How responsibility dissolves in an era of autonomy, hybrid rhythms and digital hiding places.
In hybrid work cultures and digital environments, ownership evaporates: taking responsibility becomes increasingly less self-evident. Teams become fragmented, communication deteriorates and autonomy often transforms into non-commitment. Responsibility only re-emerges when people meet one another, define boundaries and are willing to have difficult conversations.
There was nothing particularly special about last Thursday. Two good conversations with two good friends, a glass of wine, some nuts, a meal and a few loose observations that you'd normally forget straightaway. Yet something stayed with me. Something that went deeper than the life stories we exchanged with one another.
It began with a conversation about responsibility. A word that in organisations often sounds as though it's a moral elevation, whilst in practice it's often treated like a hot pancake. Everyone quickly passes it on to the next person.
I mentioned that for me, reliability coincides with a simple definition. 'As a person or entrepreneur, you do what you say and what you promise'. Nothing more, nothing less. My friend nodded and said that he sees the same thing: promises are made in meetings, but they dissolve as soon as the meeting is over. Deadlines are suggestions. Commitments are without consequences. And the blame for anything whatsoever always lies somewhere else.
It sounded as though he was describing an organisation that was slowly emptying out. Not in terms of staff, but in terms of backbone.
The choreography of evaded responsibility
This is not an isolated incident. This is a pattern that has spread widely. The Dutch are internationally known as pragmatic and direct. Yet years of research show that we display remarkably little ownership in the workplace.
Gallup demonstrates this every year in the State of the Global Workplace reports. Only 16 per cent of Dutch employees feel genuinely engaged with their work. That figure has been consistent for more than a decade and consistently belongs amongst the lowest engagement percentages in the world.
Engagement is not a conviviality meter. It says something fundamental about taking responsibility. Those who lack engagement take no initiative and don't address problems.
Responsibility then becomes a kind of smoke. Everyone senses that it's hanging somewhere, but nobody catches it. It drifts between teams, hides behind protocols and seeks space in meeting language that never wants to become concrete enough.
I see it in almost every organisation where I work. The larger the structure, the greater the inclination to duck away. This doesn't happen out of unwillingness, but because the system invites invisibility.
The working-from-home bubble as safe hiding hut
Since mass hybrid working, something subtle has also changed. It's something you don't notice immediately, but that slowly creeps into the pores of work culture.
Working from home made everyone more efficient. During travel time there's less noise and fewer interruptions. But it also took something away. Hybrid working has removed social correction.
TNO investigated the impact of hybrid working extensively. In the report Werk in Transitie, the authors describe that 33 per cent of managers see a clear decrease in spontaneous collaboration within teams. Twenty-seven per cent of employees indicate being less proactive since they work from home more often. Home workers also more frequently lapse into private activities that disrupt their work.
The figure is alarming. It's not that working from home is bad, but it does show how quickly behaviour changes when nobody directly supervises any longer.
Hybrid working has also made our world smaller. We began living in digital silos. Meetings became functional, consultation became compressed and soft signals disappeared. Nobody notices when you show less initiative. Nobody notices if you only respond. This is precisely where responsibility hides most easily. In silence.
The fault lines between generations become visible more quickly
The differences between generations aren't growing because a new generation emerges every two years. This is not how generations function. What does happen is that the differences between generations manifest themselves much more quickly than previously. This is entirely explicable from research into work culture and labour market development.
The first factor is technology. Younger groups of employees often join companies with a completely different digital frame of reference. It's not intended as a supplement to their work, but as the basis of their work. Information is processed differently. Communication proceeds via different channels. The speed at which they adopt new tools is higher than ever. As a result, their work style changes faster than organisations can keep up with.
The second factor is the value shift. Research shows that themes such as mental health, autonomy, flexibility and work-life balance have become essential conditions for younger employees. Older generations were formed in different economic contexts, with different securities and different ideas about working. These differences aren't new, but they now emerge much more quickly and sharply.
The third factor is the labour market. Due to structural scarcity, younger employees have more negotiating room. That changes the relationship with employers. Loyalty has become less self-evident. Learning curves move faster. And the threshold for switching function or organisation is lower than ever.
