Reclaiming the Human Experience at Work
Nov 05, 2026What does it feel like to be you at work? This is a deceptively simple question. But pause for a moment to try answer it and you are likely to uncover a rich, complicated, and emotionally textured landscape about your experience: the particular way you scan for safety, the stories you tell yourself about your role, the moral dissonance you manage, the sense of connection or disconnection you carry day to day. What you hope for and aspire to, even as you move through empty routines.
This is your subjective experience. And it matters!
It matters to all of us.
It is where all of us interpret events, navigate power, form judgments, and decide what to give of ourselves to the system (and what to hide from it). It gives coherence to our perceptions, feelings, reactions, and choices.
And yet—we rarely ask this question in the workplace. Even with decades of focus on engagement, psychological safety, and authenticity, the felt reality of being a person in a system—emotional, interpretive, and moral—is too often minimized or entirely overlooked.
In its place, organizations have leaned on neuroscientific, behavioral, and objectivist frameworks that aim to make humans more legible, predictable, and manageable. The intention is understandable: organizations crave insight and tools. But in outsourcing the human to the measurable, we risk erasing the very thing that gives culture life: the subjective, or more precisely, subjective experience.
Recovering the Subjective: A Deeper Human Inheritance
Long before modern psychology coined the term “subjectivity,” cultures across the world developed deep ways of understanding the interior life—as moral, relational, and spiritual terrain.
- In ancient Greece, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle treated the psyche (soul) as the seat of ethical life and self-mastery.
- In Indian Vedāntic and Buddhist traditions, inner experience was central to insight and liberation.
- In Confucian and Daoist thought, the heart–mind (xin) was cultivated through ritual, relational ethics, and spontaneous attunement to the flow of life.
- In Abrahamic mystical traditions, the soul’s inner longings, struggles, and confessions formed the core of spiritual selfhood—most famously in Augustine’s Confessions.
Across these traditions, the subjective was not weakness or indulgence, but the ground of ethical and spiritual becoming.
How the Subjective Was Abandoned
The modern marginalization of the subjective accelerated in the 17th–19th centuries, as scientific positivism rose to dominance. With it came new modes of certainty: measurement, replicability, abstraction. If something couldn’t be quantified or verified, it was deemed suspect.
- Descartes famously split mind from body and equated reason with truth.
- Newtonian mechanics reframed the universe as a clockwork system.
- Behaviorism, in 20th-century psychology, reduced mental life to observable behavior.
Even today, this legacy persists in the language of leadership and organizational change: “biases,” “brain hacks,” “dopamine hits”—as if people are machines that simply need better programming.
But when we reduce humans to what can be observed, tracked, or manipulated, we lose the lifeworld—what phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called the “Lebenswelt”: the lived, relational, emotional, and meaning-saturated world we actually inhabit.
It’s how a hallway feels, how a tone silences or opens up possibility, how one’s body carries the weight of cultural codes and past harm. It’s the difference between being included and feeling like you belong.
Carl Jung and the Return of the Inner World
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Carl Jung, a psychologist whose contributions offer profound guidance for today’s organizational challenges.
Where Freud explored repression, Jung explored integration—arguing that the psyche is composed of many parts: the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the Self.
- The persona is the face we wear to meet social expectations.
- The shadow is what we repress—emotions, traits, or truths deemed unacceptable by our environment.
- The Self is the deeper wholeness we move toward through individuation—a process of integrating all parts, including those we fear or disown.
To Jung, subjective experience was not a distraction from truth but a gateway to it. He believed that healing and growth required facing what had been hidden, unacknowledged, or denied — both in ourselves and in our cultures.
In this sense, organizations that demand “authenticity” while rewarding conformity merely produce shadow—a collective repression of pain, difference, or emotional truth that returns in the form of burnout, misalignment, and exclusion. As Jung warned: “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
Wellness and Subjectivity
In recent years, workplace wellness and mental health have re-opened the door to subjectivity—via meditation apps, resilience programs, and trauma-informed language. These efforts reflect an important evolution.
But too often, wellness is offered as repair for harm that the system continues to inflict. Subjectivity is relegated to the private and personal, with the implicit message that your wellness is your responsibility. It focuses on individual regulation rather than systemic redesign:
- The problem is framed as your stress, not the demands placed on you.
- The solution is self-care, not collective care.
- The goal is calming down, not speaking up.
Wellness that does not integrate the subjective and systemic risks becoming a subtle form of containment.
Intersubjectivity: Where Culture Actually Happens
Culture isn’t what’s posted on a wall—it’s how people feel in relation to one another, moment to moment. It lives in an intersubjective field: the emotional and interpretive space we co-create in meetings, messages, silences, rituals.
To feel psychologically safe is to feel seen.
To feel excluded is to feel erased.
That is not a rational calculation. It is a subjective, embodied sense of meaning. And it is here, in the relational space between people, that inclusiveness is either created or broken. It cannot be mandated or decreed or invoked by posters or Powerpoint.
Imagine Subjectivity-Centered Organizations
What if we designed organizations with subjective experience as the foundation—not as noise, but as vital data?
1. Leadership would shift from control to attunement. Leaders would be trained not just to “drive outcomes,” but to notice tone, body language, narrative, and meaning. Emotional literacy, deep listening, and reflective practice would be core competencies—not fringe.
2. Culture would be felt, not just framed. Values would be embodied in rituals, language, and daily interactions. Questions would include:
- How does this place feel?
- What are we allowed to show or hide?
- Where do people feel they have to perform, and why?
3. Strategy would begin with story. Strategic decisions would ask:
- What’s the lived experience of this change?
- What stories do people tell about their future here?
- What emotional truths are being ignored?
4. Feedback would be intersubjective. Instead of transactional evaluations, teams would reflect together:
- How do we experience each other?
- What’s hard to say here?
- What patterns of silence or disconnection do we notice?
5. Organizational design would be relational. From onboarding to offboarding, structures would be designed for belonging, resonance, and meaning-making.
Reclaiming the Human in the System
To center subjectivity is not to abandon logic or performance—it’s to ground both in lived reality. It’s to understand that people are not cognitive units or behavioral systems, but embodied, emotional, cultural beings, navigating complexity and contradiction.
We don’t thrive by being measured. We thrive by being seen, cared for, supported, and empowered.
Jung, Husserl, and countless traditions before them have shown the primacy of the subjective. It is not the opposite of truth—it is how truth is felt and lived.
- What would change if we treated subjective experience—not just objective data—as real, valid, and central to culture?
- How might our metrics, rituals, and leadership practices evolve if we listened for meaning, not just measurement?
- What hidden truths might emerge if we created more space for emotion, contradiction, and silence?
- What if we truly connected to and across our respective Lebenswelten?
In an age of algorithmic optimization and performative inclusion, reclaiming the subjective is a radical act of remembering what it means to be human together.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn as "Let's Reclaim the Subjective" in August 2025.
About the Author
Joerg Schmitz is a business anthropologist passionate about exploring human behavior through the lens of anthropology and organizational culture. He is the founder and Managing Director of The Inclusive Leadership Institute (@TheInclusiveLeadershipInstitute). After 35 years living in the US and working with organizations and institutions globally, he currently resides in Bremen, Germany. Connect with him at [email protected] to continue the conversation.
