Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Supporting your employees when everyone is overwhelmed

When we sit down to write this newsletter each week, there is a hesitant calculus about what is worth bring to you. Our audience skews heavily executive. We are always considering the fact that each new problem we bring up, or even action proposed, is pulling from an already depleted ability to do much with it in most workplaces.

This is especially difficult as an era of layoffs, geopolitical unrest, AI-fueled uncertainty, and unrelenting pressure to deliver leaves little room for anything else. Asking people to think about their career development on top of everything feels impossible. But supporting your team’s growth is an essential part of your job. The question is how to make career development feel relevant rather than tone-deaf when your own plate is just as full.

The answer is to stop treating learning as an extracurricular activity. Helen Tupper, cofounder of career development consultancy Amazing If, notes that most employees know they should be building new skills, but the demands of the here and now leave little room for it. They put their day job over their development.

The solution is to build learning into the week, not onto it. Look at their calendar. There is almost certainly something already coming up, such as a client event or a presentation, where they could play a bigger part. Let them open the meeting, lead the Q&A, or debrief the client. When it is done, make sure you take the time to reflect on it together.

And since you are figuring it out too, resist the urge to pretend otherwise. Share what you are currently reading or working on. Talk about a conversation that challenged your thinking. Be open about a mistake and what you took from it. As Tupper puts it: “Learning can look like anything, as long as they can see you doing it.”

How can learning compete in an attention deficit?

Workplace training has a TikTok problem. Learning experiences were designed in an era when social media exist and there weren’t a host of tools we have now to present complex ideas in genuinely entertaining ways. Now, people are scrolling constantly, consuming content that is fast, personally relevant, emotionally engaging, and designed by teams who understand human attention down to the millisecond.

When employees are asked to sit through dense modules and generic slides that feel like they were built before color TV, the disconnect is obvious. Low engagement with training is likely as much an issue of bland resources and boring design that do not feel worthwhile, as of being busy.

For the future of trainings, creativity, story-led content, and direct relevance to those taking it are better than completeness. On that note, measure impact rather than just completion is key to make learning more than just a box to check. Completion rates alone tell us very little about whether learning has actually had an impact.

Quote of the Week: Not how I’d roll out AI

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologized for offending colleagues and strangers alike when he said the British bank’s aim with using AI is to partly replace “lower-value human capital.”

Reading List:

HR invests more time in training as “skill engagement” becomes a rare point of workplace alignment

The share of HR leaders naming employee training their top priority jumped nearly 90% since last year. AI is the driver: it is increasing role complexity faster than existing programs were designed for. A Go1 survey of 2,000 L&D leaders found 7 in 10 professionals use AI weekly, but only 14% consider themselves advanced users. The organizations making the strongest progress are treating workforce capability as infrastructure, not a budget line that fluctuates with hiring.

CEOs get ruthless about performance

The corporate ethos of the previous decade, when leaders put empathy out front while quietly wishing employees worked harder, is over. As AI gives employers more leverage in a sluggish white-collar market, a growing chorus of CEOs is saying the quiet part out loud. Nestle's Philipp Navratil pledged to be "ruthless in assessing talent." Citigroup's Jane Fraser reminded staff they are judged on results, not effort. Executives used the phrase "performance culture" 633 times on S&P 500 earnings calls last year, up from 460 the year before. B-players are being managed out.

Don’t let yourself go numb, or back to sleep on AI’s disruption

There is a lot of noise right about AI right now, but the cost of tuning it out is rising too. Adecco Group research across 2,000 C-suite executives shows a widening gap between what leaders expect AI to deliver and what their organizations can actually do. While 45% of leaders expect AI agents integrated into workflows within a year, less than a third of workers agree, and only 36% of leaders say their talent strategy clearly shows how AI creates opportunity rather than displacement. "AI may move at software speed," Adecco CEO Denis Machuel said, "but organizational trust moves at human speed."

Data Point: Even the summer camps aren’t hiring

30%

Year on year fall in camp counsel jobs indicating a rough climate for teens looking for a summer job. Literally EVERYONE is affected in this economy.

In Other News

• ‘I live in survival mode’: The rise of the multi-job workforce. (BBC)

• The 19th-century guide to running an effective meeting: A US officer and engineer devised the process that is still in use today. (Financial Times)

• Target plans to evaluate employees on customer engagement. (HR Dive)

• More workers are raiding their 401(k)s as average balances fall, Fidelity says. (CNBC)

• Bolt CEO says he let go of his entire HR team for creating problems that didn’t exist: ‘Those problems disappeared when I let them go’. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Creating employee engagement during a culture of fear

When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed during a graduation speech about AI, it was as much a protest against a technology as it was signal that uncertainty is fast metastasizing into fear. The fear is justified. Customer service roles fell 130,180 in the year through May 2025. Credit authorizers are down 26.2% since ChatGPT’s introduction. The playbook is visible: Intuit cut 17% of its staff, targeting mid-level managers. Meta laid off thousands and moved managers to IC roles. As one Capital One employee virally posted: “This is exactly why you should never sacrifice too much for these companies. You are always disposable to them.”

And to a degree it’s true, isn’t it?

The question is what the new compact looks like. Sophos CEO Joe Levy faces this directly. When employees ask if support jobs will be eliminated, his answer is honest: “I don’t know.” Instead of false promises, Sophos uses a four-part framework: provide tools, give training, share examples, and offer incentives. Most companies stop after the first two. Sophos goes further because “What should I do with it?” is the most common question. They make AI part of performance reviews, measuring both outcomes and the process of finding efficiencies.

The leadership challenge is maintaining engagement when the workforce assumes they are being automated out. The answer is not pretending the threat does not exist. It is giving employees agency over the transition. Leaders who admit uncertainty but provide tools and incentives for employees to figure it out alongside them replace paralyzing fear with productive experimentation.

Fast adoption and poor governance kicks AI risks to HR departments…or legal

Get ready for shadow AI. Verizon data shows a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions tied to unauthorized AI use. Of the 45% of professionals using AI regularly, 67% access platforms via unauthorized personal accounts. Workers with access to sensitive material are plugging it into their tool of choice, leaving their organization blind to the exposure.

The risks are concrete: 28% of data loss prevention violations involved employees entering source code into AI tools. In 3.2% of cases, workers uploaded proprietary research. Yet only 13% of organizations have adequate AI agent governance. The gap is driving the development of AI-BOMs to track configurations and system prompts. Until governance catches up to adoption, IP loss and compliance violations will land on HR and legal.

Quote of the Week:

"We as employers aren't doing a good enough job saying [to older workers], we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better."

— Becky Frankiewicz, Chief Strategy Officer at ManpowerGroup

Reading List:

Workers contend with ‘skill atrophy’

There is a vicious cycle forming in AI adoption. A new GoTo survey found that 60% of employees feel pressured to use AI for productivity, yet 39% say the reliance has already weakened their skill sets. Half acknowledge they depend too heavily on the technology. The pressure to adopt is eroding the very capabilities that make human judgment valuable. While “perishable” skills tied to specific tools will be replaced regardless, but durable skills like judgment, critical thinking, and decision-making are what will differentiate high performers in an AI-saturated workplace.

Despite public examples, most employers are not cutting paid leave

When Zoom cut parental leave from 22 to 18 weeks and Deloitte halved theirs from 16 to 8, it felt like the start of a trend. It is not. A Marsh McLennan Agency survey found 86% of firms have no plans to change vacation time and 93% will maintain sick leave levels. The legal environment is part of the reason: 12 or more states now mandate paid family and medical leave, and 18 require paid sick leave, making cuts both complex and risky. If your organization is holding the line while competitors cut back, that is a story worth telling your employees.

When it comes to leadership, replacement is abdication

The most relevant AI risk for leaders might be abdication more than competitive effects. Data finds that leaders who outsource judgment to AI - out of fear of obsolescence - become less trusted by their teams. AI can generate, optimize, and even mimic wisdom. But it cannot hesitate, doubt, or read a room.

Data Point:

67%

Number of professionals who use AI regularly are accessing platforms using unauthorized personal accounts.

In Other News

• Indeed parent company touts record growth driven by AI. (HR Dive)

• Bolt’s cofounder scrapped its HR department. This CEO says people management is key to thriving in the AI age. (CEO Daily)

• Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers’ jobs around AI: ‘Transfers aren’t optional’. (The Guardian)

• LinkedIn declares war on AI slop: The job networking site plans to target low-quality AI posts that distract its users from finding value on the platform. (Fast Company)

• While other tech CEOs warn of mass job losses, Glean’s chief says AI will never replace a single worker. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Get ready for a whole host of new AI compliance headaches

Nearly 70% of employers now use AI in hiring; which is great for speed but no so much for rapidly increasing, legal exposure. The federal government has signaled permissiveness, and many employers have read that as permission to move fast. It is the opposite. The compliance burden is fragmenting into a state-by-state patchwork harder to manage than a single federal standard would have been.

The regular suspects have been active. Colorado just signed SB 26-189 requiring employers to notify individuals within 30 days when an automated tool materially influences an adverse employment decision, effective January 2027. New York City requires bias audits and public disclosures. Illinois mandates applicant notification. California has expanded its civil rights framework to cover AI-driven employment decisions with extended record retention. Courts are not waiting either: a federal judge allowed disparate impact claims to proceed against Workday’s screening software, and a separate class action alleges AI applicant scoring violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Your vendor contract does not transfer legal accountability. Employers remain responsible for employment decisions regardless of whether a human or an algorithm informed them.

If you are using AI in hiring, performance management, scheduling, or productivity monitoring, the compliance obligation already exists under Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA. The new state laws add disclosure, audit, and recordkeeping on top. Algorithmic errors at scale quickly become systemic violations. Map your tools, engage your vendors on transparency, and document decision-making processes now.

New critical metric: agent to employee ratio

The metric that will define workforce planning for the next decade just arrived. Leading mid-market organizations (ie the 5% of firms that have actually figured out how to do AI well) have an average of 144 AI agents deployed for every human employee. In small businesses, the ratio is 59 to 1. These are production systems doing work; the cumulative population of specialized, agents spawned across a typical operating period, executing work that used to require human handoffs between systems.

