"We don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences."
People Centricity
Your people. Attracted, engaged, unleashed.
Every employment relationship runs on a contract nobody signed.
Underneath the signed one sits another: what people believe they were promised, and what they believe they owe back. Unwritten, specific to each person, and the one that decides whether they commit or hold back.
Break it and nothing shows up in a system. Engagement drifts. Good people become reasonable people. Nobody files a complaint.
We find where it broke — the promise, the experience, or the potential going unused — and fix that one thing. Then we finish.
The problem
The problem is clear. The remedy is not.
Chief Talent Officers and Heads of Talent Management can almost always name the symptom. Finding what causes it is a different piece of work, and it rarely gets the time. So the risk is not uncertainty — it is acting on the symptom, and leaving the cause exactly where it was.
The field has stopped helping. Across the 10 trend reports behind our 2026 HR Trends & Priorities Heatmap, engaging and retaining the workforce barely clings to the top 10 — ninth, down from fourth. Not solved; displaced. Work redesign alone climbed from fourteenth to third, framed through AI like everything else that rose. A ranking has 10 places. Something has to leave.
The conditions did not move with the conversation. Gallup puts global engagement at 20%, a second consecutive decline costed at $10 trillion, with manager engagement falling furthest — 27% to 22% in a single year. And across 771 CEOs, the Conference Board finds talent and skills mismatch the leading internal constraint on the business. The mandate is not in question. A diagnosis is.
There is a funding trap inside that engagement number. Low engagement with high attrition is visible: people leave, vacancies get counted, replacement cost carries a figure, the business case writes itself. In this market they don’t leave — it has cooled, and leaving is no longer safe. Attrition falls, low attrition reads as health, and the disengagement stays in the building. The cost moves from replacement, which finance tracks, to opportunity cost, which nothing does — and nobody can point at an empty desk.
Low engagement with low turnover is not stability. It is accumulation — and accumulation is only fundable once someone has measured it.
Our clients range from 500 to 50,000 people. An intervention does not have to be large to matter. What decides the outcome is the precision of the diagnosis.
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. Gallup, Inc.
The Conference Board. (2026). C-Suite Outlook 2026. The Conference Board, Inc.
The evidence
Is any of this real?
Before any of it can be redesigned, someone has to know what people expect. Most organisations do not.
Employers were diagnosing a transactional problem. Employees were describing a relational one. The information exists on both counts. It is simply not asked for.
This gap has been studied for forty years, and it has a name — the psychological contract: what people believe they were promised, and what they believe they owe back. Roughly 55% report a broken promise within their first 2 years, and the effects are consistent: less trust, lower commitment, more intention to leave.
Two things get confused here. Someone notices a promise was not kept — that is breach. What they feel about it, and what they then do, is violation. The second does not always follow.
So two organisations can break the same promise and get opposite outcomes. What decides the damage is not the promise but how it was handled. Explained or not. Warned of or not. Visibly regretted or not. Which makes it something you control.
Which is why the remedy is rarely to promise more. It is to ask, and to keep asking. What people expect. What they experience. What they could become if anyone were building for it. Expectations, experience, potential — get those three right and the promise mostly looks after itself.
Robinson, S. L., & Rousseau, D. M. (1994). Violating the psychological contract: Not the exception but the norm. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(3), 245–259.
Zhao, H., Wayne, S. J., Glibkowski, B. C., & Bravo, J. (2007). The impact of psychological contract breach on work-related outcomes: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 60(3), 647–680.
McKinsey & Company. (2021). ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours. McKinsey & Company.
Deloitte Insights. (2025). What moves your people? Tapping into motivation at the unit of one. Deloitte Insights.
The business case
The business case for a people-centric organisation.
Bersin grades employee experience maturity across 4 levels, measured over nearly 1,000 organisations.
Those that do are:
Business outcomes
People outcomes
Innovation outcomes
Bersin, 2021
Note where the multiples are largest. The people outcomes run at more than twice the business ones — which is the sequence, not a coincidence. The financial return is downstream of the human one, and it arrives second.
Bersin, J. (2021). The definitive guide: Employee experience. The Josh Bersin Company.
Three questions
Three questions. If one of them stops you, that’s your entry point.
Not a menu. Three questions about the unwritten contract that most organisations cannot answer with evidence.
The interventions
Find the cause first. Then one intervention, closed when it’s solved.
Four weeks to find the cause. Then one intervention addresses it, with the end condition named before we start. An intervention that quietly becomes a programme has stopped being an intervention.
Scope
Four weeks. The brief describes a symptom; Phase 0 agrees how we find what is causing it.
Almost every intervention begins with a symptom. Engagement scores flat for 3 years. Attrition concentrated in one directorate. Managers quietly not running the performance cycle. Symptoms are real, they are usually measured accurately, and they are not the problem.
