ReportWire

Tag: workplace

  • Why Adam Grant Recommends Giving Bad Interview Candidates Another Shot

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    Business owners, hiring managers, and applicants have all experienced job interviews that started going south at some point, and kept grinding downward from there. But organizational psychologist Adam Grant says even recruiting exchanges that seem to offer neither side much reason to continue may hold opportunities to uncover the hidden capabilities of flub-prone candidates — if they’re handled correctly.

    The best-selling author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business underlined the hiring potentials in what otherwise appear to be no-hope job interview scenarios. Speaking at the WOBI World Business Forum in New York last week, Grant urged company owners and HR executives yearning to pull the plug on unimpressive exchanges with sputtering candidates to instead give them a second chance to demonstrate hidden capabilities. Ideally, that would involve a follow-up encounter with the struggling applicant, conducted from a different angle that they may respond better to.

    The point,t, Grant said, is for interviewing executives to identify and repurpose the very areas job candidates had been stumbling on to see if they can overcome those during a second chance. The reason that’s worthwhile, Grant said, is that research has shown “how well somebody does a job is not indicated by how the first interview goes, it’s how much growth they show from the first interview to the second,” according to CNBC’s coverage of his presentation.

    Aware that many business owners and human resources managers won’t have the scheduling flexibility to call a hapless applicant in for a second interview, Grant offered a workaround requiring far less time and organization.

    “Even if you could pause an interview halfway and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a couple of notes for you,’ and then watch the motivation and ability to grow from the first attempt to the second, that is a great window into ‘is somebody excited to get better,’ and also ‘do they have the capability to learn the skills that you’re trying to get them to excel at?’” Grant told the audience, CNBC reported.

    The key to offering that second chance, Grant explained, is giving flailing candidates a task directly related to the job they’re vying for. That will not only require both the applicant and interviewer to focus on skills the position involves. But it also creates the opportunity for potential recruits to demonstrate their capacity for bouncing back while proving abilities performing the work.

    The extra effort, Grant said, will spare employers from “missing diamonds in the rough.”

    The strategy springs from Grant’s own pre-Wharton near-miss experience, while working in advertising and hiring people for sales positions. He recounted one applicant he described as “the worst fit for sales imaginable,” particularly in refusing to make eye contact. “I didn’t know a thing about neurodivergence then,” Grant noted.

    But his reaction also overlooked a key employment detail that Grant’s boss soon reminded him about.

    “You realize this is a phone sales job, right?” the company president asked him, presumably from beneath sharply arched eyebrows. “There is no eye contact in this job.”

    As a result, Grant called the all the applicants back in and gave them a task related to the sales jobs being filled, and using a reference they’d all be familiar with: a rotten apple. The challenge was for candidates to convincingly sell Grant on the idea of buying the withering fruit.

    The person he’d scratched off his list for not making eye contact never hesitated, and promptly demonstrated his abilities for the sales job being filled.

    “This may look like a rotten apple; it’s actually an aged, antique apple,” Grant recalled of the nearly axed candidate’s second-chance presentation. “You know the saying ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away?’ Well, because of the nutrients in the aging process, you only need to eat one of these a week. And then afterwards you can plant the seeds in your backyard.”

    Though Grant said he had certain reservations about the ethics of making that exact product pitch, he wound up hiring the candidate — who became the best performer on the sales team. The experience made Grant change his thinking about recruitment beyond the valuable recruit he’d nearly written off.

    “What I learned from that story was not just that I needed to see him in action to gauge his potential… (b)ut also, I needed to give him a do-over,” Grant said before broadening that lesson further, according to CNBC. “I realized I had to reboot our hiring process. If you want to gauge somebody’s potential, the best thing you can do is actually give them a challenge that’s really part of the job and watch how they handle it.”

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • How Tariffs Are Making Workplaces More Dangerous

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    Recent data on consumer spending ahead of the holiday season suggests that price increases from import tariffs may already be reducing shoppers’ purchases. But another, less obvious effect of duties may also make it less safe to go to work. According to a new report from a trade association representing construction, manufacturing, energy agriculture, medical, and other companies, many member businesses are delaying procurement of workplace safety materials made abroad. That adjustment to higher costs risks creating a downstream effect of potentially rising accidents on the job.

    The International Safety Equipment Association (ISEA) says many businesses that rely on personal protective equipment (PPE) as a workplace safeguards are buying less of it. Imported first-aid kits, respiratory protectors, high-visibility clothing, and even steel-toed work boots are among the many items that now cost more, according to ISEA. A survey of association members blamed the purchasing cuts on those higher outlays since import tariffs were imposed. The move not only increases the risk of injury for the 125 million employees who use those materials to ensure their protection on the job. It also exposes their employers to greater threats of accidents that already cost U.S. businesses $176.5 billion each year.

