WeAreHuman@Work | #044 | The Ethnographer's Finding - 20 publishers, 20 rankings, no agreement, and the same ten expectations underneath all of them

Three Sundays, one question underneath them: what do people actually expect from an employer? #041 showed the answer moves with circumstances, not with age. #042 showed the engagement survey never asks it. #043 showed what happens when it goes unanswered: people stay, and they stop. This week, the answer itself.

Twenty publishers will sell it to you, and no two of them agree. Each surveys its own sample, asks its own question, and reliably finds the thing it sells. Put their top fives side by side, and no overall ranking of what people want emerges. There never was.

So here is the claim a behavioural scientist will want to argue with: there is no such thing as what employees want. Only what one sample told one vendor, in one month. Every ranking is an artefact of the survey that produced it. The categories the answers fall into are not. They hold, whoever asks.

That is an ethnographer's distinction, which is why Malinowski opens this edition. I first read him in 1996, in an ethnography course, years before I knew I would spend a career asking people what they expect from work. He spent 1915 to 1918 in the Trobriand Islands and came back with a method anthropology still uses: live among the people, learn the language, watch what they do. No questionnaire posted from London. No ranking of Trobriand priorities. He found the categories through which people saw their world, then watched what each person did inside them.

Swap the islander for the employee, and the method still works. My position, before the evidence: strip the labels and rankings off a year of workforce research and ten expectations remain, in three currencies. They do not change from publisher to publisher. Only the order does, and the order belongs to the person, not the survey.

The corpus first, with each publisher's business beside it, because you should know who is talking before you hear what they found.

— Tanguy

Twenty reports, twenty publishers, all published since January 2025. Write each publisher's business next to its report, and you can predict the findings before you open the PDF. Rewards firms find pay. The learning platform finds development. Staffing firms find flexibility and employability; mobility is their product. The insurer finds well-being. The workplace designer finds belonging, and locates it in the office. Survey vendors find engagement, not as an expectation but as the outcome they are paid to measure.

Nobody sells meaningful work or purpose. So the industry asks about the ideological rows least: ten reports and eight, out of twenty.

None of this is fraud. It is method. The question decides the answer, and every publisher asks the question its business can act on.

The full corpus, report by report and row by row, is on the framework page, together with the fifty years of academic instruments that supplied the categories: Rousseau on employer obligations, Herriot and colleagues on the content of the deal, Freese and Schalk on how relational obligations are measured, Hackman and Oldham on the work itself, Thompson and Bunderson on the ideological currency, and this year's meta-analysis by Rees, Brownell and Kickul on what a broken deal costs. The reports supply the year. The instruments supply the categories.

This is what is left when the labels come off: ten terms of the employment deal, in three currencies, each read twice. What the person believes they are owed. What they judge they are getting. Those two readings are the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™. Read the table down: what I'm given, how I'm treated, what it's for.

The order is not a ranking. It is the order of visibility: transactional terms get written down, relational terms get implied, ideological terms almost never reach paper.

How it was built. Twenty publishers' labels, laid over fifty years of academic instruments, duplicates struck. Then one test for every candidate: can the employer change this directly by changing what it provides? If yes, it is a term of the deal. If no — engagement, satisfaction, intent to stay — it is an outcome, and it belongs on the dashboard, not in the promise.

The full corpus, the lineage of each row, how each currency breaks and what the gap predicts are on the framework page. Check it, argue with it, use it. Free, no form.

One test, on a survey that has never heard of the framework. Randstad's 2026 Workmonitor, 27,062 workers in 35 markets, doesn't ask people to rank what they want. It asks why they left. 39% quit a job that didn't fit their personal life. 34% quit for lack of flexibility, 31% for lack of collaboration, 27% because they couldn't be themselves, 25% for too little independence.

The comfortable reading is a retention checklist and a five-pillar EVP by Christmas. The ethnographer's reading is that the answers arrived pre-sorted. Flexibility and independence: rows 4 and 9. Personal life: row 5. Authenticity and collaboration: rows 6 and 7. Nobody handed respondents those categories. They brought them.