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Phase 0 is where we agree how to get underneath them. Which evidence we gather and from whom. What would have to be true for each candidate explanation to hold — and, more usefully, what would rule it out. Where the analysis stops and a decision gets made.
This matters because the wrong root cause produces a well-executed intervention that changes nothing. Rebuild a proposition when the real problem is a manager population that cannot deliver the one you already have, and you will have spent a year making a truer promise that is still broken in the same place.
We design this with you rather than for you, and it ends with a written problem statement. If you don’t recognise the problem in it, we haven’t finished.
Problem statement before solution statement
Most briefs arrive with the solution already in them. The EVP needs refreshing. We need a new onboarding programme. The performance cycle isn’t working. Each is an answer wearing the clothes of a question.
So we hold the order. Empathise first. Then the problem statement. Only then the intervention.
Which is why the listening runs top down and bottom up. A problem defined from the executive view produces an intervention that fits the executive’s picture of the organisation — rarely the one people are living in. Nothing is designed until the problem statement is one the people inside the problem recognise.
And they defend what they were consulted on far more readily than what they were shown. Which counts twice here: the contract that broke was broken by not asking.
What we agree
- The symptom, stated precisely — what is observable, where, and since when; and how well it is currently measured
- The candidate causes — what could produce this symptom, and what evidence would eliminate each one
- The method — which evidence, from whom, in what sequence, and where the decision point sits
- The scope and the cost — which intervention it points to, what it covers, and what it comes to
Attract
The promise you make should be one you can keep.
Targets: expectations, and the organisational contributions that meet them
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Your Work Value Proposition™ is what people can expect from working with you, in exchange for their expertise, energy and commitment. Most of the market calls this an EVP. We call it a work value proposition deliberately: people evaluate the work, not the employment relationship, and a promise built around the second misses what the first is being asked.
The research is blunt about what belongs in it. In Bersin’s study of employee experience practices, outstanding rewards and benefits ranked well below average for impact — while making rewards fair and equitable had significant impact. A proposition is not a list of perks. It is a set of commitments you can be held to.
What you leave with
- The diagnosis — people expectations research: what employees, managers and leaders genuinely expect from work
- The proposition — framework and pillars, messaging and communication guidelines, candidate-facing narrative
- The activation plan — internal activation, manager enablement toolkit, recruitment messaging guidelines
Best for Chief Talent Officers watching top talent choose competitors — or seeing recent hires leave before their first anniversary.
Engage
The result is not a framework. It is a change your people will notice.
Targets: experience, and the organisational behaviours and enablers that shape it
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Experience is where the unwritten contract is kept or broken, one interaction at a time. Rarely dramatically. Mostly through moments that fall a little short of what was understood, until the accumulated evidence says the promise was not serious.
Using human-centred design, we map the moments that matter across the lifecycle and redesign the ones that fall short. Not every moment. The ones that decide the rest.
The mapping draws on both kinds of evidence, direct and indirect. What people tell us in interviews and focus groups, and what the systems already record — survey trends, exit reasons, mobility, time-to-productivity, where requests pile up. One tells you what the experience feels like, the other tells you where it actually breaks. They rarely point to the same moment, and the gap between them is usually the finding.
Deloitte Insights caught that gap inside a single survey: only 13% of workers named tangible rewards as their core reason for working, yet the same workers ranked financial rewards as the strongest thing driving them to perform each day. People are not always reliable narrators of their own motivation. Which is why the mapping never rests on what they say alone — and never on the system data alone either.
What you leave with
- The diagnosis — employee journey map across the full lifecycle, experience gap analysis showing where promise and reality diverge
- The experience design — target experience design, and specific redesign recommendations for the highest-impact moments
- The activation plan — sequenced and resourced implementation roadmap, change management guidance, measurement framework
Best for talent and people leaders whose engagement surveys keep delivering the same low scores and whose exit interviews keep surfacing the same unresolved issues, year after year.
Unleash
From scattered, backward-looking assessment to continuous, forward-looking development.
Targets: fulfilment, and what follows from it
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Most performance management is an annual verdict on the year that just ended. It is scattered — a rating here, a form there, a conversation nobody prepared for — and it is backward-looking by design. It grades what happened. It builds nothing.
So we revamp the approach rather than tune the cycle. The unit of work stops being the assessment and becomes the development conversation: continuous rather than annual, forward-looking rather than retrospective, and about what someone could become rather than what they already did.
That means connecting individual purpose to where the organisation is going, making growth paths explicit enough to act on, and giving managers something worth sitting down for. The result is a performance culture people want to be part of, rather than one they comply with.
What you leave with
- The diagnosis — review of the current performance cycle: what it measures, what it decides, what it costs in manager time; talent landscape across capability, performance distribution and development gaps
- The redesign — a continuous development rhythm to replace the annual assessment, forward-looking growth pathways, and a manager calibration toolkit
- The activation plan — implementation and change plan, manager enablement programme, measurement framework
Best for Heads of Talent Management whose performance cycle grades the past accurately and builds nothing for the future.