At ClickUp (a $4 billion productivity platform with 1,300 employees), the company now runs roughly 3,000 internal AI agents. The CEO instituted a policy: employees must go through an AI agent before pinging him directly. The shift, as he describes it, is from “actually doing and waiting on the work, to reviewing the work and ensuring that it meets your standards.” Employees are becoming managers of agents.

Guardrails exist (agents cannot delete anything for example), and the company maintains an “agent org chart” listing every agent by name, owner, and cost to run. When people talk about scale decoupling from headcount, this is what they mean. The question for every HR and operations leader is what workforce planning looks like when your employee-to-output ratio is no longer fixed.

Quote of the Week:

"The biggest shift is from actually doing and waiting on the work, to reviewing the work and ensuring that it meets your standards."

— Zeb Evans, ClickUp CEO on how the shifting agent-employee ratio is affecting work

Reading List:

Leadership development is no longer just for leaders

New research from ADP speaks for itself: Half of organizations now offer leadership development to workers at all levels with 79% reporting improved organizational culture and 68% saying job performance improved. Communication and decision-making top the list of what executives value and learners want. The challenge is access: 63% of managers say the role of leader was more difficult than anticipated, and more than half report their organization provided little training to prepare them.

Designing operations for resilience without sacrificing efficiency

The traditional assumption is that efficiency and resilience oppose each other. New MIT Sloan research argues they don’t have to if you’re willing to accept some complexity. Most organizations optimize for internal metrics (on-time performance, utilization rates, inventory turnover) that capture efficiency without customer or external resilience. The fix becomes pairing measurements (one metric for efficiency, one for customer experience for example), strategic buffers deployed by disruption probability rather than uniform rules, and curated choice sets that remove high-risk options before customers select them.

MBA’s are having a fire sale as fewer businesses want their wares

Business school applications are rapidly declining and institutions are responding with discounts on specialized degrees promising AI-era relevance. The two-year MBA faces intensifying ROI scrutiny as employers value demonstrated skills over credentials. Schools are pivoting toward shorter programs, acknowledging the market has moved faster than their curricula. The price cuts suggest that any MBA you might want to hire should get cheaper, even if they become scarcer than over the past decades.

Data Point:

30 days

The timeline Colordo businesses have to notify individuals of “adverse AI-influenced decisions”

In Other News

• Employers adopt AI tools faster than they can train workers to use them. (HR Dive)

• What 25,000 Intern Applicants Taught Me About People. (Forbes)

• Workers are getting paid to teach AI how to do their jobs. (CBS)

• OpenAI just acquired the consulting firm it was born alongside. The model company is now the services company. (The Next Web)

• Your Work Team Is Now a ‘Pod’ and Your Co-Workers Are AI Agents: Companies are restructuring engineering teams into smaller, more nimble cross-functional ‘pods,’ made up of humans and AI agents. (Wall Street Journal)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

You have to win the workplace before you can win your market

In the rush to avoid falling behind on artificial intelligence, organizations are forgetting the human foundation required to actually deploy it. The disconnect is stark: 88% of employers agree AI requires their workforce to develop new skills, yet four in five prioritize automating routine tasks over investing in people strategies.

Aon calls it a “clear misalignment.” Companies are pushing automation while underinvesting in the people required to align those tools with business goals. The result is a workforce that feels the pressure to adapt but lacks the support to do so.

The financial engineering approach to this problem is failing. When CFOs treat AI adoption as a spreadsheet exercise, the workforce strikes back. Docebo found that 56% of employees are so overwhelmed by manual tasks they do not have time to learn the AI tools intended to save them time. Culture Amp data shows AI tools are actually increasing workloads and driving engagement downward.

The organizations getting this right are the ones treating AI fluency as a leadership mandate, not just an IT rollout. AlphaSense CFO Samantha Greenberg dedicates 10 hours a week to learning AI skills herself, operating as a “player coach” to ensure her finance team understands how to use the technology as a thinking partner rather than just a productivity hack.

The market rewards the companies that get the workplace right first. Organizations with a dual focus on culture and performance experienced a 47% increase in share price, according to Culture Amp. The alternative is the cycle of financial engineering seen at companies like Coinbase, where leadership attempts to force an “AI-native” structure through mass layoffs and flattened org charts. You cannot financially engineer a culture of innovation. If you want to win the market in the AI era, you have to win the workplace first.

Build vs buy, organizational AI version

The fastest path to organizational AI gains is training your existing workforce, but companies are increasingly deciding it is easier to just buy new talent. General Motors recently laid off 600 IT workers, roughly 10% of the department, in a deliberate skills swap.

They are clearing out legacy employees to make room for hires with specific AI-native development and data engineering backgrounds. It is a stark admission that retraining legacy IT staff is proving too slow or too difficult for the pace of the current market.

This “buy over build” strategy is an expensive dilemma to get wrong. Coinbase took a similar approach, cutting 14% of its staff to rebuild around “AI-native pods” and eliminate pure managers. But buying talent is not a silver bullet. Poor engagement and the rapid atrophy of AI skills mean companies will eventually be forced to develop effective training programs regardless of who they hire.

Companies and academia are not equipped to teach these skills because the curriculum development process is too slow. The organizations that figure out how to build “AI builders” internally will have a sustainable advantage over those constantly trying to buy them on the open market.

Quote of the Week:

"Companies buy talent, they don't build it."

— Sam Caucci, founder of 1Huddle

Reading List:

New employees are already dis-engaged by the time they hit their desk

The hiring process has become so opaque and impersonal that candidates are burning out before they even receive an offer. A Monster report found that 60% of job seekers say the most exasperating part of the hunt is not knowing if a human ever looked at their resume. The frustration is driving behavioral changes: 48% of candidates resort to "spray and pray" applications, and 38% of U.S. candidates have withdrawn from a hiring process simply because it included an AI interview. When 54% of workers favor banning applicant tracking systems entirely, the system is actively damaging employer brands before day one.

New “code of conduct” phishing campaigns show concerning effectiveness

Malicious actors are weaponizing workplace anxiety. A new phishing campaign identified by Microsoft uses "code of conduct" violations as bait, targeting 35,000 users across 26 countries in just two days. The emails use genuine delivery services, HIPAA-compliant encryption banners, and polished enterprise templates to create a false sense of urgency. By preying on the fear of HR disciplinary action, attackers are successfully triggering credential harvesting flows, showing that the next generation of cyber threat is as psychological as it is technical.

The pay for performance era arrives

The era of "peanut butter" raises, where every employee receives an equal percentage increase, is ending. Only 4% of U.S. employers are still distributing raises this way, according to Mercer. The shift is being driven by the AI divide in the workplace. While 54% of workers are bypassing their company's AI tools to work manually, a distinct group of AI "super users" has emerged. These super users are three times more likely to have received a promotion and a pay raise in the past year. As the gap between high performers and stragglers widens, companies are realizing that equal treatment is no longer fair treatment.

Data Point:

38%

The percentage of U.S. candidates who have withdrawn from a hiring process because it included an AI interview.

In Other News

• The OpenAI trial is exposing a brutal truth about workplace texts - they’re all in bounds legally. (Business Insider)

• Colorado passes bill outlawing wage setting based on AI surveillance. (HR Dive)

• AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, and ice rinks. (Business Insider)

• No one really wants to speak up at work — especially about AI errors, study shows. (HR Dive)

• A $2 billion tech firm is pausing 401(k) contributions for staff in the latest corporate benefit rollback. (Business Insider)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The job market is becoming a growth issue for businesses

The unemployment rate is low. The stock market is high. Consumer spending is healthy. And yet, unemployment expectations are at levels previously seen only surrounding recessions. The disconnect has a name now: “doomjobbing”. Workers scrolling through infinite listings, submitting applications into automated systems that never respond, slowly internalizing the conclusion that they are unemployable. When enough people believe the economy is broken, they start behaving as if it is.

The corporate side is equally contradictory. Microsoft posted $82.9 billion in quarterly revenue (up 18%) while shrinking headcount and budgeting $900 million for a voluntary retirement program. Its AI business generates $37 billion annually, growing 123%, and capex is expected to exceed $40 billion this quarter. Meta cut headcount by 1% in Q1 and announced further reductions for May. Across the tech sector, Q1 2026 layoffs hit 52,050, a 40% increase over the prior year.

This is how the job market becomes a growth constraint. Companies generating record revenue with fewer people signals efficiency to investors and instability to workers. Workers who feel unstable spend less, apply more desperately, and disengage from their current roles.

Never before has the share of people expecting unemployment been this high without the economy actually being in recession. The risk is that the perception gap closes in the wrong direction: the economy catches down to where people already believe it is.

CHRO importance rising, but HR has its own "K-shaped economy"

The CHRO has never been more strategically important. CHROs in Russell 3000 companies rose from 148 in 2021 to 230 in 2025. Their pay grew 14.7% between 2024 and 2025, 6% higher than all over executives. At S&P 500 firms, the growth was 30.4%. CHROs are attending board meetings, overseeing AI transformation mandates, and the Conference Board’s CHRO Confidence Index just hit a new high of 59.

The K-shape is emerging below the C-suite too. The average HR professional expects to earn $130k+ yet the average salary offered is $90k. That $42,000 gap is larger than the U.S. average across all professions, a particular irony given that HR professionals set salary bands for everyone else.

Meanwhile, no company included a Chief Diversity Officer among its highest-paid executives in 2024 or 2025. The function is bifurcating: the top elevated into the boardroom, the middle squeezed by the same budget pressures HR is supposed to help the rest of the organization navigate.

Quote of the Week: Nice on paper

"Having healthcare benefits you can't afford is like unlimited vacation, it's a false promise."

— Denise Rousseau, Carnegie Mellon University

Reading List:

Workers increasingly ditch company insurance policies as costs surge

The workers that employer health plans depend on to stay solvent are starting to leave. Young, healthy professionals are opting out because they cannot afford the premiums, choosing health-share cooperatives or going without coverage entirely. The share of workers on employer plans has fallen to 61% (from 64% in 2020), and total costs per employee are expected to grow 6.5% in 2026, the highest rate in a decade. Every healthy worker who opts out makes the remaining pool sicker and more expensive.

Starbucks switches to weekly pay to match growing worker need

Starbucks will begin paying employees weekly in August, moving away from the biweekly standard most U.S. employers follow. The decision came directly from employee feedback: "getting paid sooner would help." Hourly wage growth slowed to 0.2% in March, the weakest rate in five years, and nearly one-quarter of U.S. households now spend more than 95% of their earnings on necessities.

