What Happens When Companies Treat People Like Overhead
Most companies don’t cut culture because they don’t value people. They cut it because culture doesn’t show up neatly on a balance sheet.
When budgets tighten, leaders are trained to look for line items that feel indirect, long-term, or difficult to quantify. Culture, early career programs, campus partnerships, and people-focused initiatives often fall into that category. Not because they don’t work, but because their impact doesn’t present itself in clean, quarterly metrics.
And in moments of pressure, what can’t be easily measured is often the first to go.
What Actually Gets Cut — and Why
Across industries, the same areas tend to disappear first:
Early career and campus programs
Culture and engagement initiatives
People experience and organizational effectiveness roles
DEI-adjacent work, even when rebranded
These functions are rarely cut because they are ineffective. They’re cut because their return on investment isn’t immediate or easily isolated. The value they create is spread across teams, time, and outcomes — which makes it harder to point to a single metric and say, this is why it worked.
When these programs are functioning well, they don’t create visible spikes in performance. Instead, they create steadiness. Teams ramp faster. Turnover is lower. Fewer issues escalate. Work moves with less friction. From a financial standpoint, that kind of stability can be difficult to credit back to a specific investment, especially when leaders are under pressure to justify short-term savings.
As a result, people and culture initiatives are often viewed as discretionary rather than foundational, even though their impact shows up in how smoothly the organization operates over time.
The Cost-Containment Trap
Here’s where the disconnect happens. Finance leaders are incentivized to focus on cost containment — what can be reduced, paused, or eliminated to protect margins today. People and culture work, on the other hand, is about cost prevention — avoiding future losses that haven’t shown up yet.
Attrition doesn’t spike the moment culture funding is cut. It creeps. Burnout doesn’t announce itself on a dashboard. It shows up in slower execution and poorer decisions. Broken early career pipelines don’t raise alarms immediately, they inflate recruiting costs months later.
By the time the financial impact is visible, the original decision that caused it is often forgotten.
Culture Isn’t “Vibes.” It’s Infrastructure.
Culture is often dismissed as soft, abstract, or secondary. In reality, it’s operational infrastructure.
Culture determines:
How decisions get made when leadership isn’t in the room
How knowledge is shared (or hoarded) across teams
How quickly new talent becomes productive
How organizations respond to stress, change, and uncertainty
When culture is strong, work flows. When it’s weak, everything costs more. More time, more management effort, more emotional labor. You can invest in the best tools, the most advanced technology, and the smartest strategies. Without a functioning human system underneath, those investments underperform.
The Compounding Cost No One Models
When culture and people systems are underfunded, the consequences compound:
Managers absorb emotional and operational overload
High performers carry invisible labor to keep teams afloat
Early career talent leaves before becoming fully productive
Senior leaders mistake adoption issues for tool failures
None of this shows up neatly in quarterly reports. But it shows up in missed goals, disengaged teams, and rising replacement costs. Organizations don’t feel the impact all at once. They feel it everywhere, slowly.
A Strategic Reframe
The most expensive cuts aren’t the ones that fail immediately. They’re the ones that quietly erode the systems that make future growth sustainable. Culture isn’t a perk. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the operating system for how work actually gets done.
At The Dezonie Collective (TDC), this is where we focus our work — helping organizations treat people systems as strategic infrastructure, not discretionary spend. Through early career strategy, campus partnerships, and people-centered operating models, we support leaders in building talent pipelines and internal systems that reduce long-term costs, improve decision flow, and create stability that scales.
Companies don’t just need better tools or leaner budgets. They need the discipline to invest in the human infrastructure that allows everything else to work as intended.