Before you decide
What we decline to do.
Every advisory firm claims independence. Fewer say what it costs them. Here is what our model rules out, and why we built it that way.
- ×Let an intervention become a programme. Scope creep is comfortable for an advisor and expensive for a client. The end condition is agreed in the proposal.
- ×Take the implementation streams. We design and govern the intervention, never the delivery work underneath.
- ×Carry vendor partnerships. No referral fees, no alliances, no preferred platforms. When we recommend a tool, the recommendation is shaped only by fit.
- ×Score you on a maturity ladder. Knowing you are a Level 3 changes nothing on Monday. Knowing which practice moves the outcome does.
- →Name the end before the beginning.
- →Bring three capabilities, not one. Diagnosing takes research rigour and behavioural science. Designing the remedy takes human-centred design. Proving it worked takes measurement craft. Most advisors have one of the three.
- →Report what didn’t move.
- →Say when we are the wrong firm. Some problems need scale we don’t have, and some need a strategy rather than an intervention. We would rather say so on the first call.
The mechanism
Three interventions. One chain.
Close the gap between what people expect and what they get, and fulfilment follows. Fulfilled people succeed. Successful people move the business.
Feeding in at Experiences — organisational reality: what the organisation contributes, how it behaves in delivering it, and which channels it uses.
That is the People Centricity Formula™. Those three organisation-side dimensions, plus the three on the worker side, are the six the People Centricity Framework™ diagnoses — which is what makes an intervention scopeable, and therefore finishable. Each one on this page targets specific dimensions rather than the whole surface.
The chain is not a diagram drawn to explain a service. It is psychological contract research, made operational.
Every intervention runs the People Centricity Methodology™ — Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse, around an engine turning Data into Insights, Insights into Strategy, Strategy into Impact. On a strategy engagement that loop plays out across years. Here it runs inside a single piece of work: diagnosis, design, activation, measurement. Which is precisely why an intervention can be closed and a strategy cannot.
Proof, not promises
Where this work has been done.
90 engagements across 30 organisations, led by the founder since 2006 — at PwC, at Deloitte, and now at PeopleCentriX.
Private sector
- Audemars Piguet
- AXA
- Cargill
- Cartier
- DHL
- Ferring
- Galderma
- GSK
- Gunvor
- Lingaro
- Lombard Odier
- Nestlé
- Novartis
- Pictet
- Richemont
Public and international
- Abu Dhabi Government
- Belgian Railways
- Eurojust
- European Southern Observatory
- Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève
- International Committee of the Red Cross
- International Labour Organization
- International Organization for Migration
- International Organization for Standardization
- Medicines for Malaria Venture
- The Global Fund
- UN Refugee Agency
- World Health Organization
- World Intellectual Property Organization
- World Trade Organization
3 engagements per organisation, on average. Almost none of them were won twice by the same pitch — they were renewed because the first piece of work held up, and because whoever commissioned it was still there to commission the next one.
Half our work is private sector. The other half is public and international — UN agencies, NGOs and intergovernmental organisations.
Each of them is specific. Expectations in a research institute are not expectations in a private bank, and neither are expectations in a humanitarian agency — and two organisations of the same size in the same sector often differ as much again. What people believe they were promised is local to the place they work, and to the moment they joined it.
Which is why we research expectations rather than assume them. A proposition built on assumptions imported from somewhere else is a promise made to people who were never asked.
There is usually one person who makes the diagnosis obvious. The colleague who used to volunteer for the working groups and doesn’t any more. Still competent, still present, still well-reviewed. Nothing happened that anyone could point to — a restructure that was announced rather than explained, a promotion round whose logic was never made public, a manager who stopped having the conversation. She didn’t complain. She recalibrated. On an engagement survey she reads as satisfied.
She is what breach looks like when it never becomes a complaint, and she is the reason surveys keep returning the same numbers.
Our case studies are anonymised. Client contacts are not — we share them on request.
Questions
Before you get in touch.
Who is this for?
Chief Talent Officers and Heads of Talent Management, and the Chief People Officers they report to, in organisations of roughly 500 to 50,000 people. About half our work is private sector; the other half is public and international — UN agencies, NGOs and intergovernmental organisations, with engagements across all continents.
How is this different from your People Strategy work?
Scope, not rigour. People Strategy builds and governs the whole agenda and stays until the board has seen the return. People Centricity solves one thing precisely and then finishes. Same method, same evidence standard, different size of question.
What does it cost?
The cost is a function of the plan, and the plan does not exist until we build it with you. Which is exactly why Phase 0 exists: 4 weeks, scoped on its own, in which we co-design the methodology and the project plan. Everything after it is costed against that plan, and you see the number before committing to any of it.
