Essay
How responsibility dissolves in an age of autonomy, hybrid rhythms and digital hideaways. In hybrid work cultures and digital environments, taking responsibility has become increasingly rare. Teams fragment, communication deteriorates and autonomy often morphs into non-commitment. Responsibility only resurfaces when people actually meet, name boundaries and are willing to have difficult conversations.
In hybrid working cultures and digital environments, ownership vanishes: taking responsibility becomes less and less a given. Teams fragment, communication impoverishes and autonomy often shifts into non-commitment. Responsibility only re-emerges when people meet one another, name boundaries and are willing to have difficult conversations.
There was actually nothing special about last Thursday. Two good conversations with two good friends, a glass of wine, some nuts, dinner and a few loose observations you'd normally forget straight away. Yet something stuck with me. Something that went deeper than the life stories we exchanged.
It began with a conversation about responsibility. A word that in organisations often sounds like moral elevation, whilst in practice it's often treated like a hot pancake. Everyone quickly passes it on to the next person.
I remarked that reliability for me 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 he sees the same thing: promises are made in meetings, but they evaporate the moment the meeting's over. Deadlines are suggestions. Commitments come without consequences. And the blame for whatever it is always lies elsewhere.
It sounded as though he was describing an organisation slowly draining. Not of staff, but of backbone.
This isn't an isolated incident. This is a pattern that has spread widely. Dutch people are known internationally as straightforward and direct. Yet years of research show that in the workplace we display remarkably little ownership.
Gallup demonstrates this every year in the State of the Global Workplace reports. Just 16 per cent of Dutch employees feel genuinely engaged with their work. That number has been consistent for more than a decade and is invariably amongst the lowest engagement percentages in the world.
Engagement isn't a cosiness meter. It says something fundamental about taking responsibility. Those who lack engagement take no initiative and don't tackle problems.
Responsibility then becomes a kind of smoke. Everyone senses 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 I walk through. The larger the structure, the greater the inclination to duck away. This doesn't happen out of unwillingness, but because the system invites invisibility.
Since mass hybrid working began, something subtle has also changed. It's something you don't notice immediately, but which slowly creeps into the pores of working culture.
Working from home made everyone more efficient. There's less noise during travel time and fewer interruptions. But it also took something away. Hybrid working removed the social correction.
TNO extensively researched the impact of hybrid working. In the report Werk in Transitie the authors describe that 33 per cent of managers see a clear decline in spontaneous collaboration within teams. Twenty-seven per cent of employees say they've been less proactive since working from home more often. Home workers also more frequently lapse into private activities that disrupt their work.
The number is startling. It's not that working from home is bad, but it does show how quickly behaviour changes when no one maintains direct oversight anymore.
Hybrid working has also made our world smaller. We began living in digital silos. Meetings became functional, consultation became compressed and soft signals disappeared. No one notices when you show less initiative. No one notices if you only react. That's precisely where responsibility hides most easily. In silence.
The differences between generations aren't growing because a new generation emerges every two years. That's not how generations function. What is happening is that differences between generations manifest themselves much more quickly than before. This is entirely explicable from research into working culture and labour market development.
The first factor is technology. Younger groups of employees often arrive at companies with a completely different digital frame of reference. It's not intended as a supplement to their work, but as the foundation of their work. Information is processed differently. Communication runs through different channels. The speed at which they adopt new tools is higher than ever. As a result, their working style changes more quickly than organisations can keep up.
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 certainties and different ideas about working. These differences aren't new, but they now come to the fore much more quickly and sharply.
The third factor is the labour market. Due to structural scarcity, younger employees have more room to negotiate. That changes the relationship with employers. Loyalty has become less automatic. 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 landscape of expectations. That landscape is increasingly difficult for employers and managers to navigate. Not because employees are difficult, but because their starting points diverge.
That's precisely why responsibility isn't an individual preference. It's the connective tissue that prevents teams from falling apart into separate rhythms, separate expectations and separate realities.
Teams only remain teams if people determine together how they want to collaborate. Which agreements the team members find important. The rhythm they need.
Not from generational differences, but from a shared contract.
That same evening I also spoke with the friend who a few months earlier had been appointed as a manager within a larger higher education institution. He came in hurried, as though the gravity on his shoulders stood just a bit higher than on the rest of us.
He told me the institution was in governance difficulties. The director had resigned. The management team had little direction. Meetings were chaotic and without clear decision-making.
And beneath that sat the real problem. Islands. Teams living past one another. Departments invoking their own traditions. The phrase he heard most often was: 'We've been doing it this way for 10 years.'
According to him, no one wanted to be the 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 aligns closely with broader research findings. Gallup shows that 70 per cent of team cohesion depends directly on the manager, whilst managers in Europe are amongst the least engaged groups. When engagement drops, collaboration in teams almost always drops with it. What my friend described, then, wasn't coincidence, but a pattern visible in many workplaces.
