Ep. 4 The Social Contract
The Social Contract
We all sign a contract letter when we enter the office, but most of the rules are never actually written down.
Explore the hidden unwritten rules of the office with Aparna, Lars, and Leilani Lewis. We break down the "psychological contracts" that demand your silence and performative loyalty. Learn how to reclaim your dignity and rebuild collective power at work.
IN THIS EPISODE Aparna and Lars are joined by arts leader and organization transformation practitioner Leilani Lewis to break down the implicit behaviors and unwritten rules that govern our lives as white-collar workers. We dig into the "psychological contracts" we navigate every day—from who takes the notes in meetings to why your boss might think taking a full lunch break is a sign of disloyalty. It’s a conversation about pulling ourselves out of individual survival mode and recognizing that silence isn't just a habit; it’s a corrosive social contract we have the power to change. We’re looking at what happens when we stop seeing our coworkers as competition and start building a collective sense of dignity instead.
THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH Is the unwritten "contract" you've made with your organization actually protecting you, or is it just demanding your silence?
TAKE THIS WITH YOU
Audit the "Implicit": This week, identify one behavior you engage in at work solely because of an unwritten expectation— like note-taking —and notice the impact it has on your energy.
Talk About the Norms: Get curious with a trusted colleague and ask them directly, "Do you see me as competition?" to start breaking the cycle of atomized performance.
Prioritize Work Friendship: Make a conscious effort to be a friend to someone at work today; having even one close friend in the trenches is directly correlated to better long-term health and mental wellbeing.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
"A New Optimization Opportunity" - An email exchange between "Eric F" and "Brenda" widely circulated on Reddit regarding lunch break optics.
Sam Altman & OpenAI - Discussion regarding the ethical standards and energy consumption of AI models.
Leilani Lewis - Award-winning arts leader, writer, and seasoned DEI practitioner.
CONNECT WITH US
Circle Back Club https://www.circleback.club/
Aparna on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnarae
Lars on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien
Want to bring this conversation into your organization? Aparna and Lars speak at HR conferences, Fortune 1000 ERGs, and philanthropic foundations. pod@circleback.club
New episodes every week. Follow Circle Back Club so you never miss one.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Circle Back Club | Episode 4: Renegotiating the Social Contract
Hosts: Aparna Rae & Lars Gallien
Guest: Leilani Lewis
Leilani: Loyalty to your company being a virtue, and loyalty to your coworkers being more of a liability? I think that's hard. Like we're taught to go to HR and not to each other.
Lars: Hi, I'm Lars Gallien.
Aparna: I am Aparna Rae. Welcome to the Circle Back Club. This is the podcast for anybody who's ever suspected that the problem is not us. We name what's broken at work, back it up with receipts, and build real power with people who are done performing. No productivity hacks, no brand advice, just an honest analysis and a community ready to change the status quo.
Lars: Yeah, we're here to reimagine and rebuild workplaces, to strengthen communities instead of depleting them, to see your coworker as your comrade, not your competition, and to stand up for the dignity and care of all humans and this beautiful planet together. Today we are going to focus on the social contract that we agree to being in white-collar work. What do we want to change? This social contract is all of the implicit and explicit behaviors we engage in with our coworkers. Some are conscious, some are not, and somehow all of them become purposeful expectations from the company. In this episode, we're going to name some of these behaviors, talk about who gets to create them, who gets to enforce them, and get into the impact these unwritten rules have on our wellbeing and our capacity to relate and be in community with other people. So let's renegotiate, shall we?
Aparna: Let's do it.
Lars: We're really lucky to be joined by our friend Leilani Lewis today. Welcome, Leilani.
Leilani: Thank you. Thank you Lars and Aparna for having me.
Lars: Leilani is an award-winning arts leader, a writer, and a seasoned diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioner based in Seattle. She is also an incredibly important part of our podcast creation, from our name to our episode format—everything. It’s really special to have you as a guest. Let’s warm up: is there a social contract in your social or personal life that you want to change?.
Leilani: So many. One that I see at work and even socially is that, as a person who identifies as a woman, I’m often expected to be the organizer, secretary, or note-taker—the person who cleans house. Often, I do it to myself; I raise my hand, but the implicit expectation is that you are the responsible party for those types of tasks. I’m pretty over that.
Aparna: Building on that, the implicit social contract in my marriage is that I am the cook and the grocery shopper. I have been trying so hard to change this. Whenever I ask my husband to get groceries, he says yes, but then asks me for every single item that is needed. Other than buying himself creamer and grapes, he doesn't buy any other food. Every single day it’s, "Hey, what are we having for dinner?".