Together, these factors don't form a new generation; they form a rapidly shifting expectation landscape. That landscape is increasingly difficult for employers and managers to navigate. Not because employees are difficult, but because their starting points diverge.
This is precisely why responsibility is not an individual preference. It's the connective tissue that prevents teams from fragmenting into loose rhythms, loose expectations and loose realities.
Teams only remain teams if people determine together how they want to collaborate. Which agreements the team members consider important. The rhythm they need.
Not from generational differences, but from a collective contract.
A case study from higher education
That same evening I also spoke with the friend who had been appointed as manager within a larger higher education institution a few months earlier. He came in hurriedly, as though gravity on his shoulders stood just slightly higher than for the rest of us.
He told me that the institution was in administrative difficulties. The director had resigned from his position. The management team had little direction. The meetings were chaotic and without clear decision-making.
And beneath that lay the real problem. Little islands. Teams living past one another. Departments invoking their own traditions. The sentence he heard most often was: 'We've been doing it this way for 10 years.'
According to him, nobody wanted to be owner of anything. Yet the same people stood at the front when it came to their rights or hours. A mirror image of responsibility.
It sounds anecdotal, but it closely aligns with broader research results. Gallup shows that 70 per cent of team cohesion is directly dependent on the manager, whilst managers in Europe belong precisely to the least engaged groups. When engagement drops, collaboration in teams almost always drops with it. What my friend described was therefore not coincidence, but a pattern visible in many workplaces.
The organisation this friend described is not an organisation with bad luck. It's an organisation that does exactly what large systems often do. Responsibility evaporates to molecular level.
A culture of softening
There's something else at play. Something uncomfortable.
Increasingly often, people use their background, identity or personal challenges to explain their behaviour. 'Yes, but in our culture that's how it goes.' Or: 'Yes, but I have this limitation, so you need to take that into account.'
It's slippery terrain. Understanding and empathy are essential. But as soon as an explanation replaces responsibility, we shift from maturity to non-commitment. Everyone these days seems to have a unique reason for the failure of something. The effect is simple: we create a society that shows endless understanding but hardly sets any boundaries. Responsibility only thrives in environments where clear boundaries exist.
Our capacity to bear responsibility has not only been damaged by our behaviour and culture. There's also a structural factor that's far less visible, but perhaps even more damaging. The promise of efficiency. The promise of digital tools. The promise of autonomy.
The grand promise of digital efficiency
We live in an era in which every problem is approached as a workflow issue. You only need to sigh about work pressure and there's always someone who suggests putting it in Slack, Miro or Notion.
The modern toolkit is endless. Slack, Teams, Trello, Asana, Miro, Notion, Jira, Confluence, Discourse, Airtable. Moreover, there are the new generation of AI tools, which are presented virtually daily as a messiah. The promise always remains the same: it becomes easier, it becomes more efficient and it becomes more transparent. The effect is often precisely the opposite.
The psychological impact of these tools is hardly discussed, let alone understood. We don't become more responsible, but precisely more diffuse. It's somewhat more autonomous, but also more fragmented. Not clearer, but splintered.
TNO has established in its research into digital workload that the number of stimuli, notifications and digital micro-tasks actually lowers the experienced autonomy. People gain more control on paper, but experience less direction in their thoughts.
Autonomy has become an illusion. You decide about the tool you use, but no longer about the purpose you serve.
The paradox of digital autonomy
In theory, these tools should help us collaborate. In practice, the opposite happens. Everyone has preferences, everyone has habits, everyone develops their own digital territory. It's the same reflex as with little islands in organisations, but then in digital form.
You hear statements increasingly often like: 'I don't work with that.' 'I've turned off all my notifications.' 'We do it differently.' 'Can't you just convert this to our tool?'
What used to be a shared meeting table has now transformed into a collection of parallel systems. Tools that don't speak to one another, teams that don't see one another and agreements that remain floating. Every digital choice becomes a micro-identity.
Working from home has reinforced this movement. Behind the kitchen table, every employee becomes a small independent with their own digital preferences.