The organisation this friend described isn't an organisation that's had bad luck. It's an organisation doing precisely what large systems often do. Responsibility evaporates to molecular level.
A culture of softening
There's something else at play. Something uncomfortable.
Increasingly, people use their background, identity or personal challenges to explain their behaviour. 'Yes, but that's how it works in our culture.' Or: 'Yes, but I have this condition, so you need to take that into account.'
It's slippery ground. 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 why something has failed. 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. A structural factor has been added that is far less visible, but perhaps even more harmful. The promise of efficiency. The promise of digital tools. The promise of autonomy.
We live in a time when every problem is approached as a workflow question. You only need to sigh about workload 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. On top of that, there's the new generation of AI tools, presented almost daily as a messiah. The promise always remains the same: it'll be easier, it'll be more efficient and it'll be clearer. The effect is often precisely the opposite.
The psychological impact of these tools is barely discussed, let alone understood. We don't become more responsible, but rather 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 microtasks actually reduces experienced autonomy. People gain more control on paper, but experience less direction in their thoughts.
Autonomy has become an illusion. You decide on the tool you use, but no longer on the purpose you serve.
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 silos in organisations, but in digital form.
You increasingly hear statements 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 turned into a collection of parallel systems. Tools that don't speak to each other, teams that don't see each other and agreements that remain floating. Every digital choice becomes a micro-identity.
Working from home has strengthened 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 obscure responsibilities. A missed update leads to miscommunication. An unread task becomes a tool setting. A forgotten appointment becomes a notification problem. Tools make responsibility liquid. And what becomes liquid can flow anywhere, except towards the person who must bear it.
The second layer of this problem goes deeper than digital fragmentation. It's the psychological attitude that lies 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 where everything must fit the individual. Work culture has become soft, but also diffuse. There's understanding for everything, as long as it doesn't chafe. And when it does chafe, emotions often escalate quickly.
The Social and Cultural Planning Bureau calls this 'collective norm erosion' 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 obligations 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.
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.
First: 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 at once.
Second: dilution of social cohesion. The kitchen table makes everyone autonomous, but no one connected. Without physical contact, responsibility becomes less clear. Teams become a collection of individuals without shared rituals.
Third: displacement of the question of blame to technical settings. Where someone previously simply forgot to answer, it's now a 'setting', a 'bug', a 'mute', a 'filter'. Software becomes the perfect hiding place. And responsibility doesn't like hiding places.
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 fails.
And perhaps that's the greatest discomfort of our time. We've bought the illusion of overview, but the fundamental skill of bearing responsibility is slowly disappearing.
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 a dramatic interlude, but as a counterweight. Because the reality of rehabilitation from 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 concentrated. It becomes raw, direct, inescapable.
After a brain haemorrhage, your body determines your pace. 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 go under. Those who do too much pay for it immediately. 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 name anew what works and what doesn't. And that is perhaps the most adult form of responsibility a person can experience.
In my journals, which were the anchor under my recovery for a year, I see that pattern reflected. A continuous confrontation with boundaries, a growing honesty. And in that honesty sits a kind of clarity I barely see in organisations anymore.
It's the same clarity that's missing in many teams. Because no one names what's really going on. Because everyone turns, softens or looks away. Because systems and cultures obscure responsibilities. Those who are rehabilitating cannot afford that.
That's why it struck me when I slowly returned to work. I stepped into 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 onto abstract concepts. Vague language that commits no one to anything. Endless meetings without any conclusion. Little islands that tolerate each other politely but never truly collaborate. Digital cultures of but we've always done it this way fragment everything.
Where my rehabilitation forced me towards clarity, I saw organisations retreating into the fog.
And then it became uncomfortable. It's hard to return to a professional world in which responsibility has become voluntary when you've just spent a year living in a world in which responsibility is indispensable.
That contrast forces reflection. Not only about my own recovery, but also about the way teams and organisations function.
If you want to understand responsibility, you need to look at three things. Not at systems or tools, but at human behaviour.
We avoid vulnerability. Taking real responsibility means you become visible, you put your name to something, you take risks. Work is designed to avoid risks, confrontations and tension.
The Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau describes this in its research on civic engagement as an 'increase in conflict avoidance in professional settings'. That sounds abstract, but what it really means is that no one 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 less committed than ever. The illusion of choice doesn't create ownership. Autonomy without responsibility isn't freedom, it's individualism. And individualism is a poor foundation for collaboration.
TNO demonstrates that generative AI is changing the way we work significantly. Routine tasks are decreasing and employees are gaining more autonomy and more complex responsibilities. That offers opportunities, but also increases mental load and diminishes the social function of work even further. When consultation moments and informal exchange disappear, engagement becomes more vulnerable and people feel more detached from their team.