Lars: All social contracts can be renegotiated. For me, I want to allow for more potential conflict in my relationships. I was socialized to see my value in being able to keep the peace. I really want to say things sooner, be a little bit messier, and root in myself a little bit more in my personal relationships.
Let’s talk about these contracts at work. Some are conscious, some are not, but they all have a big impact on how we experience ourselves and connect to others. It’s "social" because it’s often not written into a policy or onboarding documentation. Organizational psychologists use the term "psychological contracts". Ethical leadership created the pathway for what we know today as corporate social responsibility (CSR). We initially studied ethics starting with the individual person, and it turned into a CSR program: is the corporation ethical or moral?. But companies are just groups of people making decisions together. An Oxford study found that top management must be ethical to co-create an ethical tone in an organization.
Aparna: I’ve become deeply obsessed with watching AI CEOs at conferences. Sam Altman was at a summit in India recently and was asked about the energy consumption of AI. His response was unhinged; he essentially compared the energy cost of AI to the "cost" of feeding and housing a human being for 20 years to make them smart. It is a morally bankrupt response to suggest that caring for human beings is on the same plane as the energy consumption of these AI models. Then OpenAI leaned into a contract with the Department of War because Anthropic wanted guardrails against surveilling American citizens. You see it playing out in broad daylight every day.
Leilani: Corporations are able to absorb critique without actually changing. Somehow, compliance—did we follow policy?—is used as a stand-in for morality. I don't know that their criteria for defining these terms in corporate space are anywhere near the humane treatment of people.
Aparna: If the way I spoke to my friends made them develop an autoimmune disease, they would cease to be my friends. But that is not necessarily considered "harm" for a corporation. If going to work at a place leads to severe heart disease, it's not the corporation causing harm; it’s you eating too many hamburgers, even though there is a direct relationship between work stress and physiological issues.
Lars: Exactly. Ethics are often based on compliance, but is that enough?. Compliance and policies are renegotiated all the time. These social contracts include expected behaviors like communication style, FaceTime, how long you stay in the office, lunch habits, mentorship, and language tone. It also covers humor, competition, urgency, and conflict avoidance. These unwritten rules inform you on how to be accepted, how to advance, and how to have job security.
Aparna: I have a visceral reaction to running up against these norms and learning the hard way when I wasn't in compliance. It’s like touching something hot and getting burnt.
Leilani: You learn them quickly by being corrected, or sometimes you're just ushered into feeling a lesser sense of belonging. These implicit agreements maintain equanimity. Keeping the peace at work often means whoever is the most compliant with these agreements gets the promotion. Navigating the distance between explicit values on the wall and implicit expectations in action is exhausting.
Lars: The purpose of this podcast is to help white-collar workers move from individual survival mode to a collective experience. When we become curious about how others experience work, we take action to change the parts that take away our humanity for the sake of compliance. We have to talk to each other about these norms. I want to read an email an employee named Eric F. received.
Aparna: This post made its way through several Reddit threads. The email is titled "A New Optimization Opportunity" and is from his boss, Brenda. It says: "Hi Eric. It's been great having you on board these last three weeks. I wanted to reach out regarding a small observation I've made during your lunch breaks. I've noticed that after you've finished eating your sandwich, you've been spending the remainder of your 30 minutes sitting at your break table and looking at your phone. Yes, you are on your break and not abusing the slotted time, but the optics of taking your full lunch break instead of showing an eagerness to get back to support your work family is frankly disappointing. Most of the team finishes their lunch in about five to 10 minutes immediately. Let's correct this behavior and try to be more mindful of that team-first spirit so we can keep your momentum going in the right direction. Brenda.".
Leilani: He swore fealty to the "family" and now he is considered disloyal for taking his break. These norms are becoming tighter and tighter around workers.
Aparna: Brenda admits it’s not illegal for him to take his 30 minutes, but she's nudging him toward the company norm where people don't eat in peace. For most desk workers, you just eat at your desk.
Lars: It’s gaslighting language. She manipulates expectations by using terms like "work family" and "team first spirit".
Leilani: It’s a weaponization of loyalty. Corporations don't want us in solidarity because we might compare notes. The "family" labeling is fraught because you are trading labor for money. Eric deserves to be treated with dignity and allowed 30 minutes to eat his sandwich. These social contracts rely on silence and total agreement. If Eric and his colleagues all decided to take their full 30 minutes together, that would be against the social contract. Ambition is treated as a virtue where sacrificing your lunch for unpaid labor is the norm. The minute you say you're being treated differently because of your identity, you're outside the contract. Your silence and complicity are bought.