    According to “The Hidden Costs of PPE Tariffs “report, the ISEA says import levies are forcing many businesses whose employees face higher risk of workplace mishaps to make a very hard choice. Either they pay the increased costs of protective equipment that duties have created immediately, or scale purchasing plans back in the hopes customs taxes will be lowered over time — or perhaps be overturned by a looming Supreme Court ruling.

    In most cases, business owners have decided to bide their time.

    Nearly 60 percent of companies surveyed said they’d delayed planned purchases of safety materials, “in many cases using PPE far beyond its useful lifespan.” Another 41 percent of participating businesses said they’d sought to offset the higher costs tariffs have generated by switching to cheaper made, often less effective protection equipment.

    The reason? Fully 93 percent of respondents reported their costs for safety materials have risen since import duties were announced in April. By contrast, the study didn’t establish a figure for the average increase of PPE prices under tariffs, or even offer an ballpark percentage of those hikes.

    However, it did find 90 percent respondents believe that companies cutting procurement of costlier PPE materials “will have a negative impact on the safety” of workers. But faced with choice of paying more now or waiting to see if tariffs decrease, many employers have decided to take a calculated risk.

    “Workplaces will cut corners to accommodate the extra costs,” said one unidentified ISEA member cited in the report. “They’ll use PPE too long, buy inferior and less protective PPE, and not use PPE when they should. We haven’t yet seen the full consequences.”

    The report projected how the resulting increase in workplace risks might play out.

    It warned that if “worker injuries increase by just a single percentage point, over 40,000 workers will be injured on the job, costing the American economy $1.8 billion.” That’s on top of the $176.5 billion accidents already cost companies each year. ISEA CEO Cam Mackey called that a tragic waste in more ways than one.

    “When tariffs make it harder to afford quality protective gear that keeps workers safe, everyone pays the price,” Mackey said in comments about the report’s release this week. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about protecting the people who make America run — the workers building the infrastructure that keeps our cities moving, manufacturing the machinery that defends our nation, powering the energy systems that drive our economy, and caring for our families. Ensuring their safety should be a national priority.”

    Injuries aren’t the only way higher PPE costs are affecting business owners and employees. The survey found 44 percent of participating companies — which collectively contribute $15 trillion in annual GDP growth — have already delayed hiring plans in reaction to rising costs, including those of safety materials. Another 33 percent of respondents said they’re considering doing likewise.

    Release of the report is part of the ISEA’s continued drive to convince the Trump administration and members of Congress to exempt PPE and other safety materials from import tariffs. Doing that, it argues, would prioritize the protections of U.S. workers exposed to workplace risk by sparing their employers the cost of trade war duties.

    “Businesses don’t want to cut corners on safety,” said Mackey. “But when costs rise and budgets tighten, difficult choices follow. We’re asking policymakers to help prevent that situation before it starts.”

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Mark Cuban Shares the Smartest Places for AI-Skilled Workers to Find Jobs

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    Serial entrepreneur, business visionary, and — not coincidentally — billionaire Mark Cuban has repeatedly urged both young and older people to develop artificial intelligence (AI) skills, and use those to tap into the enormous career-building potential these tools offer. More recently, Cuban expanded on his advice by counseling job seekers to market their AI experience to small businesses, not the big corporations now spending billions adopting the tech.

    Cuban is clearly convinced AI is set to transform business in ever bigger ways than his Cost Plus Drug company revolutionized pharmaceutical markets. To get in on that change, Cuban has been encouraging people — including his own children — to spend all their free time to “learn all you can about AI,” and exploit the “unique opportunity” it offers employees and companies. Of late, the 67-year-old entrepreneur has honed that message even more by telling current and future job seekers to forget trying to use those AI skills to secure work with leading corporations, and instead focus on the far more numerous opportunities at small businesses.

    “They have to compete differently, and they don’t have the resources to just, you know, have a huge IT department,” Cuban told CivicScience CEO John Dick on his “Dumbest Guy in the Room” podcast recently. “So, they’re going to go to kids just like we saw with the early days of the internet. You hired young kids who were more comfortable with it, who learned it already and could come in and implement new things.”

    In making that point, Cuban didn’t ignore the fact that big companies are spending billions of dollars both developing and adopting AI tools to automate countless workplace tasks previously performed by humans. But as part of that, he said those corporations are also investing considerable amounts of money to hire top tech workers, not recruiting at lower levels that would be open to most job seekers.

    “The large companies are trying to use AI to cut back and they have the resources to understand how to implement it, apply it to processes,” Cuban said. “They have great AI people.”

    He further detailed that thought recently in comments to CNBC.

    “Small- to medium-size companies don’t have that depth,” Cuban told the business channel. “They are typically entrepreneurially driven and don’t have the flexibility to have people research things. Bringing a new graduate on to work on agentic AI projects is inexpensive for them and can get them immediate results.”

    Moreover, small businesses are not only more numerous than corporations, but will use AI — and the new recruits helping them adopt it — differently. He cited his own Cost Plus Drugs company as an example of how that works.