The irony is that systems designed to structure responsibility ultimately mainly conceal responsibilities. A missed update leads to miscommunication. An unread task becomes a tool setting. A forgotten appointment becomes a notification problem. Tools make responsibility fluid. And what becomes fluid can flow anywhere, except towards the person who must bear it.
Why ownership disappears
The second layer of this problem goes deeper than digital fragmentation. It's the psychological attitude lying beneath it. The conviction is that responsibility must feel like freedom, choice and autonomy.
But responsibility is not a choice. It's a role, an agreement, a moral obligation.
Yet we've become a culture in which everything must fit the individual. Work culture has become soft, but also diffuse. There's understanding for everything, provided it doesn't chafe. And when it does chafe, emotions often escalate quickly.
The Social and Cultural Planning Bureau calls this 'collective norm blurring' and points to the growing discrepancy between people's expectations and what they give back to their organisation. The more acquired rights we have, the less inclined we are to keep our duties sharp.
It's not meant cynically. It's an observation. Society, which is organised around comfort, flexibility and personal preferences, struggles to connect people to something larger than their own agenda.
How systems evaporate responsibility
Large organisations have always struggled with taking responsibility. The combination of hybrid work culture and digital tools has accelerated the effect. Three processes play a role in this.
Firstly: fragmentation of communication. What used to be a conversation is now divided across ten channels. A question becomes a thread, a decision becomes a board, an assignment becomes a card. And responsibility becomes a fog bank hanging in multiple places simultaneously.
Secondly: dilution of social cohesion. The kitchen table makes everyone autonomous, but nobody connected. Without physical contact, responsibility becomes less clear. Teams become a collection of individuals without common rituals.
Thirdly: displacement of the blame question to technical settings. Where previously someone simply forgot to reply, it's now a 'setting', a 'bug', a 'mute', a 'filter'. Software becomes the perfect hiding place. And responsibility doesn't like hiding places.
The larger question: what remains then?
What does responsibility still mean in a world organised around convenience, autonomy and digital fragmentation?
The answer is simpler than it seems. Responsibility is precisely that which cannot be automated, delegated, filtered out or outsourced to a tool. It's the human layer that remains standing when the software crashes.
And perhaps that's the greatest discomfort of our time. We've bought the illusion of overview, but the fundamental skill to bear responsibility is slowly disappearing.
The grammar of recovery
There's another layer I cannot skip. A layer that has nothing to do with organisations, management or digital systems. A layer that lies much closer.
My own recovery from the past year.
Not as dramatic intermezzo, but as counterweight. Because the reality of rehabilitation with acquired brain injury forces you to take responsibility in a way you cannot postpone, displace or delegate.
Where organisations dilute responsibility, personal responsibility during rehabilitation becomes precisely concentrated. It becomes raw, direct, inescapable.
After a brain haemorrhage, your body determines what your tempo is. Your brain determines how long you can focus. Your energy determines which conversations you can handle. And your boundaries determine how honest you must be, even when that's uncomfortable.
There exists no hiding place, no notification policy, no digital tool that takes it over from you. Those who don't pay attention collapse. Those who do too much pay for it directly. Those who overestimate themselves feel it the same day.
Rehabilitation is responsibility in its purest form. Not elevated. Not heroic. Simply inevitable.
You learn to look at life anew. You learn to listen to signals anew. You learn to articulate anew what does and doesn't work. And that's perhaps the most mature form of responsibility a person can experience.
In my journals, which were the anchor beneath my recovery for a year, I see that pattern reflected. A continuous confrontation with boundaries, a growing honesty. And in that honesty lies a kind of clarity that I hardly see in organisations any more.
It's the same clarity lacking in many teams. Because nobody articulates what's really going on. Because everyone turns, softens or looks away. Because systems and cultures conceal responsibilities. Those who rehabilitate cannot afford that.
The shock in the contrast
That's why it struck me when I slowly returned to work. I entered business environments with a brain that had been trained for months on directness, boundaries, honesty and concrete action. And I saw something I hadn't seen before, or perhaps had been blind to.