Now look at the experience column. The share of workers who can choose where they work fell from 60% to 53% in a year, while 43% say they would not accept a job without that choice. The expectation held. The delivery shrank. One row of the framework, read in both directions, in a survey that doesn't know the framework exists.

It is also why the framework is unranked. The only ranking that predicts anything lives inside one person, on one day. A persona deck puts that person in a single box. Read down the ten rows, and they hold several terms at once: the skills they need to stay employable, the flexibility they were promised, trust in their judgement, the belief that a restructuring is being done honestly. The last engagement survey they filled in measured none of them.

So stop writing pillars. A pillar is a brand element: admired, never kept. A term is a promise, and a promise can be kept, broken and tested row by row. Write your EVP in terms, and it stops being a poster. It becomes a ledger. The full method arrives in December, once every row has had its Sunday.

Your EVP is written in the vendor's vocabulary. Your people keep score in theirs.

The framework is above. Here is how to use it before your next EVP goes to print: one page, a line leader, someone hired in the last year, and an hour.

Sort it. Take every promise from the Breach Ledger (#043) and the Expectation Brief (#042) and place each on one of the ten rows. Anything that won't land is an outcome or a brand line, not a term.

Read it twice. For each row, write the expectation and the experience in the words your people use. Not the pillar's words.

Find the break. Where the two columns diverge, the deal is breaking, and the currency tells you how it will show: calculative withdrawal on rows 1–4, emotional withdrawal on 5–8, principled withdrawal on 9–10.

Expect an argument over where some promises land. That argument is the point.

The full table with sub-elements and lineage, the evidence on what a broken term costs, four moves for your next EVP or listening strategy, and the framework deck (10 pages, PDF, no form) are on the framework page.

Your turn. Place every promise in your EVP, careers page or offer letter on one of the ten rows, then count the empty ones. Hit reply with the number, and which currency the gaps sit in; I read every one. And if you know an employer-brand agency about to sell someone a five-pillar EVP, forward this before the pillars get their names.

💰 What a Fair Deal Costs — Sunday 4 October

Row one, in full. Pay is the expectation every survey measures and most organisations believe they understand. Next week: the best of 2025–2026 research on what people expect from pay, what they actually get, and the distance between the two. The first Expectation Gap of ten, and the one figure that should stop a remuneration committee mid-meeting.

— Tanguy

The Ethnographer's Finding — strip the labels and rankings from a year of workforce research and the same ten expectations remain, in three currencies; the order changes with every sample, the categories do not. This edition's frame.

Expectation currencies — the three kinds of term a deal is written in: transactional (what I'm given), relational (how I'm treated), ideological (what it's for). Each breaks its own way: by calculation, by betrayal, by principle.

The provision test — can the employer change it directly, by changing what it provides? If yes, it is a term of the deal. If not, it is an outcome, and belongs on the dashboard.

The People Expectations Framework™ — ten terms of the employment deal in three currencies, each read twice: as expectation and as experience. This edition's instrument.

Expectation Gap — for any one row, the distance between what people expect and what they experience. Next edition's measure, starting with pay.

Freese, C., & Schalk, R. (2008). How to measure the psychological contract? A critical criteria-based review of measures. South African Journal of Psychology, 38(2), 269–286.

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279.

Herriot, P., Manning, W. E. G., & Kidd, J. M. (1997). The content of the psychological contract. British Journal of Management, 8(2), 151–162.

Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. George Routledge & Sons.

Randstad (2026). Workmonitor 2026: The great workforce adaptation. Randstad N.V. randstad.com/workmonitor

Rees, R. R., Brownell, K. M., & Kickul, J. (2026). Beyond exchange and affect: An updated meta-analytic review and regulatory framework for psychological contract breach. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10123-1

Rousseau, D. M. (1990). New hire perceptions of their own and their employer's obligations: A study of psychological contracts. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 11(5), 389–400.

Thompson, J. A., & Bunderson, J. S. (2003). Violations of principle: Ideological currency in the psychological contract. Academy of Management Review, 28(4), 571–586.