    “Small- to medium-size businesses like our size companies, we need people that understand AI and agentics, (and) can go and look at our processes and automate them using AI,” Cuban told the podcast. “And as we grow it, you know, (recruits) help us become more productive, competitive, and profitable using AI. And so I think redirecting kids as they graduate from college in particular to small -to medium-sized businesses as opposed to trying to work for a big company (is wise).”

    Cuban admitted not all his three college-age children are fans of AI, with one daughter particularly soured on it due to its enormous energy consumption.

    But he said he continues urging all his kids — and other future and current employees — to embrace the tech, and use it to take their careers to new, higher places over time. The alternative, he warns them, is that people and businesses who snub the quickly developing and spreading AI tools risk finding themselves on the outside looking in.

    “I tell them, like I tell every young kid, there’s going to be two types of companies in this in this country,” Cuban said. “There’s going to be those who are great at AI and those who used to be in business. There’s no in between.”

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Giving Feedback Is Hard. Here’s How Top CEOs Get Better At It

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    A company is nothing without the people who keep it running—but how can you, as a business leader, ensure those people are bringing their best selves to work?

    That knotty question was the subject of the latest installment of Your Next Move, Inc.’s ongoing series of interviews with top business leaders.

    “Without good performance management, your best people might leave and your worst habits stick around,” Inc. editor-in-chief Mike Hofman explained at the top of Thursday’s episode, which was produced in collaboration with Capital One Business. “We’re going to talk about how founders can build a sustainable and effective approach to managing performance as their companies scale.”

    Joining Hofman in conversation were two CEOs from the wider Inc. community: Daniel Chait, co-founder of repeat Inc. 5000 honoree Greenhouse, which offers hiring software; and Christie Horvath, founder of the pet insurance company Wagmo, which entered the Inc. 5000 pantheon this year at No. 1,082.

    Performance management can be uncomfortable, Horvath said, since it often involves telling an employee that they’re not doing their job perfectly. That means having hard conversations—something that Chait emphasized is a skill you can hone through practice.

    “Defining what good is—even knowing, ‘What are you trying to manage that person to do?’—isn’t always so obvious,” he said. “What good versus great actually means requires a lot of thought. It’s not always easy to get right.”

    At one point, faced with an executive team that was struggling to give and receive feedback, the Greenhouse chief executive even brought in an outside expert who shared a feedback framework with the team: “Get a micro-yes, and then talk about the behavior and how it made you feel. … You have this little checklist in your head.”

    Horvath also recommended role-playing the feedback process ahead of time so that leaders can get comfortable approaching those conversations with staff.

    Of course, sometimes feedback isn’t enough and you have to let someone go. When that’s the case, Horvath said, it’s always best to get it over with.

    “Every time I’ve ever had to exit somebody, I’ve always wished we’d done it sooner,” she explained. “It’s never worth waiting. Your company is so much more resilient than you think; your team is so much more resilient than you think. It really detracts from your top performers. So it is your job to make the unpopular decision [and] make sure that your top performers are surrounded by other top performers.”

    The moment you start thinking about letting someone go, Chait added, is probably the right time to do it. That’s likely what’s best for both the organization and the individual, who would probably be a better fit elsewhere, he explained.

    But you can make those decisions less painful.

    “Be great at hiring,” Chait advised. “If I knew that I could hire an amazing ‘A’ player the minute this person’s out of that seat, I feel much more comfortable about making that change, whereas part of the fear that people always have is, ‘Gosh, if I get rid of this person, I don’t know if … the next person will be as good.’”

    Another key consideration when it comes to managing your team is burnout. Sometimes there will be stretches of high-intensity crunch, Chait acknowledged, but it’s generally important to create a sustainable work culture so that when those periods do come up, everyone’s ready to handle them.

    “I’ve had conversations with people in my teams,” he said, “where I’ve told them, ‘You’re creating a risk for the business in the way you’re working. You haven’t taken a Saturday or a Sunday off in three months. One day you’re going to come to me when I don’t know it’s gonna happen, and you’re going to catastrophically explode and quit—and that creates a big problem for me.’”

    When it comes to making performance management a day-to-day task, both executives have developed their own distinct processes and philosophies. Horvath, for instance, asks her direct reports to check in with her about their strategic performance—on an “out of the weeds” level of abstraction–every month.

    “’Let’s take a step back,’” she’ll say. “’How are you feeling about how you’re doing this month? Are you feeling supported?’ That way, when you get to that semiannual or whatever performance review, where it’s all documented and it’s a whole process, there’s no surprises.”

    A poll of the audience watching this episode reinforces this notion:

    Chait, meanwhile, said he’s sought to implement an ethos of “good is good” at his company.

    “If everybody at the company did their job to a good level, we’d be in a really good spot—but it’s not great,” he explained. “What does it really mean to be transformational? What does it really mean to be great? … That’s a better place for us to find ourselves in.”

