You give your team something rare. A four-day week. Flexible hours. Real breathing room. And for a while, it works beautifully. Then, gradually, the gratitude fades. The expectation creeps in. And suddenly, the gift feels like a given. 

This is one of the more uncomfortable paradoxes of building a genuinely good workplace: the better the culture you create, the faster it becomes the new normal. And once people stop noticing it, they start resenting any friction that interrupts it.  

This episode is part of The Work Edit, a format where I sit down with someone facing a real professional challenge and we work through it together. My guest is Marilla, who has spent eight years building Equality Media and Marketing, a 30-person agency where flexible time is a core part of the culture. Marilla came to me with a challenge I hear a lot from leaders of genuinely good workplaces: what do you do when your team starts taking the culture for granted?  

If you lead people, this one is full of things you can take straight into your week: 

• The goat story: an ancient parable that explains why people stop appreciating what's good, and how to use it as a leadership tool 

• Why Inventium runs a Four Day Week policy reset every one to two years, and the specific questions that make those conversations productive 

• Why checking emails for 45 minutes feels like "working all night", and what that distortion does to team morale 

• What to do when one or two people are quietly poisoning the culture, and when to stop trying to bring them around 

• The "deal or no deal" conversation: how to give people a genuine choice about whether they're still on the bus 

• The single question I ask before any team-wide pep talk, to make sure I'm not just avoiding a direct conversation I need to have 

Key quotes 

"All I can control is how I approach the conversation and the messages that I deliver. I can't control how that other person is gonna react." 

"Is this about the minority or the majority? Because that's really unfair if it's just the minority that's the root cause of what's happening."