The shifting of responsibility towards abstract concepts. Vague language obliges nobody to anything. The endless meetings without final conclusion. The little islands that tolerate one another politely but never truly collaborate. The digital cultures of actually we've always done it this way fragment everything.
Where my rehabilitation forced me towards clarity, I saw organisations crawling away into the fog.
And then it became uncomfortable. You can hardly return to a professional world in which responsibility has become voluntary when you've just lived a year in a world in which responsibility is indispensable.
That contrast compels reflection. Not only about my own recovery, but also about the way teams and organisations function.
The diagnosis behind the behaviour
If you want to understand responsibility, you must look at three things. Not at systems or tools, but at human behaviour.
We avoid vulnerability. Truly taking responsibility means you become visible, you put your name to something, you take risk. Work is organised to avoid risks, confrontations and tension.
The Social and Cultural Planning Bureau describes this in its research into social engagement as an 'increase in conflict avoidance in professional settings'. That sounds abstract, but it mainly means that nobody takes the first step any more. Responsibility demands precisely that step.
We confuse autonomy with non-commitment. Hybrid work and digital tools have created a paradox. People feel more autonomous than ever, but behave more non-committally than ever. The illusion of freedom of choice creates no ownership. Autonomy without responsibility is not freedom, but individualism. And individualism is a poor basis for collaboration.
TNO shows that generative AI significantly changes the way we work. Routine tasks decrease and employees gain more autonomy and more complex responsibilities. That offers opportunities, but also increases mental burden and further diminishes the social function of work. When consultation moments and informal exchange disappear, engagement becomes more quickly vulnerable and people feel more quickly detached from their team.
Responsibility has been degraded to a choice. In theory, we regard responsibility as important. In practice, we often regard it as an extra. It's no longer a core competence, no virtue and no basic condition. It's become a behavioural option. You can be a bit responsible, or only on Tuesdays, or only if it fits in your diary, or if it suits the tool you happen to work with. This mental shift is the core of the problem. Not the system, not the tool, not the organisation. The behaviour.
What responsibility actually is
Responsibility is not a form of autonomy. It's a form of maturity. It's the willingness to bring your behaviour in line with the interest of others. It's the capacity not to see yourself as the centre. It's the courage not to look away. It's the insight that freedom gives no direction without backbone.
In my own recovery, that became almost tangible. Every step I took required alignment. Every mistake required a lesson, and every improvement required discipline. That is responsibility in motion.
The question that remains
If responsibility is so essential for recovery, personal leadership and collaboration, why do increasingly fewer people take that role?
The answer is uncomfortably simple. Because we've built a society in which responsibility is asked for less and less and rewarded less and less. We live in an era of comfort, we avoid tension, we like softness, we individualise. And responsibility asks for the opposite.
We can search for many explanations for the disappearance of responsibility. We can point to organisations, to working from home, to tools, to culture and behaviour. We can cite research, quote statistics and identify structural problems.
But ultimately everything revolves around something much simpler. A simple question:
Do you want to be owner of your work or not?
There lies the core. Not in systems, not in policy, not in technology. But it concerns the attitude with which we begin our day.
The crumbling of collective rhythms
Over the past decade, a movement has emerged that has taken up space almost unnoticed. The movement towards less physical presence, less direct communication, less shared space.
It began with flexibility. Then came working from home. Then came the introduction of hybrid rhythms. This happened during the adoption of tools that created the illusion that physical proximity was no longer necessary. And by now we've reached a point where presence itself has become a negotiable variable.
We've come to believe that work is completely manageable from the kitchen table, that connection can be automated, that collaboration consists of a set of digital traces and that responsibility is possible without physical proximity.
But presence is not a luxury. It's a foundation. It's the place where noise transforms into nuance, where misunderstandings are resolved before they grow large, where ideas arise in the space between two sentences, where collaboration is not programmed but emerges.
Research from various sources shows that physical presence is crucial for collaboration and responsibility. TNO concludes in research that teams who see one another physically at least twice per week develop more proactivity and more informal alignment than teams who work completely hybrid. Gallup shows that employees who collaborate physically regularly experience significantly more engagement than employees who work primarily remotely.