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Brian Contreras

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  • Amid Government Shutdown ‘Fog’, Employers Are Scrutinizing Private Data for Economic Clues

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    One of several effects of the longest government shutdown in history that’s clouding our economic outlook is the shuttering of the agencies that provide economic and employment data. With that flow of information closed since September, private sector observers have stepped up with their own statistics to offer business leaders a better idea of where things are headed. But no end in sight for the federal work stoppage, the job figures released this week by a variety of companies may actually create more confusion than clarity.

    This week the government shutdown entered its second month, leaving legions of federal workers unpaid, disrupting services from air traffic control to food stamp distribution. It also continued preventing the Bureau of Labor Statistics from producing its regular monthly jobs reports. The agency’s last official data in September showed companies had pinched off recruitment to almost nothing beyond replacing departing workers. That cautious staffing strategy by businesses that have hesitated to hire since spring amid economic uncertainty meant a monthly average of only 26,750 positions were created between May through August, when just 22,000 openings were filled.

    Since that time, companies have had to rely on statistics and analyses from private sector actors as they try to figure out how the labor market and broader economy are performing. A new wave of data released this week may leave some business leaders more cross-eyed than clearsighted.

    On the positive side, payroll services company ADP said that its customers’ data indicated U.S. businesses increased headcounts by 42,000 in October. That number was a decided improvement over the 34,000 net job losses ADP reported in September, after a decrease of 3,000 in August.

    But it’s still a fraction of the average 180,000 hires per month in 2024, and even less than the 64,500 monthly average between January and May. Moreover, relatively robust hiring in the healthcare, transport, and utility sectors compensated for anemic recruitment otherwise.

    “Private employers added jobs in October for the first time since July, but hiring was modest relative to what we reported earlier this year,” said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson, announcing the latest monthly estimate.

    And that was the good news.

    Rival payroll services and staff management company Gusto released its October employment data for small businesses, when 5,900 jobs were lost. Worse still, that extended the decline in recruitment since a recent peak of 57,400 new hires in July, which decreased to around 19,000 in September before dipping into the red last month.

    “This marks a continuation of the broader hiring slowdown we’ve observed since the post-pandemic hiring surge of 2021, when small businesses were adding an average of 170,000 net new jobs each month,” the October 2025 Gusto Small Business Jobs Report said. “Notably, the overall pace of both hiring and terminations has slowed dramatically over the past two years — the so-called ‘Great Freeze’. Hiring for small businesses peaked at nearly 3.4 million per month in January 2022, and have since fallen by 37 percent since then.”

    Homebase, another competitor in payroll and workforce management services, used different statistics to paint the same picture of a weakening labor market.

    Its recently released “Main Street Health Report” found that what it terms “workforce participation” at the over 100,000 small businesses it studied had decreased by 2.9 percent in October — a slight improvement over the 3.5 percent headcount decline in September. That came as hiring slipped 5 percent compared to October 2024, with business activity sluggish or dropping in all sectors apart from hospitality.

    So, what should business leaders make from those different, yet largely overlapping views of company headcounts remaining flat or shrinking slightly in October?

    According to Appcast chief economist Andrew Flowers, amid the “fog” created by the absence of reliable government data during the shutdown, the best thing businesses owners can do is use the available “headlights” of private sector statistics to carefully steer themselves down the road. That may be unnerving, he said, but less dangerous than pessimists might think.

    “What data we do have in hand suggests a continual labor market slowdown, but not the bottom falling out,” Flowers said in emailed comments to Inc.

    But he also pointed to recent mass layoffs announced by Amazon, Target, UPS, IBM, and other corporations. Following those big cuts, there may be a risk that business leaders deprived of official economic and employment data could defensively replicate the headcount cutting example of bigger companies.

    “This happened in early 2023, mind you — when bad vibes about jobs were disproportionate to the underlying data,” Flowers said. “This time around we don’t have the data to guide us. (But) underlying consumer spending and business investment has been surprisingly resilient. Real-time GDP tracking estimates show Q3 to be quite strong.”

    Meaning employers, staff, and job seekers alike would be wise to buckle up and hope for the best as they make their way through the fog.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Gen-Z Talks About Their Salaries Openly. Should Your Company Embrace Pay Transparency?

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    Few workplace issues get as much attention as the question of salary transparency, which has been a hot-button topic for years. While there’s an ongoing push toward completely public salary disclosures in the European Union, the U.S. has mostly lagged behind, with compensation historically deemed to be a private, personal matter. A new report says Gen-Z is challenging these norms, as it is with many old-fashioned workplace traditions. Could this prompt your company to be open about your workers’ pay, and even to encourage your staff to chat about the topic? And what benefits can you expect if you make the change?

    New global data from Kickresume, the Slovakia-based AI résumé building service, found that only 31 percent of people say salaries are openly discussed at their job, and 37 percent say their employers actually ban talking about salaries, Newsweek reports. But nearly 40 percent of Gen-Z respondents to the survey said that they openly discuss salaries at their workplace—far above the average across all age cohorts since just 30 percent of Millennials and 22 percent of Gen-X respondents felt the same way, and one in three Gen-X workers say they actually prefer not to discuss the matter at all. In fact, 18 percent of Gen-Z respondents said they are so open about pay transparency that they talk about it even if their employer bans the topic.

