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Over the next few years, Gilbert guided IBM’s shift toward design-thinking and re-trained thousands of employees to work differently, all without mandating a thing. Today, he sees corporate mandates as pointless: They don’t work, he says. And yet, they’re ubiquitous—take the RTO mandates that companies are enforcing, often to the frustration of their employees. At Paramount, about 600 workers took a voluntary buyout rather than accept the company’s 5-day RTO mandate. But change is inevitable, whether it’s about remote work or AI integration. So how do companies get employees on board? Gilbert, now a leading culture change expert, spoke with Fast Company about the lessons he learned from his undertaking at IBM and what company leaders should know about getting employee buy-in for their own change initiatives. We’re in a time when companies are undergoing and implementing lots of changes, from RTO to AI to DEI—all the acronyms. In your book, you talk about the importance of treating change like a product. What do you mean by that? My predisposition, based on years of experience, is that mandating changes in the workplace is hugely inefficient and hugely ineffective. Cultures drive outcomes. Mandating culture changes to achieve different outcomes doesn’t work.