Interim leaders in demand as change efforts challenge traditional leaders

Demand for interim C-suite leaders has increased 151% since 2021, according to Heidrick and Struggles. Requests for human capital expertise jumped 129% in the past year alone. HR tops the list of functions seeking interim support, driven by the dual pressure of managing its own transformation while helping the rest of the organization navigate workforce planning and organizational redesign. The pace of change is outstripping the capacity of permanent leadership teams to manage it all simultaneously.

Data Point:

90%

The year on year decline in new job postings as “low fire, low hire” goes to zero hire, high fire.

In Other News

• 67% of high school graduates opting against college cite cost-of-living concerns, poll finds. (Higher Ed Dive)

• KPMG Cutting 10% of U.S. Audit Partners After Voluntary-Retirement Push Falls Short. (Wall Street Journal)

• Total compensation not currently helping engagement much, McLean reports. (HR Dive)

• The uncomfortable truth about AI and the American worker. (Fortune)

• Reed Hastings says AI will drive a return to humanities: ‘I’d be doubling down on emotional skills’. (Fortune)

• Amazon pushes AI use and closely tracks adoption, as some employees push back. (Business Insider)

• AI literacy is popular at the DOL: The agency is bolstering efforts to ready the US workforce for the age of AI. (HR Brew)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Overspending on tech and underspending on talent

As organizational leaders, the job of managing organizational capacity is getting things done with whatever the right mix of capital, talent, and tech looks like. Yet the current mix is being badly imbalanced. Ne KPMG data shows executives are now twice as likely to invest in new technology as in training employees.

While 57% of execs say improving performance and efficiency is a top priority, fewer than 10% say developing workforce training is. The predictable result: 53% of employers say finding the right AI skills is their main talent challenge, and only 14% of graduates report high proficiency applying AI tools professionally.

The organizations avoiding this trap treat AI as a literacy requirement, not a software deployment. Walmart is training all 2.1 million employees on agentic AI tools, from its 35,000-person tech team to front-of-house greeters. The approach is explicitly “people-led, tech powered,” focused on removing friction from daily workflows to create more time for customer-centered work. Same headcount as six years ago, significantly higher revenue, no role displacement.

The alternative is false promises and reactive cuts. Bank of America’s CEO told employees they did not have to worry about AI replacing jobs, then cut 1,000 roles four months later. How engaged or secure do you think those remaining employees will feel?

• Read more: Why are workers so worried about AI? Listen to how business leaders talk about it. (CNBC)

As KPMG’s Atif Zaim notes, new tools alone do not drive performance. Organizations are cutting support exactly when their people need it most. As Korn Ferry’s Emilie Petrone warns, firms cutting HR budgets now may have to double down in two or three years because they skipped the heavy lifting on the people side of AI.

Deloitte cuts benefits as corporate commitment to employees wanes

Big Tech led the way in astonishing employee perks, and now they are leading the way in rolling them back. Consulting is the next domino. Deloitte plans to cut parental leave from 16 weeks to eight, reduce PTO by up to 10 days, and eliminate a $50,000 adoption and surrogacy benefit for its “center” talent model (IT, finance, admin).

The changes take effect in 2027 as AI and hiring cutbacks have quietly prompted the largest reduction in HR budgets in years with just 29% of CFOs plan to invest more in HR, making it the division least likely to see a budget increase.

It’s not hard to imagine the type of backlash this generated, for the businesses that read this newsletter though, this type of discourse can be a pro or a con for employee engagement.

Big companies pulling the rug on promises can allow you to look really good in comparison and can be an engagement-boosting moment if used to clarify how you support your people. Alternatively, if it goes un-addressed since it’s “not relevant to you,” headlines like these leech engagement from employees increasingly pre-disposed to distrust.

Quote of the Week:

"Another shift in today's job market is how many roles are filled before they are widely advertised. In many sectors, more than half of hires occur without a traditional public job posting."

— Andrew Hudson, Colorado Sun

Reading List:

Employees are bringing money problems to work

The average 401(k) balance hit a record $167,970 last year, but hardship withdrawal rates also reached a record 6%, as more participants tapped retirement accounts to avoid eviction or cover medical expenses. The uptick is partly driven by the SECURE 2.0 Act making early withdrawals easier and automatic enrollment bringing more lower-compensated workers into plans.

The next battlefront in AI worker woes - who owns the data

The line between employee skills and company property is blurring. A viral GitHub project that claims to clone workers into a reusable AI skill is forcing workers to confront the reality that their companies might own digital doubles. Fights over this such data are already occurring in the U.S. where suing companies over employee data uses is touted as “more effective than unionizing” according to an HCI analysis of over 100 viral TikTok’s about the subject. Except this fight to grow across more organizations as the roughly 50% of employees which dislike AI to push back harder.

The three types of leadership loneliness

80% of CEOs say they have experienced loneliness in their tenure. According to HEC Montreal’s CEO institute, this isolation rarely stems from a lack of connection. It is driven by "surface acting," projecting confidence that contradicts inner beliefs, and the structural reality of being the only person with a complete view of the company's data. When performance sags, it threatens the CEO's identity, creating a doom spiral where isolation degrades communication, which degrades performance further.

Data Point:

-8.3%

The change in HR budget growth this year, down from 9% in 2025, making HR the corporate division least likely to see a budget increase according to Korn Ferry

In Other News

• Organizations and employees want different things from leaders, study finds. (HR Dive)

• Execs fear job loss over AI adoption failures. (CIO Dive)

• America’s ‘silent army’ of skilled tradespeople are retiring with no one to replace them—and the price tag could hit $1 trillion a year. (Fortune)

• Recent grads are settling for jobs they plan to leave, says ZipRecruiter. (HR Dive)

• Emerging Liability for AI-Driven Hiring Tools: Key Developments in Mobley v. Workday, Inc. (Maynard Nexsen)

• Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. (The Verge)

• OpenAI is working with consultants to sell codex in a revision of the SAP model for AI. (Wall Street Journal)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

AI is now a frontline issue for most businesses. Here are the best practices for adoption.

American executives are all in on AI as the future of work…in Mark Zuckerberg’s case a bit too much (readers, please don’t create an AI avatar of yourself to manage employees). Despite AI’s return on investment lagging the promise, 92% of executives say AI makes them more productive.

Outside of the C-Suite, people are less convinced. 40% of non-managers say it saves them no time at all and around half of individual contributors are actively opposed. That gap has become a management crisis. Four in ten executives are boosting AI spending this year, making it their top strategic response to global disruption.

Meanwhile, 80% of enterprise workers are avoiding or rejecting the tools being deployed, 29% admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, and a new phenomenon called “workslop,” AI-generated output so flawed it creates more work than it saves, is costing organizations an estimated $8.1 million per 10,000 employees.

The generational fault lines are widening it. Among Gen Z workers, 44% have sabotaged their company’s AI rollout in some way, driven by fear of job loss and frustration that the technology diminishes their value. Their anxiety is not unfounded: 60% of C-suite executives say they plan to lay off employees who cannot or will not use AI.

The organizations breaking through share three common practices.

1. Leadership clarity: Intuit overcame its engineering holdouts by setting transparent expectations, modeling AI use at the executive level, and creating listening posts to surface concerns.

2. Manager support: Gallup data shows employees whose managers actively champion AI are nearly twice as likely to use it frequently.

3. Protected time to build judgment: Infosys begins reskilling its 300,000 employees by banning AI tools for the first months of training, ensuring workers develop foundational thinking before the technology accelerates it.

Leadership for the speed of today’s challenges

Ask former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney to draw a high-performing team and he will not draw a pyramid. He will draw a blob. In his dynamic subordination model of leadership, the person closest to the problem and most competent steps up and leads. The leader is wherever the leader needs to be.

This is becoming a structural necessity as AI compresses five-year goals into six-month sprints. Gusto CEO Josh Reeves is building autonomous agents that will soon file taxes and set up retirement accounts for small businesses. Managing that velocity requires teams that move like special operations units, a point echoed by Jamie Dimon in his recent shareholder letter.

The new contours of leadership require understanding the attributes of your people, adaptability, persistence, judgment, and putting the right person at the wheel when the terrain demands it.

Quote of the Week:

The way CEOs are using AI today follows a clear pattern. Most rely on it for familiar, tactical tasks like research, summarizing information, writing, and day-to-day communication. Far fewer leaders are tapping AI as a strategic partner.

— Joe Galvin, Chief Research Officer of Vistage

Reading List:

Five ways to bridge the CEO trust gap

Every internal message about AI making work better lands next to a layoff headline - in turn trust is eroding faster than most CEOs realize. The ones closing the gap practice open-book management, share strategy in plain language, own mistakes directly, and ensure decisions align with stated values. Flexibility and purpose have to be core principles, not situational leverage.

The reason why your productivity changes so much day-to-day

The difference between your best day and your worst is 80 minutes of productive work, according to a new University of Toronto study. On sharp days, people complete more goals and aim higher. Pushing through long hours yields short-term gains, but extended overwork degrades the cognitive clarity required for performing well tomorrow too.

How to create a culture of learning

Three-quarters of organizations say they lack the staff and time to build a learning culture. The ones that succeed are not finding more time. They are protecting it: dedicated learning hours (median of 40 per year), public recognition for skill development, and structured mentorship. As skills evolve faster than training cycles can accommodate, making learning digestible and culturally celebrated is becoming a critical retention strategy.

Data Point:

76%

The number of CEOs who report regularly using generative AI, according to a recent Vistage study (a 10% increase in just nine months). Yet most remain on the sidelines when it comes to actually embedding it into how they lead and run their organizations

In Other News

• Why More People Are Dropping Out of the Job Market. (Wall Street Journal)

• US workers increasingly trapped in the ‘Great Detachment’ as hiring slows, report shows. (Fox Business)

• US workers are quitting at the lowest level in a decade. (HR Dive)

• Nearly half of American households have no retirement savings: In 2022, 46% of households reported retirement savings, with 26% above $100K and 9% over $500K. (USA Facts)

• AI may threaten critical thinking in the workplace. (HR Dive)

• You’re looking at the AI revolution all wrong, top economist says: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week are the same thing. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The value of clarity and empathy are surging

The premium on basic human connection is rising exactly as fast as the technology meant to replace it. While leaders obsess over AI integration, Gallup’s latest data shows that the workforce is quietly checking out.

