in terms of Generation X, which is the generation that I’m in, we’re outnumbered in the workplace.
We had a very small generation. And now, when you start to see the dynamics of the workplace, this is a significant change. Workplaces are becoming more diverse: racially, sexually, neurodiversity, national origin, religious, any other type of diversity. We’re becoming increasingly diverse as a world and as a nation. And then also think about the prominence of remote work.
This is now more frequent in organizations, when five or six years ago, remote work wasn’t such a big thing, but it is now. And those are changing times, and it requires new solutions. Let me give you a solution to this fifth observation. The solution to the fifth observation includes, first, making sure that we’re using better collaboration tools. If you’re only collaborating online and your employees are not having meaningful touchpoints, they’re not going to be able to establish relationships.
So, we cannot just use online platforms to collaborate. I’m a big fan of starting a culture committee, and hear me carefully when I say this, it’s not a DEI committee. It is a culture committee. It is a cross-section of your organization that is designed to focus exclusively on making sure that we are building and maintaining and fostering a winning culture. Reimagine workplace outings.
What I talked about in my live presentation was not always having outings that seem to be focused around alcohol or going out for drinks. I have some of my clients that will have an ice cream outing. Everybody loves ice cream, unless you’re lactose intolerant. And even then, you probably like it, but you can’t have it. But there are other things that we can rally around and create new synergies and new energies.
One of our offices here at Ogletree for years has done an opening day baseball outing for people in the firm and some of the clients. It’s fabulous. It’s family-friendly. And if you want alcohol, they have that. But guess what? They also have ice cream. Y’all feel what I’m talking about. We have to start thinking about not necessarily doing things the way that we’ve always done them, and we need to reimagine those outings, and we need to explore different workplace schedules.
That’s something that we don’t talk about enough. A lot of times we’re wedded to, okay, you’re going to be remote a couple of days, and then come into the work location a couple of days. What if you have a schedule that says you’re going to work remotely for half of the day and come in for half of the day? What if you had a schedule that says you’re going to be remote in the middle of the day and work remotely at the beginning and the end of the day?
Because a lot of employees say they prefer remote work because they’ve got some responsibilities at home. What if we designed a schedule that allowed them to have the best of both worlds? So, when I say explore different workplace schedules, consider those things. New solutions to a changing work environment. So, I’ve shared with you those five observations and those five solutions. I’m not here to tell you that I have all the answers.
I’m not here to tell you that there’s a foolproof method in terms of bringing people together, but here’s what I can tell you conclusively. Our journey to bringing people together successfully during changing times begins with what I call that Einstein principle of making sure that you are dedicated to the principle of having the audacity to ask the right questions and carve out solutions that are based on a holistic view, and not just a one-dimensional view, of the wonderful employees that you have in your organization.
I can guarantee you that if you do that, you’ll be on the path to having a rockstar organization where you manage change easily. Thank you for your time and attention. I hope that these five observations and five solutions are helpful to you. Thank you.

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