    Digging into what’s going on here, the survey also found that an average of 32 percent of respondents remain curious about what their colleagues earn and are interested when someone discusses the topic. Gen-Z is more curious, with 38 percent feeling this way.

    As to cultural differences about the matter, while 34 percent of European respondents say salary is openly discussed, just 27 percent of Americans say the same, and only 24 percent of respondents from Asia. Kickresume’s report says the U.S. is actually leading the movement to “[keep] pay talk off the table, with one in three workers saying they simply don’t want to discuss salary at all.”

    What’s your takeaway from this data?

    Experts have long argued that pay transparency is a good thing for the workforce, often citing a noted study in which some people were kept in the dark about bonuses and pay and others were informed of their colleagues’ details. Workers who weren’t told about pay levels actually performed worse in the experiment.  

    Other research suggests that the trend for secrecy around compensation is slowly changing, with more and more job postings explicitly listing salary levels, even as an increasing number of states are legislating to make all companies post salary levels publicly. 

    Interestingly, in 2022, a LinkedIn survey on workforce confidence found that workers at smaller businesses were less likely than workers in larger enterprises to feel that salary discussions are discouraged by their employer. It’s easy to imagine that in a smaller, more family-like company the sense of camaraderie and familiarity with colleagues encourages this idea of openness. In larger enterprises, management may be uncomfortable with workers at similar levels and with similar skills discovering that, for whatever reasons, their pay levels are different—even though the National Labor Relations Act says workers have the right to talk to each other about pay.

    Meanwhile, Newsweek pointed to a February survey from Delaware-based essay writing service EduBirdie that found 58 percent of Gen-Z people surveyed said they would explicitly avoid applying for jobs at employers where salaries aren’t disclosed ahead of time. 

    Essentially, there’s a large body of evidence that being open about salaries promotes employee well-being and boosts the sense of equality and fairness—assuming that you are a fair employer, and, for example, pay female workers the same rates as male ones. The EU is so set on the idea that member states have to implement the Pay Transparency Directive by next June as part of an effort to make such transparency commonplace across the continent. 

    Savvy business owners may see this new research as a prompt to promote pay and compensation openness among their employees, since the change may boost your productivity. You may have to put up with some difficult discussions about disparities in the short term, however. 

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Employees Can Tell When You’re Using AI to Deliver Bad News. Here’s How

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    The spreading use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not only a potentially game-changing workplace development, but one driven by employers urging staff to increase their productivity by adopting the tech to automate repetitive tasks. New data indicates just how often workers are using apps to compose email and other business communications — including managers’ employee reviews and layoff notices that usually require high doses of human consideration and empathy that bots can’t replicate.

    Those insights come from email strategy and service provider ZeroBounce, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. employees and managers about their AI habits in composing texts for work. It found 56 percent of respondents reporting they use bots anywhere from a few times per week to “always,” with just 20 saying they never do. Not only did 52 percent of participants say using apps leaves them feeling more confident in their workplace writing, but 10 percent said they had delayed, or entirely dropped plans to send business email during the most recent AI outage their company suffered.

    What ZeroBounce looked at from there was how discerning respondents were in turning to AI when writing sensitive messages or reports in addition to run of the mill email.

    Over a third, or 35 percent of participants said they’d used bots to compose those more delicate texts, with 14 percent saying they’ve cut and pasted confidential content directly into bots without editing the results. Just under 10 percent of respondents admitted they no longer felt capable of writing those sensitive reports or notes — or even regular email — after having become over-reliant on apps for that.

    The potential problems with that increasing use of bots in writing became clearer when respondents spoke of their experiences of being on the receiving end of those exchanges.

    Over a fifth of respondents said they’d “caught a coworker using the exact same Al email I have seen before,” which could shape how recipients viewed the importance of the message, and industriousness of the colleague sending it. Even more significantly, however, more than a quarter of participants said they believed performance reviews they’d received had been written by bots, with 16 percent saying they’d gotten layoff notices they suspected were AI-generated.

    There are several reasons for those suspicions. Those included sensitive texts composed respondents had gotten containing excessive, even robotic formality and unnatural word choice that bots are infamous for. Overly polished, ornate, or repetitive phrasing were other notorious causes for doubt.

    Then there were the survey answers from managers themselves about their use of apps in writing sensitive messages that further fanned those misgivings.

    For example, 41 of participating executives said they’d indeed relied on AI “to draft or revise a performance review.” Another 24 percent of respondents said they’d used apps to compose a performance warning, and 17 percent had done so to inform an employee they were being terminated.