There are 3.2 million fewer engaged workers today than there were in 2023. The root cause is a profound sense of disconnection. In 2020, 54% of Millennial and Gen-Z employees felt someone cared about them at work. Today, that number is 41%. The organizations winning right now are the ones treating empathy as a hard operational requirement.

The mechanism for delivering that empathy is what researchers call attunement. A new study by found that leaders who practice four specific skills (flexibility, reading nonverbal cues, self-regulation, and collaboration) see measurable jumps in team cohesion and psychological safety.

Flexibility means asking what a team needs rather than assuming. Reading cues means paying attention to the silence on a Zoom call. Self-regulation means managing your own stress so you do not transfer it to your direct reports.

But empathy without clarity is just sympathy. When performance criteria are vague, trust erodes and stress spikes. McLean & Co found that employees who clearly understand their job expectations are 8.6 times more likely to be engaged.

Organizations that fail to provide this clarity see voluntary turnover rates 40% higher than those that do. The mandate for HR and senior leadership is clear: before you ask your teams to adapt to the next technological shift, you have to ensure they actually understand how they are being measured today.

Younger employees are sabotaging AI adoption efforts

The biggest threat to your technology strategy is coming from the demographic you assumed would champion it. A new report from Writer and Workplace Intelligence found that 29% of knowledge workers admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI rollout.

Among Gen Z workers, the number jumps to 44%. The sabotage is not subtle. Employees are entering proprietary information into public AI tools, refusing to use approved platforms, tampering with performance reviews, and intentionally generating low-quality work to make the technology look bad.

They are doing this because they are terrified. Nearly a third of those sabotaging the tools cited fear that AI would take their jobs. But the resistance is a strategic error. Sixty percent of executives say they are considering cutting employees who refuse to adopt AI, and 77% say those who refuse to become proficient will not be considered for promotions.

The divide is already showing up in the data: AI “super-users” are three times more likely to have received a promotion and pay raise in the past year. The challenge for leaders is not buying better tools. It is convincing a fearful workforce that using the tools is the only way to stay employed.

Quote of the Week:

"The leaders who are putting in the work to radically redesign operations with human-agent collaboration at the center are the ones compounding their advantage in ways competitors can't replicate."

— May Habib, CEO of Writer

Reading List:

Macro fears lead small business to cut back on hiring

The latest U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index shows a sharp decline in optimism on the economy, investment, and hiring. While 69% of small business owners rate their own business as being in good health, only 28% say the U.S. economy is in good health. Consequently, just 30% expect to increase staff in the year ahead, a 12-point drop from the previous quarter. Inflation remains the top concern for the 17th consecutive quarter.

Middle management is undergoing an identity shift

Large companies are redefining middle management roles and handing off work to AI. Large companies are shifting from manager titles to “org leads” and “player-coaches" who build alongside their teams. Employers advertised 12.3% fewer middle-manager jobs in 2025 than in 2024. While fully offloading management to AI is impractical, the shift toward smaller, cross-functional teams with AI support is accelerating.

Companies increasingly turn to “in office trials” in interviews

Hiring managers increasingly are expecting candidates to show their live work. Companies are using work trials, job simulations, and live tests to evaluate candidates. Startups like Rounds use AI agents to conduct technical simulations, while others pay candidates to work in the office for a few days. The goal is to see how candidates think, adapt, and use AI tools to accelerate their work.

Data Point

In Other News

• Why More People Are Dropping Out of the Job Market. (Wall Street Journal)

• US workers increasingly trapped in the ‘Great Detachment’ as hiring slows, report shows. (Fox Business)

• US workers are quitting at the lowest level in a decade. (HR Dive)

• Nearly half of American households have no retirement savings: In 2022, 46% of households reported retirement savings, with 26% above $100K and 9% over $500K. (USA Facts)

• AI may threaten critical thinking in the workplace. (HR Dive)

• You’re looking at the AI revolution all wrong, top economist says: 40% unemployment and a 3-day work week are the same thing. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

The "Return to Human" Begins

Remember the “Return to Office”? The fight is still ongoing for many, after companies spent years optimizing for remote efficiency, then realized the isolation was hollowing out their cultures and dragged everyone back. We are watching the same correction play out with AI, only broader and more consequential.

AI has made good-enough work available to everyone. A polished cover letter, a competent brief, a passable customer interaction: these used to separate the serious from the unserious. Now they are table stakes. Seventy-five percent of senior HR leaders report a steep rise in AI-generated applications, and more than 40% have extended probation periods because they can no longer tell who is actually capable before the person starts working.

Beyond process, talent quality itself has dipped. When AI handles the messy, frustrating early-career work that builds real expertise, people look competent without becoming competent.

A software consultant with 25 years of experience let AI build his product for three months, then found he could not write code confidently when he took the wheel back. “My swing was off,” he said.

Multiply that across an entire generation of workers who never build the baseline, and you have a workforce that performs well on paper and breaks under pressure.

In response, companies are beginning to push back. L’Oreal has made interviews an “AI-free zone,” requiring every candidate to sit face-to-face with a trained recruiter. Dave & Buster’s is pouring investment into human service standards because its CEO recognizes that the guest experience can never exceed the team member experience.

We believe that the trickle of anecdotes will become a new best practice as companies realize that where not to use AI is a more important decision than where you can.

CEOs Increasingly Feel Threatened by Their CFOs

Roughly one quarter of CEOs surveyed (26%) ranked CFOs as the top job security risk within their own C-suites, followed closely by COOs (24%) and chief commercial officers (20%), according to Boston Consulting Group’s CEO Insomnia Index.

The perceived vulnerability is structural: finance chiefs regularly brief the board on financial performance, forecasts and capital allocation, positioning them as the CEO’s natural heir apparent in ways that other C-suite roles simply do not.

The anxiety has a basis in recent data. CFO to CEO promotions reached their highest level in a decade last year, with more than 10% of sitting CEOs coming directly from a top finance seat, up from 7% in 2024 according to Crist Kolder Associates.

Quote of the Week: Scary to everyone but the CEO

“AI is not yet a primary source of day-to-day pressure for many CEOs. 84% report feeling more energized than stressed by the need to innovate. The stress is coming from inside the house."

— BCG CEO Insomnia Index, April 2026

Reading List:

Manager workloads double

The average American manager now oversees 12 direct reports, nearly double what Gallup tracked in 2013, as AI-enabled cost-cutting guts middle management ranks. Some big companies taken the logic to its extreme with 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratios. The human ledger is looking considerably worse than the balance sheet with these moves: 75% of HR leaders say managers are already overwhelmed, and 69% say they lack the skills to lead change effectively even before full AI integration takes hold.

Workers don’t know how to use AI

Forrester measured employee understanding of AI tools and found the results "alarming." Prompt engineering comprehension, integral to tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, increased by only 4% from 2024 to 2025. Meanwhile, 96% of C-suite leaders expected AI to increase output while 77% of employees say AI tools actually increased their workload. Companies bought the tools and skipped the change management.

Decision-making by consensus increasingly doesn't work

The speed of AI-driven change has outpaced the consensus model. HBR argues that the companies surviving the next decade will be those courageous enough to establish clear decision rights rather than democratic processes. The organizations winning are not those with the best algorithms or the most data. They are the ones that have fixed how decisions get made.

In Other News

• America’s gig economy - Self-employment, at both the high and the low end, is keeping consumption afloat — but for how long? (Financial Times)

• New graduates say they would sacrifice pay for job stability. (HR Dive)

• The sneaky truth about the wave of AI layoffs: Tech companies are axing full-time roles. They’re hiring some back as contractors. (Business Insider)

• Oracle cutting thousands in latest layoff round as company continues to ramp AI spending. (CNBC)

• Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha think AI can make middle management obsolete. (Fortune)

• Trump Team Scraps College Degrees for Hundreds of Federal Jobs. (Bloomberg)

• Jensen Huang just painted the most bold image of AI’s future: 7.5 million agents, 75,000 humans—100 AI workers for every person. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

How to Lead Through Fear

Your employees are terrified. The data is unambiguous: for the first time, more U.S. workers are struggling than thriving, according to Gallup’s Q4 2025 survey. Worker engagement is at a decade low, and just 28% of workers say now is a good time to find a quality job, down from 70% in mid-2022. Globally, only 22% of workers feel their job is safe from elimination, per ADP’s survey of 39,000 workers. The workforce is restless but stuck, a combination that creates quiet deterioration.

• An example: 30-year-old CEO of $11 billion Harvey earned the backing of OpenAI and Sam Altman. He says you have to ‘re-earn’ your role every 6 months. (Fortune)

When workers cannot leave, discontent accumulates. The most engaged employees leave first. The ones who stay are increasingly those who feel they have no choice. Gallup finds that workers who are not thriving miss 53% more days due to health problems and are 32% more likely to be actively job seeking.

Leaders who treat this fear as information will win. It is a signal about clarity and fairness. The data shows that workers who feel secure are more productive and engaged. Creating that security, where warranted, costs almost nothing. Communicating it clearly costs even less. The organizations that do this well will find themselves with a captive audience that is actually paying attention.

Protecting your top performers

In an environment of widespread cost-cutting, leaders think they are protecting their top performers. The data shows the opposite is happening. The employees who drive the most value are the most exposed when development budgets are slashed, a mistake that costs organizations a 36% drag on share price growth over two years.

The mechanism is simple: top performers are the first to feel the loss of growth opportunities and the most likely to burn out from new administrative burdens. Protecting them is not about retention bonuses; it is about protecting the conditions under which they do their best work.

Quote of the Week: Work itself is changing

"57% of U.S. work hours are now automatable using technology that already exists today. Two years ago, that number was 30%. The gap is no longer about technology. It's about knowing where and how to start."

—McKinsey Global Institute, November 2025

Reading List:

White collar employees increasingly getting pay cuts

Among white-collar workers who changed jobs at the end of last year, 40% took salary cuts of more than 10%, the highest share in a decade, per Revelio Labs. With long-term unemployment nearly doubling in three years, employers are requiring more experience for open roles. For workers who accept a pay cut, the consequences compound, as future raises and offers are anchored to a lower base.