So the sequence is: a conversation, then Phase 0, then a costed engagement. If the budget you have and the work you need are not compatible, the first conversation is where we would both rather find that out.
Why not a Big Four firm?
Sometimes you should. If the work needs 100 people across 12 countries simultaneously, we are the wrong call and we will say so on the first conversation.
They have 20 or more service lines. We have 2. Employee experience sits alongside 19 other offerings there. It is half of what we do, and the research it rests on is the research one of us spent 5 years producing.
There, an intervention is often the way in. A diagnostic is priced modestly because the platform or transformation behind it is where the revenue sits. We hold no implementation practice and no vendor partnerships, so there is no follow-on for our recommendations to bend towards. What we advise is what we think, because it is all we have to sell.
You get the team you met. In a large firm, staffing is a utilisation problem — the engagement is filled from whoever is on the bench. We do not have a bench.
And the people doing the work are trained to do it. Everyone here holds at least an MSc, with formal training in project and change management, in qualitative and quantitative method, and in design thinking. In a large firm the diagnostic is usually run by consultants trained in consulting, working from a benchmark database somebody else assembled.
The trade is scale for specialisation and continuity. If scale is what your problem needs, take scale.
We already know what is broken. Do we need Phase 0?
Knowing the symptom and knowing the cause are different things, and the second is what an intervention has to be built on. Phase 0 is where we test whether the cause you suspect is the one the evidence supports.
Sometimes it is, and Phase 0 is short. Sometimes it is not, and 4 weeks has saved you a year of solving the wrong problem.
Who actually does the work?
A PeopleCentriX team, and the same one from diagnosis through to measurement.
We never subcontract and we never outsource — no associate network, no partner firm, nobody billed through us who does not work here. Which means our capacity sets a hard ceiling on how many engagements we run at once, and we would rather turn work down than staff it thinly. It is why we work with a small number of clients at any one time, and why the answer to when we could start is sometimes not now.
What does “closed when solved” mean in practice?
A written condition, agreed before the work starts, describing what has to be true for the intervention to be finished. It’s in the proposal. You can hold us to it.
What happens if I get in touch?
A conversation, not a pitch. Most first calls are spent on your situation — what is breaking, what you have already tried, what your evidence is telling you. Some end with a proposal. Many end with a suggestion and nothing else.
Where does the research come from?
The trend figures come from our 2026 HR Trends & Priorities Heatmap, which maps 64 trends across 20 themes from 10 publishers — free, no form. The chain underneath this work comes from psychological contract research — Argyris, Rousseau, and four decades of work on fulfilment, breach and violation — including my own. The business-outcome figures come from
Work with us
Bring us the problem worth solving properly.
The contract nobody signed is the one that decides whether people commit or hold back. It is broken quietly, repaired deliberately, and almost never visible in the systems built to monitor it.
Finding where it broke is the work. Closing it is the intervention.
We work with a small number of clients at any one time.
Not at that point yet? Read the Heatmap instead — 64 trends across 10 publishers, every source named, free and unformed. It will tell you what the field is saying. Your own evidence will have to tell you the rest.
Who’s behind this
Tanguy Dulac
Founder & Managing Partner, PeopleCentriX
Between 2001 and 2006 I spent 5 years on one question: what happens to people when the promise their organisation made is kept, and what happens when it is broken.
The literature is unusually clear. Fulfilment produces commitment, discretionary effort and the willingness to stay. Someone noticing a promise was not kept is breach. What they feel about it, and what they then do, is violation — closer to grief than to disappointment, and it does not repair on the timescale anyone plans for.
The finding that shaped how I work is that the two are separable. Organisations break promises constantly; conditions change and commitments become unaffordable. What determines the cost is not the breach but whether it becomes violation — and that depends on whether it was explained, warned of, and visibly regretted. Which makes it something you control.
The People Centricity Formula™ is that research made operational. Expectations, experiences, fulfilment, people success, business success.
The other half of the discipline came later. In 2006 I joined PwC for one reason: Saratoga, the practice Jac Fitz-enz built, where measuring the value people create was the whole job. Talent work is where that matters most and is done least — a proposition, an onboarding programme, a performance framework, each launched and none of them measured against what it was supposed to move. An intervention that cannot show what changed has not finished. It has stopped.
It is also why I am unmoved by most employee experience work. Perks, platforms and rebrands act on the surface of a relationship whose logic sits underneath. If you have not asked what people expect, you are redesigning experiences against an assumption — and the literature is specific about what that costs.
PeopleCentriX sells this work, so this page is not disinterested. It is, however, checkable — every figure names its source, the Formula and the Framework are published in full, and the end condition is agreed in writing before we begin.
If something here lands, or doesn’t, I would rather hear it than not.
tanguy.dulac@peoplecentrix.eu · LinkedIn