    The problem with that, ZeroBounce said of its findings, is if the positive use of AI in automating all kinds of repetitive, boring, or less critical workplace tasks becomes too reflexive. When it happens, it said some users immediately turn to the tech to compose critical communications requiring maximum human input, analysis, and even compassion that bots can’t produce.

    “The (survey) results are part cautionary tale, part Black Mirror episode,” the introduction to the survey’s results said. “AI has crept into our inboxes, sometimes invisibly, and many of us aren’t sure who’s writing or feeling on the other end.”

    Recognizing that, 40 percent of participating employees said they thought sensitive emails, evaluations, or notices about promotions and terminations should never be Al-assisted. Another 56 percent of respondents said those texts may be crafted with some support from apps to increase clarity, but that should never come at the expense of full human input and personalization.

    A separate survey offered some possible reasons for why managers would rely on AI as much as the ZeroBounce study revealed. Language learning platform Preply questioned an unspecified number of U.S. employees and managers about termination messaging they’d been involved with, and found delivery and phrasing of that bad news often sorely lacking.

    For starters, it found an average of 55 percent of participating managers “who have fired someone (had) not received training on how to navigate the process.” Perhaps not surprisingly, 65 percent of respondents who’d been laid off said “the manager handled the situation poorly.” While the survey didn’t ask how often AI was used to formulate those termination announcements, there’s some reason to think bots may have at times been involved.

    With word and term repetition a frequent AI vice in these early days of the tech’s development and output, use of the phrase “letting you go” appearing in 45.6 percent of all layoff announcements examined may indicate bot involvement. Meanwhile, “effective immediately” and “terminating your employment” were also mentioned in over 28 percent of all dismissals, with “no longer require services” and “parting ways” used in over 20 percent of cases.

    All of which indicates that at this point in its evolution, AI’s automating abilities are impressive, but not always adapted to workplace scenarios requiring human discretion and empathy.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • How These Employer-Backed Health Clinics Are Saving Companies Money

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    As many workers note while checking changes in their company-provided health care plans during the open enrollment period that began November 1, U.S. employers have worked to provide their staffs with the most affordable medical insurance coverage possible. But a growing number of businesses are going even further by establishing on-site clinics, or partnering with nearby care providers. That has allowed them to slash the time and money employees must invest in seeking professional care, and considerably reduced their overall costs of keeping their workforces healthy.

    The moves by many businesses to provide health care services within the workplace, or by partnering with neighboring clinics, was the focus of a Washington Post report this week. That effort goes beyond offering typical medical insurance coverage — whose costs to employers rose 6 percent this year, and are expected increase by double digits in 2026. Instead, companies took the considerable extra step of bringing health care providers into direct proximity to their employees. That nearness and convenience allows workers who may otherwise avoid doctor visits because they take too much time, are difficult to set up, or are prohibitively expensive to quickly schedule consultations when they need one.

    That usually involves third-party companies setting up clinics within customers’ workplaces, or establishing facilities nearby that cater primarily to their employees. The effort permits employers to provide care to workers at lower costs, and without the habitually long appointment waits and travel times of seeing outside physicians. Meanwhile, clinicians primarily dedicated to employees can give them more time and attention than most doctors can spare.

    “They offer a combination of low- or no-cost in-person and virtual care… (with) the convenience of same-day appointments, on-site labs, and consistent relationships with their providers,” the Post said of workplace clinics. “It’s a benefit strategy that is gaining traction across all industries, to attract and keep talent, and to address common U.S. health care woes — long wait times, short appointments, unnecessary and expensive ER visits — that can lead to less healthy employees and weigh on the bottom line.”

    Why would an employer assume the heavy lifting of establishing a workplace health care center for employees? Because most that have done so report big dividends in the form of lower overall costs and healthier workers.

    According to a study by the Business Group on Health professional association, 48 percent of its member companies said they offered on-site health care. About half of those respondents estimated the rate of return on their clinic investments at 200 percent, with a quarter of participants putting that payoff at 300 percent. Frequently, improved health and cost benefits of those newly established medical facilities offset the finances used to launch them within a year.

    “Employers are facing double-digit medical cost trend increases and looking for solutions,” said David Keyt, national director of employer health centers at insurance company Alliant in comments about a study it carried out with the National Association for Workplace Health Care.

    Its survey found 28 percent of business with their own health centers said they planned to establish new clinics in new locations in 2026. Nearly 55 percent of respondents also said they intended to increase services or staffing at existing clinics.

    “Directly contracted worksite and near-site care models have been a proven strategy that delivers significant value on investment,” Keyt said. “Employer health centers are a strong foundation for an employer total worker health strategy.”

    It’s also a win-win initiative, with companies cutting costs and productivity lost to staff illnesses through improved worker health and well-being. Just ask the 26,000 employees at Oakwood, Georgia-based poultry company Wayne-Sanderson Farms, which hired clinic operator and medical service provider Marathon Health to set up an on-site healthcare facility nearly a decade ago.