Performance reviews are shifting from awkward ritual to continuous conversation

Deloitte eliminated annual appraisals a decade ago, saving two million hours annually. Yet a Gallup poll finds 56% of employees still get a formal review once a year or less, and only 2% of CHROs say their systems work. The gap between research and reality is a change management problem, and it is costing organizations the engagement of their best people.

Why are we so relieved when meetings cancel?

A Rutgers University study finds that unexpectedly gaining time alters our perception of how that time passes, leading people to choose longer, more ambitious activities. The finding has a practical implication for leaders: over-scheduled teams are less capable of the deep, intentional work that moves the needle. Looks like the humble calendar is actually a leadership tool.

Data Point:

22%

The number of US employees that feel safe from layoffs, lower than Egypt, Nigeria, and most of the developing world according to an ADP survey of 39,000 workers across 36 markets.

In Other News

• Toxic managers dehumanize employees, leading to extreme burnout. (HR Dive)

• JPMorgan monitoring keystrokes and video calls of junior bankers. (Fortune)

• Leaders report a ‘growing gap’ between what’s expected of them and the support they receive. (HR Dive)

• How compensation teams can become strategic finance partners. (HR Dive)

• Highly skilled workers have been training AI — that comes at a cost. (Financial Times)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Accountability Is Leadership's Greatest Weakness

There is a 20-point gap between how leaders rate their own ability to create accountability and how their managers rate them. That is a performance problem. A recent Gallup study of seven core leadership competencies found that “create accountability” was the lowest-rated skill for both leaders and managers—and the one with the largest gap between leaders’ self-perception and the reality their teams experience.

This is the quiet crisis of accountability in most organizations, and it can only be addressed top. Beyond the implications for execution, this accountability gap is a primary driver of disengagement. Gallup finds that managers who believe their leaders are accountable are three times more likely to be engaged at work. The mechanism is simple: accountability drives clarity. When leaders fail to set clear expectations and hold the organization to them, the most common result is a quiet drift.

The takeaway is that accountability is a design choice. It is built into the systems that connect what you say matters to what you actually measure. It is reinforced in the weekly one-on-one, not just the annual review. And it starts with closing that 20-point gap by asking your own leadership team what they see, and really listening.

Your talent development budget’s been slashed. Now what?

AI budgets are soaring while talent development budgets are shrinking across the middle market. On paper, this promises efficiency, scalability, and a clear path to future-proofing the business. Investing in people, by contrast, can feel like a softer, less measurable bet.

The paradox is that the more powerful AI becomes, the more critical human skills like judgment, collaboration, and adaptability are to realizing its value. AI can automate tasks, but it cannot build trust, navigate ambiguity, or lead a team through change.

When organizations cut training, coaching, and leadership development, they are not just trimming a budget line; they are hollowing out the very capabilities they need to make their AI investments pay off. The result is a workforce that is stressed, disengaged, and unprepared to manage the complexity that AI introduces.

Quote of the Week: Valid or not, why broadcast this?

"The best leaders don't just hold their people accountable. They hold themselves accountable for their people's success."

—Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, Gallup

Reading List:

Why leaders lose the room in high-stakes meetings

Most advice on leadership communication focuses on presentation skills. But the most consequential communication happens in meetings where tough issues are being discussed. An MIT Sloan analysis finds that under pressure, leaders tend to lean too hard on their natural thinking process, inadvertently making it harder for the audience to follow, contribute, and align. The key is not to change your style, but to recognize how your style is experienced by others and build in safeguards to protect shared understanding.

Women are avoiding the technology that threatens them most

The jobs women hold are three times more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average. This is not a competence gap; it is a confidence and trust gap. A Fortune analysis warns that if this trend continues, we are at risk of creating a two-tiered AI economy, where one group reaps the benefits of augmentation while the other is left behind. The solution is not to push for blind adoption, but to address the underlying issues of bias, psychological safety, and equitable design.

Why talent lifecycle alignment quietly breaks after hiring

Organizations have invested heavily in improving hiring accuracy. Yet for many, the talent lifecycle quietly breaks down in the first year. A Talent Culture analysis argues the issue is rarely flawed hiring science. It is a measurement gap between what organizations hire for and what they reward. When performance evaluation systems reward different signals than those used during selection, the accuracy of hiring science stops mattering. This is a governance issue, not just an HR program.

Data Point: “Performance” reviews

14%

Number of employees that strongly agree performance reviews they receive inspire them to improve.

In Other News

• Toxic managers dehumanize employees, leading to extreme burnout. (HR Dive)

• JPMorgan monitoring keystrokes and video calls of junior bankers. (Fortune)

• Leaders report a ‘growing gap’ between what’s expected of them and the support they receive. (HR Dive)

• How compensation teams can become strategic finance partners. (HR Dive)

• Highly skilled workers have been training AI — that comes at a cost. (Financial Times)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Intelligence offers keys to win in an accelerating world

The world is moving faster than ever, but most companies…aren't. The rise of AI, shifting market structures, and a flood of information create a fog of uncertainty that leaves many leaders paralyzed. Winners in this new environment are those with the clearest and most compressed ‘informational supply chain.’ Accurate and complete information, delivered faster, means decision makers can avoid noise and act decisively while competitors are still trying to figure out what’s going on.

In most companies, intelligence is scattered. Market research lives in marketing, competitive analysis in strategy, and financial forecasting in finance. Each function provides a partial view, but nobody owns the full picture. This leads to rework, thin accountability, and a chronic inability to see the whole board. A true intelligence capability centralizes this function, giving leaders a single, unvarnished view of the competitive landscape.

Building this capability is a leadership imperative. It requires a relentless focus on what matters, a willingness to challenge your own assumptions, and the courage to make bets with incomplete information. The alternative is to watch from the sidelines as others build the future.

The key to making AI work? ‘Old school’ leadership

The hardest part of AI adoption isn’t the technology; it’s the people. The tools are here and they work (some better than others, granted). The bottleneck is the messy, human work of getting your team to actually use them. The companies that are seeing real ROI have better managers, not better models. They understand that AI adoption is a change management problem, not a technology problem.

This isn’t about hype or cash prizes for “innovation.” It’s about the unglamorous, day-to-day work of leadership: setting clear expectations, providing the right training, and holding people accountable. It’s the reason Accenture’s CEO has made AI skills required for promotion. It’s what Gartner is getting at when they say managers, not HR, are the key to company-wide adoption. And it’s about recognizing that employee resistance isn’t irrational; it’s a predictable response to a poorly managed change process.

Quote of the Week: Valid or not, why broadcast this?

“Part of working hard is sending emails to the team on a Saturday. And if I don’t get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark. What’s going on?”

—Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber

Reading List:

Employees and executives drift further apart on AI

The disconnect between the C-suite and the rest of the organization on AI is getting wider. A recent survey found that while 86% of executives believe AI use is mandatory, only 49% of middle managers agree. The C-suite is selling a vision of AI as a transformative teammate, while employees are experiencing it as a helpful but limited tool. The result is a stalemate. The companies that have narrowed the gap find that empowered managers are key to translate C-suite vision into day-to-day reality.

Most companies lack real plans for change communications

61% of companies have no formal approach to change communication, according to a recent Gallagher survey. During ongoing disruption, communicating change effectively is a core competency. Without it, every new initiative is dead on arrival. The fact that most companies have six or fewer people in a communications role, regardless of size, shows how undervalued this function is. If you don’t have a real plan for communicating change, you don’t have a real plan for executing it.

Ask not what your COO can do for you…

The COO is no longer just an operator; they are the CEO’s strategic partner in execution. As CEOs spend more time focused externally, the COO is the one who has to translate vision into reality. Yet the COO’s success increasingly depends on their ability to build strong relationships with their C-suite peers more than abstract “operational excellence”. They are the connective tissue of the organization, but if they lack the time and space to “grab a beer” across the organization, they can quickly go from effective partner to inefficient enforcer.

Data Point: Mandatory to use, option to learn?

35%

Number of businesses that report having data and AI upskilling programs available to all of their employees.

In Other News

• Mastercard bots target C-suite roles: Card giant offers SMEs a virtual chief financial officer through artificial intelligence technology, with other C-suite roles to follow. (Computer Weekly)

• Workers who are receptive to ‘corporate BS’ may struggle with analytical thinking. (HR Dive)

• How AI Is Accelerating Skills-Based Hiring and Upskilling. (Talent Culture)

  US companies say they plan to accelerate global hiring despite hurdles. (HR Dive)

• Shadow AI rises as leaders choose speed over governance. (CIO Dive)

• AI Job Loss Is Breaking the Psyche of Workers, Psychiatrist Warns. (Futurism)

• Washington state wants to keep employers from microchipping workers, before anyone even gets the idea. (Fortune)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

What skills does the modern workflows actually need?

An important note for hiring managers - there is not really as an “AI skill.” The rush to find people with this discrete, magical new competency misunderstand both the tech and the skills that can make it work. The ability to effectively use and even build generative AI tools are the same ones that have always mattered, just magnified: clarity of thought, precision of language, curiosity, and the bravery to change yourself. These are human skills. A-players already have them. The challenge isn’t finding new people; it’s supporting your people as they learn to apply their existing talents to a new class of tools.

The ManpowerGroup report that found “AI skills” are the hardest to find is better understood as a shortage of adaptability, not a shortage of coders. This is not just a philosophical point; it’s a practical one with huge ROI implications. A recent DataCamp report found that organizations with mature data and AI upskilling programs see double the return on their AI investments. That return isn’t coming from hiring a few expensive prompt engineers. It’s coming from a workforce that is empowered to think critically and experiment.

Look at Walmart. They are training 1.6 million employees not to become AI experts, but to use AI to be better at their jobs. The CEO takeaway is this: stop chasing a mythical beast. Your best people already have what it takes. Your job is to give them the tools, the permission, and the support to amplify their innate curiosity and judgment. The bottleneck isn’t talent; it’s a failure of leadership to trust the people you already have.

Managing change and attention budgets as real resources

The current volume of change organizations are facing is spurring a lot of calls to change everything—key functions, org charts, training. But the “budget” of leaders and employees for change and the intentional work it requires is being tapped out. Every new tool, process, or pivot draws down from a finite organizational capacity for change, and that budget is now deep in the red.