I’ve been in spaces where some team members were allowed to yell at people because it was excused as their personality. If I yelled like that, it would not be okay based on my identity and position. These contracts apply differently to different people, which is extremely confusing.
Aparna: Silence is one of the most notably conscious social contracts: don't raise your voice to complain, don't leave bad Glassdoor reviews. Silence is corrosive in any space.
Lars: What social contracts are we avoiding naming the most?.
Aparna: Health. We aren't supposed to talk about how work is hurting us. You can't talk about perimenopause or work stress causing infertility; those aren't "acceptable" health issues like your toddler giving you the flu.
Leilani: The most insidious ones implicate people with power. There is also the implicit agreement that competence looks like whiteness and maleness. Loyalty to the company is treated as a virtue, while loyalty to coworkers is a liability. We are taught to manage up, not across. Structurally, an atomized workforce is a more compliant one. Mission-driven nonprofits often weaponize your values, suggesting you should accept being underpaid because you "care about the cause".
Aparna: Exactly. You care about the cause, so you aren't supposed to criticize a leader making poor choices. If you do, you're a rabble-rouser.
Leilani: I bet in every nonprofit there is at least one employee who, if they broke the social contract and shared what they knew about finances or inappropriate behaviors, would sink the whole ship. In a large corporation, breaking the contract might only have high stakes for you personally.
Aparna: We've talked about silence, but secrecy is another implicit norm. Legally, we have protections for whistleblowers and organizing, yet so much corruption is kept secret. Meta knew the psychological harms Instagram caused young women, but they prioritized making a buck over children.
Lars: If you subscribe to the contract that your coworker is a liability, you've already made that decision in how you interact with others. But it doesn't have to be that way; we can problem-solve together through things like restorative justice.
Aparna: When I worked at Teach for India, one explicit norm was that leadership had to spend one day a month in a low-income school. As a director, I wasn't exempt from being in the community. In another nonprofit, an implicit contract was eating lunch together and sharing food. I worked with a construction company where a contract was not jumping to the worst conclusion about someone. When an older worker used outdated language, a manager gently nudged him rather than shaming him. I want to see norms like transparency and vulnerability propagated.
Leilani: Seeing each other as human is essential to keeping morale up. A 2023 study showed that surveys on happiness jumped from 43% to 86% when workers implemented their own protocols for celebrating milestones. I would love to see that norm everywhere.
Aparna: I once had a client with a half-time employee devoted solely to celebrations. People really loved it.
Leilani: That’s not soft work; it’s good work. I also want healthy discourse. The performance of competence has made people too fearful to say they need help or to admit a problem is complicated. I want a world where people get to be human at work.
Aparna: Let’s do a rapid-fire round. Finish the sentence: The white-collar worker’s greatest superpower, if they choose to use it, is...
Leilani: Collective legibility. The moment we start talking about our experiences, we break the illusion.
Lars: Last episode I said verbal influence, so today I'll say a really good presentation. Let's bring those skills into civic engagement and convince people of things.
Aparna: Favorite corporate phrase?.
Leilani: I like "touch base," even though it implies physical touch which HR would not like.
Lars: "We're building the plane as we're flying it".
Aparna: A phrase that actually means "I'm scared"?.
Leilani: "Let's make sure we're set up for success," which often means "slow down". Or "let’s not boil the ocean," which means they’re overwhelmed.
Lars: "We need to get some eyes on this".
Aparna: What is one thing the system never told white-collar workers about their own power?.
Leilani: That your employer needs you more than you've been conditioned to believe. The whole apparatus is designed to make you feel replaceable, but institutional knowledge and relationships are not interchangeable. You have more leverage than they want you to know.
Aparna: What is one sentence to every worker listening about what is possible on the other side of renegotiating social contracts?.
Leilani: Build your own community with your coworkers.
Lars: My takeaway is: can we normalize talking about social contracts so we can start taking accountability for them?. When we get overly focused on compliance, we move into a place of dishonesty. This week, talk to your coworker. Ask them if they see you as competition or if they are afraid of retaliation. Just get curious.
Leilani: When you can commiserate with people, you at least have some relief. If you can't leave your job, stand together. Tell each other how much you're making and care for each other.
Aparna: Having friends is highly correlated to longevity and health. Having at least one good friend at work increases your mental wellbeing. Make friends at work. On our next episode, we’re going to talk about the myth of being the perfect worker. Send your stories to hello@circleback.club. I'm Aparna Rae.
Lars: I'm Lars Gallien.
Aparna: And we'll see you next week.
