Work became transactional. Then it stopped working.
Somewhere along the way, every interaction at work became a contract. OKRs, KPIs, performance cycles, retention bonuses, exit interviews. The vocabulary of work shrank into the vocabulary of accounting. Even the small conversations took on the rhythm of a Jira ticket — acknowledged, assigned, resolved.
Work used to have texture. Hallway chatter, lunch debates, the side project with the person two desks over who later turned into the person you stayed for. Most of that texture is gone, and most of what replaced it can be tracked in a dashboard.
Then came the machines. And we started imitating them.
AI got fast at exactly the things that made work feel like work: drafting, summarizing, replying, reviewing. The promise was that we would be freed up to do the human parts. Instead, we started doing the machine parts ourselves to keep up — faster threads, faster decisions, faster turnaround, fewer pauses.
Days got optimized to look more like the systems we ship code into. The line between the human and the tool got thinner. The humans started to feel like tools.
Perks were never the answer. They were a louder way of looking away.
Companies tried to compensate. More PTO. Free lunches. Stipends for ergonomic chairs. Quarterly engagement surveys with the same six questions. None of it worked, because none of it touched the thing that was actually missing.
People don’t quit because the kombucha tap went dry. They quit because nobody on the team would notice if they did. Perks don’t make a stranger feel known. They only make the room they’re standing in look more expensive.
Most coworkers are strangers. That’s the part nobody puts on a slide.
Walk into any company past a few hundred people and the most honest description of it is: a network of strangers paying each other to perform tasks. Most names on the org chart have never spoken. The ones who have, mostly speak through tickets.
There’s no trust because there’s no relationship. There’s no relationship because there’s no room left in the day for one to form. Performance suffers in the silence. Open communication suffers in the silence. Eventually, retention suffers in the silence too.
The human layer. That’s what we’re building. That’s why we exist.
We don’t think this is a culture problem you can solve with a poster. It’s a missing layer. Companies have a work layer — tools, processes, deliverables — and they’re spending heavily on a machine layer of AI, automation, and observability. What they don’t have is a human layer.
A place where coworkers know each other beyond a role. Where a relationship can start without a meeting invite. Where the small, unscripted moments that used to happen in a hallway can still happen across a remote, hybrid, AI-saturated company.
Unplanned Club is that layer. We built it because work doesn’t hold together without it, and we kept building it because, when the human layer is there, everything else gets easier — trust, communication, performance, the decision to stay.