This a leadership mandate masquerading as a tech problem. The shift to new operating models isn’t free; it consumes a finite budget of attention and energy. That requires deep, disruptive change that consumes the very attention your team needs to do their actual jobs.

If you treat your team’s attention and their capacity to adapt as free and infinite resources, you will burn them out and your most important initiatives will fail. You have to budget for change as you budget capital. It’s a real asset, and it’s nearly depleted.

Quote of the Week: Failure as an absence of effort

"The worst thing is not to take a decision, because then nothing happens.”

Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of Hitachi Energy, on why he pays his team to make decisions, not to wait for permission.

Reading List:

A HCI foray into parenting advice

Advice on dealing with kids is like managing with higher stakes and lower pay, which is why we normally avoid the subject. But a WSJ piece on how tech execs are raising their kids shows how much today’s kids won’t be educated by curriculums or schools. From leaders at Anthropic to Microsoft to Wharton, parents “in the know” are taking control of their education and emphasizing empathy, adaptability, critical thinking, and the ability to be in rooms with other humans (not GenZ/A’s natural strong-suits) as technical skills become table stakes.

Don’t plug legally questionable things into ChatGPT

If you or your team are plugging confidential information into a public AI, you’re committing malpractice. A federal court just made it clear in U.S. v. Heppner: your conversations with AI are not confidential. A CEO used Claude to research his own fraud case, and the court ruled those chats were not privileged and were fully discoverable. While a silly example, multiple studies have found that executives are the most likely group in organizations to break AI policies. Consider every AI prompt as if it will be read aloud in a deposition, because it just might.

Workplace gossip has an unappreciated upside

Your team is probably gossiping, and it might be holding them together. New research in the Journal of Business Ethics found that while employees avoid their boss after gossiping, they also report a greater sense of belonging and collaboration with their peers. This informal channel can be a powerful, if risky, tool for building team cohesion. The challenge is to foster an environment of psychological safety where the energy spent on negative gossip can be channeled into open, constructive feedback. If your team is gossiping, it's a signal they don't feel safe talking to you.

Data Point: An indicator of financial stress

6%

The share of workers in 401(k) plans who took a hardship withdrawal in 2025—a record and from 4.8% in 2024.

In Other News

• RIP résumés: Slop is killing the résumé. Job hunters are scrambling for new ways to stand out. (Business Insider)

• Why pay-for-performance programs don’t always work. (HR Dive)

• Women Show Stronger Employee Engagement Amid Higher Burnout. (Gallup)

• Australian state to give legal right to work from home 2 days a week. (Financial Times)

• What if AI just makes us work harder? Employees have reported increased momentum, but also a feeling of having more to do. (Financial Times)

• Frictionless AI comes at a human cost to learning, growth and connection. (AAAS)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

We’re talking about AI…because work is now tools + people

Many of our readers are in the middle market, where AI is an idea, a promise, or a nuisance more than a reality. And yet… the most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it. That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it.

A new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that argument to its actual conclusion, and what it finds that AI supercharges the intensity of work, rather than reducing it.

In companies with strong AI adoption, nobody was told to hit new targets, people just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

The CEO takeaway: your best people are at the highest risk. The research shows that the first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most. The productivity gains are real, but the company captures them, not the employee, breeding resentment.

This a utilization problem. You’re burning out your most valuable asset—human judgment—on low-value review tasks. The companies that get this right will not be the ones with the most tools. They will be the ones that figured out how to make people and tools work together without burning both out.

Critical markets are rapidly breaking down, that’s a leadership problem

We hate saying things that make it feel like there’s more on the to do list. But in this case, three markets that every business depends on are deteriorating at the same time. Digital attention costs are soaring as platform saturation drives down engagement and drives up CPM.

Cost-per-hire climbed sharply in 2025 despite 1.8 million Americans searching for jobs for over 6 months and AI-d applications flood job platforms. Meanwhile, 74% of employers now call pharmacy costs unsustainable, with GLP-1 drugs alone reshaping benefits strategy from an HR decision into a board-level conversation.

Treating these as separate functional problems—a marketing problem, an HR problem, a finance problem—is the mistake. The rising costs and declining effectiveness across these domains demand a unified strategic response. The CEO takeaway: every dollar spent on employee retention is also a marketing dollar.

Every decision about benefits is also a decision about your cost of talent acquisition. Leaders who continue to manage these in silos are being be picked apart by converging crises, while those who see the connections and make the trade-offs will build a structural advantage their competitors won’t understand, and can’t, replicate.

Quote of the Week: Low hire, low dynamism

“The fact that it is low-hire, low-fire is actually not a great state to be in. The churn is important to the productivity growth.

You want to see the most talented go to the places where that talent is the most rewarded. And if we are in this really stable period, that means that talent is not being repositioned to its best use.”

— Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP

Reading List:

CFO turnover reaches new high as flux extends across the C-Suite

CFO turnover hit a seven-year high last year, with one in nine CEOs at top public companies also being replaced. The churn is being driven by a combination of burnout, heavier workloads, and the need for a different kind of leader in a rapidly changing world. Boards are more impatient, and the playbooks of the past no longer apply. The new class of leaders is younger and less experienced, a sign that companies are prioritizing adaptability over tenure. The message is clear: the C-suite is in flux, and the pressure to perform has never been higher.

A white-collar labor shortage is quietly brewing

Headlines are sending high schoolers away from college on mass, with computer science enrollment plummeting and 60% of Gen Z reportedly pursuing skilled trade work. As white-collar workers contemplate a future where their skills are devalued, many are looking to trades that can’t be automated. This migration is overdue but could potentially create gaps in some area of white collar talent like finance and data analysis.

Nobody is prepared for retirement, here’s how to make that work for you

Americans aren’t ready for retirement. The average person thinks they need $2.1 million to retire comfortably, but 62% have less than $150,000 saved. As Gen X, the first generation primarily dependent on 401(k)s, begins to retire, the crisis will only get “harder and nastier.” For employers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. With so many people unprepared for retirement, there is a growing pool of experienced workers who are willing and able to keep working.

Data Point: HR turns to AI

82%

The percentage of HR leaders who say they’re comfortable using AI to perform some parts of their jobs, according to the Hartford Business Journal.

In Other News

• Why the Smartest Leaders Respond to Crisis By Saying Less. (Entrepreneur)

• JPMorgan analysis finds Trump’s tariffs are working on China—at a huge cost to American small business. (Fortune)

• People Trust Websites More When They Know a Human Is on Standby. (Wall Street Journal)

• What CEOs Mean When They Say Leading Is Complex. (WSJ/Mercer)

• The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. (Fortune)

• SHRM: Demand for HR workers is down amid AI adoption. (HR Dive)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Leadership lessons from software: What got you here won’t get you there

The recent software industry meltdown offers an important lesson for today’s leaders. For anyone not familiar (after watching their 401ks drop) the stock market has wiped billions of value off after Claude maker Anthropic released a tool that can automate coding tasks like cloning the entire salesforce platform.

But the real story isn’t about software. It’s about what happens when the advantages you’ve spent decades building start rapidly eroding. Companies that built empires on recurring revenue watched their value proposition evaporate in a single trading session.

This is the new reality across industries, including in middle market businesses that you’d never suspect are being disrupted by AI and the broader pace of general change alike. The skills that made you successful, the business models that seemed unassailable, the competitive advantages you’ve cultivated can become liabilities faster than your planning cycle.

The companies surviving this transition aren’t the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones willing to abandon what worked yesterday. Leaders who wait for clarity before acting will find themselves managing decline rather than growth. Your next competitor isn’t improving on your model…they’re making it irrelevant.

Trust and skills are the growth engine leaders keep stalling

The gap between employer optimism and employee reality is offering a map to how growth plans are break down. While 96% of employers forecast growth in 2026, only 51% of workers agree. The disconnect is more about investment priorities than anything ephemeral. Companies historically reinvest productivity gains into more technology rather than the people who must use it, then wonder why workers don’t share their confidence.

High performers offer a lesson of how to approach this differently. They convert saved time into strategic capital for upskilling, collaboration, and judgment work, achieving double the ROI as a result. The pattern repeats in reorganizations: 88% of leaders believe their new structure will succeed, but only 36% of employees agree because only 22% receive adequate support to adapt.

Leaders overemphasize design while underinvesting in the transition itself. This isn’t a communication gap. It’s a trust deficit created by resource allocation choices that tell employees they’re secondary to the technology meant to help them.

Quote of the Week: Change is the beginning, not the end

"The announcement of a redesign isn't the finish line, it's the starting gun. Leaders who plan for how people will actually work in the new model, and who support them through that transition, are the ones who unlock results others never reach."

— Tracy Thurkow, partner at Bain & Co.

Reading List:

Gen Z’s “admin nights” reveal what’s missing at work

Finally a positive story about Gen Z! The FT reports how 20 somethings are turning tedious logistics tasks into social events, gathering with friends to collectively tackle bills and budgets. The trend works because of “body doubling,” where shared accountability makes hard tasks easier. But the deeper insight is what it reveals about work: people crave connection around difficult challenges, not just efficiency. Mixed-age groups add life experience that transforms admin into mentorship. When someone says the best part was “knowing I’m not alone,” they’re describing what’s absent in most workplace transformation efforts.

Deloitte's job title overhaul signals strategic intent

Deloitte is changing job titles for nearly 182,000 US employees by June to reflect its AI transformation priorities. The firm is "modernizing our talent architecture to provide a more tailored experience reflective of our professionals' broad range of skills and the work they do," a spokesperson told Business Insider. Experts say clear job titles can benefit employees by creating status and clarifying advancement paths, but warn that major changes imposed without consultation breed resentment. "Too often, senior leaders make these changes without inviting employees into the conversation," said Joe Mull, founder of Boss Hero School.

The HR-C-Suite divide on AI is a strategy failure

64% of execs agree AI is essential for competitive talent pools but nearly half say HR and C-Suite aren't aligned on its use. CHROs are simultaneously the most enthusiastic about AI's potential and the most concerned about job security impacts. This isn't contradiction, it's realism about managing a transition that leadership hasn't funded properly. The division means organizations will fall behind not because they lack AI tools, but because they lack agreement on how humans and AI work together.

Data Point: Think twice about the ROI of bye bye

45k

The average cost of turnover for a single worker.