    “Making things easy, making things affordable, putting that care right there at their fingertips … is what we want to do,” Wayne-Sanderson Farms’ director of benefits, Christy Freeman, told the Post.

    While some companies like Wayne-Sanderson establish clinics to provide close and accessible health care options to their largely rural staffs, businesses in urban centers have done likewise to make visiting doctors and getting treatment easier for swamped employees.

    For example, in 2022 Washington, D.C., law firm Sterne Kessler asked CloseKnit Health to set up and staff an in-house clinic to serve its attorneys and support workers. Many of those employees don’t have time to set up outside doctor visits, or commute to them when they roll around.

    “Working at a law firm isn’t easy,” Sterne Kessler chief operating officer Rob Burger told the Post. “You have a lot of stress and a lot of hours. I saw people neglecting themselves.”

    Similarly, telecom and media group Charter Communications partnered with Marathon Health in recent years to open three on-site health centers on its corporate campuses. Those have already handled over 10,000 appointments, and helped cut the company’s overall healthcare costs.

    “People get what they need,” Paul Marchand, Charter’s executive vice president and chief human resources officer told the paper. “They get it on time. They get it in a convenient manner, and they walk out saying, ‘Wow, that was easy.’”

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  • How Wearable Tech Could Become ‘Big Brother’ in the Workplace

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    Wearable tech continues to be one of the Next Big Things in technology innovation, thanks to what many experts expect to be the replacement for the humble smartphone—AR and VR headsets, as well as other AI-powered devices. But wearables like fitness monitors and smartwatches are already part of some workplaces as a useful tool for monitoring employees — providing data on everything from performance to employee well-being. But this sometimes controversial data collection carries some risks, as a new report highlights.

    A team of management researchers from the U.K.’s University of Surrey recently did a meta-analysis of previous studies on the benefits and risks of using wearable worker monitoring tech. They found that most workplaces that have deployed wearable tech are using them to track employees’ well-being and health data. The devices were helpful for accurately tracking “sleep quality, stress markers, physical activity, and even team dynamics,” science news site Phys.org reported. That, which aligns with some of the ways devices like FitBits and Apple Watches are promoted. 

    But the way some businesses roll out these devices is problematic the researchers said, since many of these efforts aren’t fully transparent and leave employees guessing about what personal data is being collected by their companies and why it’s being gathered. Meanwhile, many businesses have inconsistent policies for analyzing collected employee data, and they may even store it insecurely. This behavior risks making workers feel insecure and suffering the effects of “invasive surveillance,” Phys.org says. That level of explicit oversight can harm workplace culture. 

    When used properly, these wearables, many of which are commercial off-the-shelf products, can warn HR departments in real time about potential problems. One good example is their potential to spot “rising stress before burnout or to safety hazards before accidents,” wrote Dr. Sebastiano Massaro, a neuroscience lecturer and co-author of the study.

    But unless companies have “robust methodological and ethical guardrails,” there’s a risk of blurring the lines between “science and pseudoscience, between real support and dangerous surveillance,” Massaro worries. In their best uses, wearables can “help create safer, healthier, and more responsive and productive workplaces” he thinks. Done badly, they could “normalize unnecessary monitoring and paradoxically increase workplace stress rather than reduce it.”

    Recently, Amazon revealed it was developing smart glasses (a little like Meta’s recently unveiled AR glasses) the company said will help its delivery drivers “identify hazards, seamlessly navigate to customers’ doorsteps, and improve customer deliveries.” The goggles sound like powerful tech, melding “AI-powered sensing capabilities and computer vision” with cameras and a display so a driver can see “everything from navigation details to hazards to delivery tasks,” as well as spotting the right packages in their truck at a delivery address. It’s plausible that these devices could speed up deliveries—a form of 21st century optimization that’s akin to a business efficiency decision that means UPS delivery trucks almost never turn left.

    But Amazon’s product announcement immediately triggered ethical and privacy worries, both about the drivers’ well-being and about data collected outside the trucks, when drivers are at a delivery location, for example. Amazon, after all, has repeatedly been in the news over the way it surveils its workforce, including landing a 32-million euro fine ($36 million) in France in 2024 for doing so excessively. 

    How can you best apply this research for your own company?

    Offering your workers wearable tech can be presented positively — the devices have a certain social cachet, and if they help workers monitor their health and fitness for their own purposes (as well as for more workplace-directed reasons, like monitoring stress levels) then they can be seen as an attractive workplace perk. The data they collect can, if used responsibly, also help you avoid complex health issues like burnout.

    But if you do deploy tech like this, it’s important to be open and transparent about what data is being collected, and what for, and also to be rigorous in protecting sensitive employee medical data. Otherwise you risk harming employee well-being and your company’s reputation. 

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  • How AI Training Can Lead to Productivity Gains

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    While most U.S. businesses are already using artificial intelligence tools in their workplaces, their adoption rates and productivity increases vary greatly. New research shows how valuable those efficiency increases can be when employers give their full support to staff, including properly focused training on new AI tools. It also shows how the ineffective or disorganized introduction of these apps often undermines their potential gains.

