4 Signs You’re Turning Employees Into Robots
4 Signs You’re Turning Employees Into Robots
Published on Inc., Aug 1, 2025, by Shayne Fitz-Coy.
A few Fridays ago, I took my team to a bar mid-afternoon for happy hour.
Empty place. Nine of us. Two bartenders.
“We don’t have a table for nine,” one said.
“Can we push a few together?”
“Sorry. It’s against the rules.”
“Is that for fire code reasons,” I ask.
“No. It’s against the rules.”
Later, I came back and asked why that rule existed. “I don’t know. It’s just against the rules and I never asked,” he said.
I don’t read that as bad intent or laziness. I see what my friend Christina Pan calls, “regression to the incentive.”
Regression to the incentive is when people behave exactly as the system encourages them, no more, no less. If effort isn’t rewarded, effort fades. If rules matter more than outcomes, rules win. Over time, good people learn to do only what’s asked and stop asking what’s needed.
The bartender wasn’t paid to serve more customers. He was paid to follow the policies and get through his shift.
Most of us have done the same. Quietly. Logically. And at times, expensively for someone else.
I’ve built companies with policies that dulled people’s thinking. I’ve promoted the rule follower and missed the quiet fixer.
I’ve watched a good culture drift into compliance because I was too slow to notice.
Here’s what I’ve learned: most people don’t want to be robots. They just need a system that trusts them to be human. Here are four ways to know if your culture is turning employees into robots and how to address it if you are.
- Rules replace judgment
“We can’t do that.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“The system won’t let me.”
We’ve all said them often without noticing. But when policies replace thinking, customers feel it and so do your best people.
Here’s what we tried. We gave the team a different phrase to work with: “What would you do if it were yours?”
If you owned this checkout line, this client call, this policy - what would you do?
We didn’t codify the answer. We just started asking the question. It made people pause. Then act like owners. Permission to care changes more than policy ever will.
What to ask your team:
What rule gets in the way of serving our customers?
What would you do instead?
- People show up, but don’t lean in
We had a support rep once quietly hit all her numbers. But when I asked what she’d change to make the job better, she shrugged: “That’s not my lane.”
She was doing what the job asked. But we hadn’t asked her to care. Or helped her see how much it mattered.
Here’s what we tried. We added one question to our weekly check-ins: “What did you do last week that made the company better?”
No pressure. No grades. Just a chance to connect effort with impact. At first, the answers were tactical - “answered 42 tickets,” “got a package out on time.”
But over time, people started to name the why. “That client stayed because I didn’t rush her.” “That fix reduced rework for the whole team.”
Some stayed task-doers. But a few became stewards.
What to ask yourself:
Does everyone understand how their role moves the business?
Or do they just understand what tasks they’re supposed to perform?
- Collective comfort trumps customer care
A few weeks ago, Amy, an employee at a portfolio travel company went out to buy pants for a client who’d spilled on herself. She didn’t check a policy. She just acted on care.
I learned about it weeks later as did the VP of client services who discovered it on a follow-up call with the client. Amy just did it and didn’t ask for any credit; she didn’t even tell her boss.
That guest became a loyal customer and brought her portfolio with her next time.
Why did Amy act while others might not have? Maybe because she had skin in the game. But more likely because she felt her care mattered. Her bonus grew with bookings.
Here’s what we tried. We introduced a profit-sharing pool with equal splits. It was simple, no tracking dashboards and with one clear rule: When the team wins, everyone wins.
What it changed: People were skeptical until the first payout (a few hundred dollars per person), when something shifted. When the money hit direct deposit with little friction, the message was clear: Team performance affects your wallet.
We had more owners and fewer, “That’s not my job” and “It’s the rules.”
- No one asks why anymore
A quiet sign of drift: fewer questions.
When your team stops asking why, they’ve likely stopped seeing themselves as owners. We built a training manual once so tight that no one deviated from it. That seemed like success until problems changed, and no one adapted.
Here’s what we tried: We stripped the manual to outcomes. “Thirty percent more return customers.” Then asked teams how they’d get there.
The ideas weren’t perfect. One team decided “more return customers” meant giving more discounts. We lost money and I lost sleep as we recalibrated. But their ideas were aimed at the right problems. We adjusted and re-aimed together.
A quiet audit
The robots are coming. But your edge still comes down to this: better rules, or better humans?
It’s easy to say: Give people more freedom. It’s harder to believe they’ll use it well.
We’ve had people misuse it. We’ve had to reset. But far more often, they rise to meet it. Because it’s dignifying.
That shift from compliance to contribution is everything.
If you want to test this in your own business this week, try this: Ask your best person, “What’s one rule you’d change if you could?” Then ask, “What would you replace it with?”
You’ll learn a lot about your systems and your trust level.
Originally published in Inc.