In Other News

• Have you considered hiring a chief bullshit officer? (Financial Times)

• Learning through tiny bits: Why microlearning is the future of employee development. (London Loves Business)

• Employees say compliance training is ‘disconnected’ from real life. (HR Dive)

• Private-Sector Job Growth Cooled in January: America’s private sector added 22,000 jobs last month, according to human-resources firm ADP, well below estimates. (Wall Street Journal)

• What HR needs to know about hiring in the wake of a layoff: A reminder of the dos and don’ts when reorganizing your workforce. (HR Brew)

• AI is breaking the job application process — and forcing recruiters to rethink hiring and building the bench of talent. (Business Insider)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Focus and intentional decision making become scarce resources in the “AI-ed” organization

AI’s rapid advancement has ignited enthusiasm about its potential to revolutionize corporate decision-making by substituting for expensive, fallible humans. But it’s naïve to believe that by gathering ever more data and feeding it to ever more powerful algorithms alone, businesses can uncover the truth.

This false belief, what researchers call “dataism,” overlooks the nuanced human elements that remain irreplaceable. Workers now report getting only 2-3 hours of daily focus time, and Gartner predicts that overreliance on AI will cause worse decision-making in 30% of organizations by 2030.

Decisions are not simple exercises in data aggregation though. They involve selecting trustworthy sources, employing imagination to envision possibilities, and judging feasibility. These are areas where humans have innate advantages.

As AI automates routine tasks, it creates a vacuum in experience-building for early-career professionals. Without on-the-job learning, critical judgment cannot develop. Organizations must now explicitly cultivate human decision-making by rejecting simplistic “dataism”, ensuring leaders stay grounded in real-world phenomena, and making skills like intuition and imagination an explicit part of development. The future isn’t about choosing between humans and AI, but building hybrid systems where each plays to its strengths.

Breakdown of traditional organizational structures increase dependence on HR and middle management

The traditional organizational chart is dying. In its place, a new structure is emerging, one inspired by the octopus. An octopus operates according to what needs to be done, with a distributed intelligence system where work, not hierarchy, determines action. This is precisely the approach organizations need as AI reshapes work.

For decades, we’ve relied on hierarchical boxes and lines. But those charts are from an era when authority mattered more than agility. AI is obliterating these assumptions. Companies clinging to org-chart thinking are trying to fit AI into existing structures rather than reimagining how work gets done.

As companies flatten and AI automates administrative work, middle management and HR are being reinvented. Middle managers now oversee an average of 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 in 2024. Their effectiveness depends less on control and more on acting as translator-coaches.

Meanwhile, HR is undergoing what Josh Bersin calls “the great reinvention,” shifting from compliance to strategic work focused on talent architecture, culture, and AI orchestration. With AI expected to automate 30-40% of existing HR jobs, the profession is transforming, not shrinking.

Quote of the Week:

“Many of my students are concerned that the convenience of tech will stop them from developing the nuanced judgment they aspire to have. A little bit like a controlling parent, it makes life easier for you, then you don’t know how to manage life on your own.”

—Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor of organisational behaviour on the risk of “cognitive atrophy” from over-relying on AI.

Reading List:

Workers vs companies on AI

As large public companies signal that AI will drive future efficiency and workforce reductions, some workers are pushing back by “friction-maxxing” (a newly popular GenZ-ism). This is the intentional choice to do things the harder way: opting for in-person meetings, reading full documents instead of AI summaries, and learning skills from scratch. It is a quiet rebellion against the “tyranny of convenience,” born from a desire to cultivate deep thinking and protect the human qualities that frictionless tech threatens to erode.

Automated applications creating hiring stress for talent acquisition

The hiring market is under “unprecedented strain,” with 90% of U.S. companies missing their 2025 hiring goals. While recruiters spend nearly 40% of their time on scheduling, the rise of AI-assisted and fraudulent applications has become the most anticipated challenge for 2026. This creates a paradox: while AI is seen as a solution for efficiency, it is also fueling a crisis of trust and a deluge of low-quality applications, forcing a reevaluation of how to find the best candidates in a sea of automated noise.

How top companies are bucking the engagement decline

While overall employee engagement continues its downward spiral, particularly among younger workers, a few top companies are bucking the trend via transparent leadership, meaningful recognition, and clear communication. With burnout’s influence on engagement growing, these companies prove that strong leadership can break the cycle. The small sliver of engagement winners show that a well-defined culture and a clear path for growth are the simply effective engagement tools in a world of increasingly complex problems.

Data Point: The Disappearing (Deep) Work Day

2-3 hours

The average amount of daily focus time a worker gets, defined as uninterrupted work periods without meetings, messages or tool switching, according to the Hubstaff 2026 Global Benchmarks Report.

In Other News

• The Trade Shortage Crisis: How Data Centers Are Exposing America’s Skills Gap. (Forbes)

• Highly educated but under pressure: The paradox facing L&D pros. (HR Executive)

• The US is headed for mass unemployment, and no one is prepared. (The Hill)

• Layoffs are piling up, heightening worker anxiety. Here are some of the biggest recent job cuts. (AP)

• Job seekers optimize resumes amid ATS ‘anxiety’. (HR Dive)

• Teaching employees to use AI could add up to $6.6T to US economy. (HR Dive)

• The Rise of Workslop — and 4 Ways to Counter the Negative Effects of AI. (HR Morning)

• Quantifying the Productivity Gains from AI. (Apollo)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

‘Sink or swim’ engagement is back, but leadership still determines who survives

The labor market has shifted decisively back toward employers, and with it, a harder-edged management philosophy is re-emerging. As hiring slows, layoffs linger, and AI reshapes cost structures, many organizations are quietly abandoning the softer engagement strategies that defined the post-pandemic years. Performance expectations are rising, perks are disappearing, and loyalty is no longer assumed or rewarded.

This is not simply a return to pre-2020 norms. What makes the current moment distinct is that companies are tightening expectations while markets remain profitable and equity values strong. Employees are being asked to do more, with less leverage, in an environment where quitting is riskier and internal mobility is less visible. “Sink or swim” is becoming an implicit “engagement” strategy, even when leaders do not label it as such.

The organizations that will separate themselves are not those that squeeze hardest though. In a down labor market, employees are not asking for indulgence, but for predictability, fairness, and a credible path forward. Firms that invest in manager capability, transparent expectations, and real development will retain commitment even as power shifts back to employers. Those that do not may find that compliance replaces engagement, and that erosion is far harder to reverse.

Lack of career development changes employee loyalty

Even amidst the squeeze, employee loyalty has not disappeared, but it has become conditional on clarity. Workers may stay put in a weak job market, yet their attachment to employers depends on whether they see forward motion in skills, scope, or opportunity. When career paths are unclear, loyalty does not deepen. It simply pauses.

This creates a hidden retention risk. Employees hedge by taking on side projects, building portable skills, or mentally detaching, even if they are not actively job hunting. Employers that provide career clarity without promotions or pay increases can retain talent through the cycle. Those that delay will face attrition the moment conditions improve.

Quote of the Week: Little Changes, Big Difference

“You don’t need grand, expensive programs to make a real difference. Sometimes the most impactful benefits come from listening closely to employees and removing friction from their lives.”

—Eric Stark, cofounder and president at Slate, which added home cleaning services as an employee benefit after one worker requested it on LinkedIn

Reading List:

CEO confidence in short-term company growth has declined sharply

AI becomes the defining leadership topic as CEO confidence hits covid-low

CEO confidence in growth and execution has fallen to levels last seen during the pandemic, even as investment in AI accelerates. The tension is no longer about whether to adopt AI, but whether leadership teams can convert spending into durable performance gains. For many executives, the anxiety is not technological but organizational, stemming from uncertainty over skills, structure, and accountability.

Employee training is the investment that pays off twice

New research suggests that the return on training investments extends beyond frontline productivity. Better-trained employees reduce dependency, rework, and escalation, freeing managerial time and attention for higher-value decisions. Nearly half of training’s payoff may come indirectly through improved managerial leverage, a benefit most ROI models fail to capture.

AI’s hidden management tax becomes a drag on efficiency

While AI promises time savings, many organizations are losing a meaningful share of those gains to verification, correction, and oversight. Without clearer role design and stronger baseline skills, managers absorb the burden of monitoring AI-assisted work. In practice, this shifts cognitive load upward, limiting productivity improvements and increasing leadership strain.

Data Point: Not too confident

40%

Percentage. of productivity gains in the workplace due to artificial intelligence are being lost to rework and low-quality output, according to new research from Workday.

In Other News

• Trust has become the crisis CEOs can’t ignore at Davos, as new data show 70% of people turning more ‘insular’. (Fortune)

• Front-line supervisors are often promoted without leadership skills, Gallup says. (HR Dive)

• Thinking about HR succession? Expect to appoint a first-timer. (HR Brew)

• Policies Aren’t Enough to Retain Top Talent. You Need Systems. (HBR)

• The AI perception gap: How to ensure employers and workers are ready for imminent transformation. (World Economic Forum)

• As organizations race to adopt AI in 2026, Marsh’s Mercer says empower talent and redesign work to achieve meaningful gains. (Mercer)

• Measuring US workers’ capacity to adapt to AI-driven job displacement. (Brookings)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Skills create the organizational speed limit for AI success

AI adoption is accelerating, but capability gaps are starting to dictate the pace. Companies are realizing that infrastructure, security, and model access are no longer the primary bottlenecks. Execution now depends on how quickly teams can learn, adapt, and apply AI in real workflows.

That shift has exposed a silent constraint: skill mismatches buried inside functions and roles. Early adopter teams hit a wall when employees can’t bridge the gap between tool and task. Training is often generic, adoption is uneven, and leaders assume that basic AI literacy will scale into measurable returns. But without high-slope learners who can map use cases, test edge cases, and teach others, AI slows down rather than speeds up.

Productivity will be defined not by how much AI a company uses, but by how much its people can handle. Systems can be bought. Skills have to be built.

Adapt or build, the 2026 mandate for leadership

Nearly half of all executives report their businesses were highly disrupted over the past year. While pressures from regulation and supply chains have moderated, relentless challenges from energy prices, geopolitics, and cybersecurity persist. In this environment, AI has become the great divider, with 80% of executives expressing optimism.