The misconception that autonomy is always gain
One of the greatest mistakes of this era is the thought that autonomy is the same as freedom. In reality, autonomy can transform into isolation, fragmentation and non-commitment. Freedom without responsibility is not maturity. It's escape.
When everyone determines their own rhythm, chooses their own tool stack, turns off their own notifications and declares their own workflow sacred, what emerges is not autonomy but disintegration. Teams then no longer become teams. They become clusters of individuals who happen to have the same name in their contract.
Organisations feel that. They notice it in slow decision-making, in vague agreements, in the floating around of responsibilities, in the decrease in initiative, in the fatigue of managers extinguishing small fires that never needed to arise.
The invitation too long postponed
We stand at a point where responsibility must be defined anew. Not as burden, but as maturity. Not as duty, but as basic condition for professional life.
And that asks for something concrete. Something that goes against the self-evidence of digital technology.
Seek one another out again.
Not sporadically. Not because there's a schedule prescribing it. Not to be visible briefly.
But collaboration is only possible through proximity, regardless of the way a team shapes that proximity. Teams only become teams when they meet one another regularly. In the same space, in the same conversation, with the same attention.
The office is not a sacred place and certainly not a museum from the pre-COVID era. It's one of the places where mature work culture can emerge. Where spontaneous conversations don't disappear into channels and notifications. Agreements are here spoken aloud instead of being filtered out.
Where trust grows because people get to know one another outside the window of a camera. It's not about the office itself. It's about the humanity that disappears when everyone remains out of view for too long.
The myth of AI as solution
There's another misunderstanding that must be corrected. The idea that AI can solve our problems.
AI is a powerful piece of equipment. It can structure, analyse and accelerate. But it cannot bear responsibility. It cannot form a team. It cannot resolve conflict. It cannot build trust. It cannot replace presence.
People who rely completely on AI as workflow partner often become more reactive and less engaged. They think that organising information is efficient. That's not the same as collaborating.
AI functions as an engine. Not as a backbone.
And an engine needs a driver who dares to take responsibility for where they're driving.
The creeping evaporation of presence
In recent years, physical presence has shifted from basic condition to variable. Everything has become negotiable. The kitchen table became workplace. The screen became a means for conversations. Teams are now a collection of individuals who sometimes don't see one another for days.
But presence is not an unimportant detail. It's a supporting beam beneath collaboration. Misunderstandings are resolved more quickly. Ideas arise spontaneously and the rhythm of collaboration is shared. And responsibility gets a face.
Research shows time and again that physical proximity strengthens proactivity and alignment. Teams who see one another regularly show markedly more engagement.
Proximity is not nostalgia. It's psychology.
The last sentence is not simple
We must regard responsibility as something normal again. It must not be seen as a heavy concept. Not as moralistic assignment. It's a mature agreement between people who together try to build something.
It doesn't begin with protocols.
It begins with a choice every professional can make themselves.
→ Choose for the conversation instead of for the screen.
→ Choose for collaborating instead of working in parallel.
→ Choose for behaviour that contributes to the whole.
Responsibility is not individual expression. It's a contract concluded by the group.
If we learn to value this anew, something emerges that we've almost forgotten along the way.
Collaborating is not difficult. It's brilliant.
How ownership relates to a strong personal brand identity and what that means for your position, you can read via my approach.
Sources
Gallup, State of the Global Workspace 2025,
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
TNO, Hoe laten we hybride werken voor iedereen werken?, https://www.tno.nl/nl/gezond/werk-gezondheid/mentale-werkgezondheid/laten-we-hybride-werken-iedereen-werken/
TNO, GenAI verandert werk. Maar wat doet het met de mens?, https://www.tno.nl/nl/newsroom/insights/2025/07/gen-ai-verandert-werk/
Peter van der Steege
I occasionally investigate human authenticity in a digital era that increasingly resembles an egocentric hall of mirrors. As designer and strategist, I know that not everything that glitters is beautiful.