Responsibility has been downgraded to a choice. In theory we regard responsibility as important. In practice we often treat it as an optional extra. It's no longer a core competence, a virtue or a basic requirement. It's become a behavioural option. You can be a bit responsible, or only on Tuesdays, or only when it fits your diary, or when it suits the tool you happen to be working with. This mental shift is the heart of the problem. Not the system, not the tool, not the organisation. The behaviour.
Responsibility isn't a form of autonomy. It's a form of maturity. It's the willingness to align your behaviour with the interests of others. It's the ability not to see yourself as the centre of everything. It's the courage not to look away. It's the understanding that freedom gives no direction without backbone.
In my own recovery that became almost tangible. Every step I took required coordination. Every mistake required a lesson, and every improvement demanded discipline. That's responsibility in motion.
If responsibility is so essential for recovery, personal leadership and collaboration, why are fewer and fewer people taking on 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 a time of comfort, we avoid tension, we love softness, we individualise. And responsibility asks for the opposite.
We can look for all sorts of 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 name structural problems.
But ultimately it all comes down to something much simpler. A simple question:
That's where the heart of it lies. Not in systems, not in policy, not in technology. But in the attitude with which we begin our day.
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 can be done entirely 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 isn't a luxury. It's a foundation. It's the place where noise turns into nuance, where misunderstandings are resolved before they grow, where ideas emerge in the space between two sentences, where collaboration isn't programmed but arises.
Research from various sources shows that physical presence is crucial for collaboration and responsibility. TNO concludes in a study that teams who see each other physically at least twice a week develop more proactivity and more informal coordination than teams who work entirely hybrid. Gallup shows that employees who collaborate physically on a regular basis experience significantly more engagement than employees who work primarily remotely.
One of the biggest mistakes of this age is the idea that autonomy is the same as freedom. In reality autonomy can turn into isolation, fragmentation and non-commitment. Freedom without responsibility isn't maturity. It's escape.
When everyone determines their own rhythm, chooses their own toolstack, turns off their own notifications and declares their own workflow sacred, what emerges isn't autonomy but disintegration. Teams then stop being teams. They become clusters of individuals who happen to have the same name on their contract.
Organisations feel that. They notice it in slow decision-making, in vague agreements, in the wandering around of responsibilities, in the decline of initiative, in the exhaustion of managers who are putting out fires that should never have started.
We're at a point where responsibility needs to be redefined. Not as a burden, but as maturity. Not as duty, but as a basic condition for professional life.
And that demands something concrete. Something that goes against the obviousness of digital technology.
Find each other again.
Not sporadically. Not because there's a rota that prescribes it. Not to be visible for a moment.
But collaboration is only possible through proximity, regardless of the way a team shapes that proximity. Teams only become teams when they meet regularly. In the same space, in the same conversation, with the same attention.
The office isn't 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 spoken here rather than filtered out.
Where trust grows, because people get to know each other outside the window of a camera. It's not about the office itself. It's about the humanity that disappears when everyone stays out of view for too long.
There's another misunderstanding that needs to be put right. The idea that AI can solve our problems.
AI is a powerful piece of equipment. It can structure, analyse and accelerate. But it can't carry responsibility. It can't form a team. It can't resolve conflict. It can't build trust. It can't replace presence.
People who rely entirely on AI as a workflow partner often become more reactive and less engaged. They think that information can be efficiently organised. 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 to.
In recent years, physical presence has shifted from basic requirement to variable. Everything has become negotiable. The kitchen table became a workplace. The screen became a medium for conversation. Teams are now a collection of individuals who sometimes don't see each other for days on end.
But presence is not an insignificant detail. It's a load-bearing beam beneath collaboration. Misunderstandings are resolved more quickly. Ideas emerge 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 that see each other regularly show noticeably greater engagement.
Proximity is not nostalgia. It's psychology.
We must regard responsibility as something normal again. It shouldn't be seen as a weighty concept. Not as a moralistic assignment. It's a mature agreement between people who are trying to build something together.
It doesn't begin with protocols.
It begins with a choice that every professional can make for themselves.
→ Choose the conversation instead of the screen.
→ Choose collaboration instead of parallel working.
→ Choose behaviour that contributes to the whole.
Responsibility is not individual expression. It's a contract sealed by the group.
If we learn to value this principle afresh, something emerges that we nearly lost along the way.
Collaboration is not difficult. It's brilliant.
How ownership connects with 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 examine human authenticity in a digital age that increasingly resembles an egocentric hall of mirrors. As a designer and strategist, I know that not all that glitters is gold.
Written by
Peter van der SteegePeter van der Steege is a designer, brand strategist and AI director. He builds brands for entrepreneurs and writes about what makes brands strong, from strategy to the role of AI and humanity. He lives and works in Groningen.