The fastest-growing companies are converting this disruption into an advantage, yet it is their leaders who feel the most anxiety, making the corner office both the command center and the hot seat. 45% of executives considered quitting last year, amid a growing gap between the pace of change and leader’s ability to keep up.

CEOs now feel twice as likely to feel they are personally falling behind in knowledge and skills. In an era where disruption has eclipsed economic cycles as the primary driver of change, the burden of navigation falls squarely on their shoulders.

Quote of the Week: Adjusting to ongoing change

“The tweaks or changes [companies] are making now are just to adjust and to be more flexible and more agile given the changes to the global order. But they don’t see a reason to wholesale upend everything.”

— Dana M. Peterson chief economist at the Conference Board

Reading List:

Decline in early career jobs creates a talent cliff

Entry-level roles are quietly disappearing as automation, AI, and leaner org models shrink the number of true development positions. Without early reps, fewer workers build the experience and judgment needed to move into mid-level and leadership roles. The result is a growing talent cliff that will hit harder as internal pipelines dry up.

Middle management is being reinvented as more critical than ever

While job postings for middle managers have declined, the role itself is not disappearing but rather being reinvented. As organizations flatten, the need for middle managers to act as the connective tissue between strategy and execution has intensified. They are uniquely positioned to translate high-level directives into actionable steps, manage cross-functional collaboration, and serve as guardians of institutional knowledge.

Burnout begins to rise the ranks of human capital problems?

Burnout has become an operational concern, not an individual issue. Many organizations treat it with wellness apps and resilience workshops, but these are reactive measures that fail to address the root causes: challenging stakeholders, toxic leadership, and inefficient workflows. This “carewashing” shifts the burden to employees while absolving leadership of its responsibility to fix the systemic problems.

Data Point: Employees are too tired to switch

43%

Number of US workers say they’re planning to look for a new job—93% of workers said the same in 2025 according to Monster

In Other News

• Lockheed Martin CIO Says AI Is Remaking Her Role: ‘It’s got to come from a central place,’ Maria Demaree says. ‘And they’re looking to the CIO.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• Recruiters are doing more ‘legwork’ to find candidates, Glassdoor finds. (HR Dive)

• Meta is changing its performance review to reward output over effort, taking a page from Amazon and X. (Fortune)

• Approaching AI risk as the staffing industry evolves. (Staffing Industry Analysts)

• EY Study: Curious how AI will change HR? These Big Tech HR leaders have some thoughts about what to expect. (HR Brew)

• McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels says the firm now has 60,000 employees: 25,000 of them are AI agents. (Business Insider)

• Is Your Lunch Break Now Run by AI? How Corporate-Mandated Wellness Is a Slippery Slope to Mandatory Meal Plans. (Entrepreneur)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Productivity without culture is a recipe for disaster

Many companies are dialing up productivity demands without fixing the systems that make productivity possible. Amazon’s new policy requiring weekly manager impact reports reflects a wider shift toward visible output tracking. But when organizations lack consistent expectations and working trust, documentation turns into defense, and accountability loses its edge.

Meanwhile, the old social fabric is fraying. Fewer people linger after hours. Fewer friendships form on the job. For younger employees, the absence of these informal cues leaves the workplace harder to read and harder to navigate. Culture has quietly become an operational dependency. When it is missing, performance tools lose traction, and even high performers pull back.

That’s where a sudden rise of culture coaches fits. Businesses are bringing in outside help to improve how teams make decisions, resolve conflict, and hold one another to clear standards. Culture is becoming a fixed cost of performance. Without strong norms, even the best systems break down under pressure.

Skill resilience requires pushing back against the theft of our attention (aka reading)

Our lives are increasingly flooded with tools that promise speed while quietly eroding our focus. Auto-summaries, feed algorithms, and AI assistants make it easy to consume more while understanding less. Over time, that shift is reshaping the cognitive habits behind good work. People scan, react, and move on. What they lose is the ability to stay with a hard problem and think deeply enough to solve it.

• Read more: LinkedIn Data show people are scrolling longer on the site. (WSJ)

Reading (something an increasing number of Americans don’t bother with) offers a way back. Long-form fiction and nonfiction force the brain to process complexity without shortcuts. They train attention span, narrative memory, and the ability to hold ambiguity…all essential for navigating strategic work and leadership roles. But reading for pleasure continues to fall, especially among younger men, and the muscle of sustained focus is weakening across the board.

Quote of the Week: Distance Responsibility

“You can’t explain licensing or franchising to a customer.”

— Jim Fielding, former CEO of Claire’s Stores, on why brand blowback lands even when a location is independently operated.

Reading List:

2026 ushers in a wave of new labor laws

New labor rules taking effect this month mark a broader regulatory shift. Nineteen states raised minimum wages, led by Washington at $17.13 an hour, and more workers now fall under $15-plus state floors than the federal baseline. At the same time, states are extending oversight beyond pay. Illinois expanded its Human Rights Act to cover algorithmic bias in hiring, Colorado and Texas added limits on AI use in employment decisions, and Oregon introduced stricter scheduling notice rules. The message for employers is clear. Labor compliance is now as much about systems and processes as it is about wages.

Hilton, ICE, and the new corporate crisis playbook

A Hampton Inn franchise in Minnesota became the center of a political firestorm after screenshots alleged it refused rooms to ICE agents. Hilton removed the property from its system within a day. The move was quick and decisive, but the incident revealed an ongoing vulnerability: customers do not care whether a location is franchised or company-owned. Brand accountability is absolute. In a social media environment where reputational damage can spread in hours, the margin for inaction is gone.

Even small businesses are getting CEOs security

Security spending for executives is rising, with the average disclosed off-the-job executive protection reached $112,000 in 2024, nearly double what it was four years ago. Behind the number is a structural change: event logistics are tighter. Spouses and children are briefed. Personal information is scrubbed or managed more actively. The pattern reflects a broader reality: visibility is risk, and even mid-market firms are reconsidering their posture.

Data Point: Kids Aren’t Alright

41%

Underemployment rate for recent college graduates according to New York Fed data

In Other News

• Forget an MBA: Hasbro forces workers to sit through a Monopoly-style board game to see if they’re fit for the C-suite—and it’s a tactic approved by Reid Hoffman. (Fortune)

• Fewer layoff announcements may be masking a deeper slowdown as white-collar and manufacturing hiring continues to fall. (Quartz)

• Why AI Boosts Creativity for Some Employees but Not Others. (Harvard Business Review)

• Recruiters are increasing their AI usage as pressure to hire intensifies. (HR Dive)

• An analogue native’s guide to digital success: If employers want AI to transform work, they should pay attention to history’s technological flops. (Financial Times)

Sent this by a friend? Sign up here to receive HCI in your inbox every week.

By Ken Stibler; Powered by Reyvism Analytics

Preparing for the wave of employees as retirement becomes out of reach for millions

Retirement is no longer a predictable endpoint for a growing share of the workforce. Rising living costs, uneven savings, and the erosion of pensions are pushing more Americans to work into their late seventies and beyond, not out of preference but necessity. What once looked like a fringe trend is becoming a durable labor market feature.

For employers, the challenge is not accommodation but design. Older workers often remain productive and engaged, but they bring different constraints around stamina, health, and scheduling. Firms that rethink roles, task intensity, and hours are retaining experience that would otherwise be lost, while reducing turnover costs in tightening labor markets.

The strategic implication is straightforward. As labor force growth increasingly comes from older cohorts, companies that fail to adapt will face higher hiring friction and knowledge loss. Those that redesign work for longevity, rather than speed alone, will gain a quiet advantage over the next decade.

How to train when employees’ tech moves faster than HR

AI is scaling faster than organizations’ ability to train the people expected to use it. Employees consistently say learning and development improves retention and confidence, yet heavy workloads and fragmented ownership have left training behind the technology curve. The result is a widening gap between adoption and actual capability.

“When organizations don’t set people up to use AI reliably, employees won’t trust it and won’t adopt it…That’s why HR leaders need to create space for safe learning and experimentation with AI’s uses and limits, starting with their own teams.”

—Ted F. Tschang, an associate professor of strategic management at Singapore Management University, on the AI adoption challenges facing HR

That gap carries operational risk. When training lags, employees rely on informal workarounds, overuse a small group of AI-fluent peers, or disengage from tools they do not trust. Productivity gains look strong on paper, but performance becomes uneven and fragile in practice.

Until companies treat AI literacy as core infrastructure rather than a benefit, returns on AI investment will remain uncertain. Technology adoption can move quickly, but capability only compounds when organizations create space to learn.

Quote of the Week: Retention as a Competitive Advantage

“Retention is going to be one of the most important competitive differentiators in 2026. Investing in our people isn’t just the right thing to do, it delivers real returns. High attrition, burnout and disengagement cost far more than initiatives that support employees and provide meaningful experiences.”

—Anna Lundström, CHRO at Spotify, on the company’s 2026 retention strategy

Reading List:

Is the labor market shrinking? Fed admits that we don’t know

Federal Reserve officials now acknowledge that headline job numbers may be seriously overstating employment growth due to modeling limits and data lags. If true, the labor market may be weaker than it appears, complicating hiring, wage planning, and policy decisions. For employers, confidence in workforce forecasts is becoming harder to justify.

“De-bossing” leaves employees increasingly burned out

Efforts to flatten hierarchies and remove managers are eroding employee autonomy rather than increasing it. Research shows that when workers lack clear ownership, burnout rises even in flexible environments. Autonomy without structure is proving as damaging as over-control.

Is there a right way for executives to exit?

Boards are discovering that succession planning often fails not for lack of process, but because leaders struggle to step aside. Poorly managed exits disrupt morale, delay internal advancement, and amplify uncertainty. The strongest organizations treat succession as a continuous discipline, not a last-minute negotiation.

Data Point: Modern Motivations

85%

The number of employees who prioritize remote work over compensation when considering a new job.

In Other News

• AI Is Powering Trump’s Economy, But American Voters Are Getting Worried. (Bloomberg)

• More workers say they will job hunt in early 2026, but competition is tight. (HR Dive)

• Will skills still matter in 2026? (HR Executive)

• Retail job cuts up nearly 140% from last year. (Retail Dive)

• Evolving economic conditions — not AI — will drive cautious 2026 hiring. (HR Dive)