    As noted in recent Inc. reports, studies show a majority of global employees aren’t wasting time worrying about AI taking over their jobs, and have instead actively learned to use the tech to enhance the value of their work. A new global survey of nearly 3,250 workers and executives by the London School of Economics’ Inclusion Initiative along with business consultancy Protiviti, quantifies the efficiency gains AI offers. It found that on average, employees save 7.5 hours per week — nearly a full workday — by using apps to automate tasks. The report calculated that by redeploying that extra time for other work, each respondent generated about $18,000 in additional annual productivity for their companies.

    Alas, wasn’t the only lesson for business owners. The study also warned that a large gap exists between the AI-powered productivity increases and the level of support they’re offering staff to use most effectively.

    For starters, 68 percent of employees who answered the survey said they’d received no AI training in the previous 12 months. That was determined to have influenced both adoption rates, and efficiency gains made using the tech. Indeed, fully 93 percent of respondents who’d gotten that instruction reported regularly turning to apps for their work, versus only 57 percent who hadn’t been given that support.

    Meanwhile, the time saved by participants who said they’d received instruction on AI was double that of people who hadn’t. Concretely, 11 extra hours freed up each week to redirect to more productive tasks, versus five hours for people who used the tech without training. According to Grace Lordan, founding director of The Inclusion Initiative and the study’s research lead, those differences offer an obvious message to employers seeking efficiency gains through AI.

    “For business leaders, the priority is clear: Closing the AI training gap is one of the fastest ways to unlock measurable return,” Lordan said in comments accompanying the findings. “Equipping employees with the right skills doesn’t just improve individual productivity — it drives sharper decision-making, accelerates innovation and creates stronger overall performance. In an environment where every efficiency counts, organizations that act now will set themselves apart from those still waiting on the sidelines.”

    Getting all generational workplace members into that game on a more level field is also essential.

    While the survey found 82 percent of Gen Z respondents said they used AI for work, the rate dropped to 52 percent of Baby Boomers. Similarly, about half of Gen Z participants said they were involved in developing AI and its use across the workplace, compared to about 30 percent of Gen Z and Boomers combined.

    In line with those findings, the survey also showed nearly twice as many younger employers received AI training during the previous 12 months than older colleagues. That discrepancy was also reflected in the performance of workplace teams that were made up of people of different age cohorts. About 77 percent of working groups with higher degrees of generational diversity reported regular productivity gains, compared to 66 percent with lower age diversity.

    In other words, survey authors said, companies that both encourage AI use and train all workplace members to use those tools are likely to see higher increases in overall productivity — as well as better adoption rates and efficiency gains by employees of all generations.

    “AI isn’t just another tool for the workplace — it’s a catalyst for rethinking how they organize, lead and empower their people,” said Protiviti global leader of people and change Fran Maxwell. “The organizations that will benefit the most are those that embed AI into everyday workflows, redesign roles to focus on higher-value work, and give employees the confidence to experiment. This research shows that inclusive adoption across all generations doesn’t just improve productivity — it prepares companies for the next wave of change.”

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  • Why Some People Have Better Jobs Than Others

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    Why are some jobs better than others?

    Well, it largely depends on people’s preferences. In other words, one person’s dream job may be another person’s nightmare.

    And yet, there are also clearly some universal or at least generalizable parameters that make most people accept the idea that some jobs are objectively better than others—or at least seen by most as generally preferable.

    Pay and purpose

    For example, jobs that pay well, offer stability, and provide opportunities for growth are almost universally considered better. A tenured professorship, a senior engineering role at a reputable company, or a stable medical position all combine financial security with long-term prospects and prestige. In contrast, poorly paid, insecure, or dead-end roles (like gig work with no benefits or exploitative manual labor with long brutal shifts and an alienating experience) are widely viewed as worse, even if a few individuals might value their flexibility or simplicity.

    Then there’s autonomy. Jobs that grant people a degree of control over how and when they work (e.g., creative professionals, entrepreneurs, and researchers) tend to score higher on satisfaction than those defined by micromanagement or rigid supervision. Autonomy is a proxy for trust and respect, and it correlates strongly with both engagement and mental health. Few people dream of jobs where every move is monitored, and most aspire to roles where they can think, decide, and act freely.

    Unsurprisingly, purpose matters, too. Occupations that contribute to something meaningful (whether saving lives, advancing knowledge, or building something lasting) are viewed as more fulfilling than those that feel transactional or pointless.

    A teacher inspiring students, a scientist developing a vaccine, or an architect designing a community space are all examples of work that confers a sense of legacy. By contrast, even lucrative jobs can feel hollow when they lack purpose or moral value. This may explain the low correlation between pay and job satisfaction, which highlights the fact that we tend to overestimate the importance of compensation when making career choices. In that sense, the “best” jobs aren’t just about rewards, but about how they make people feel about themselves and their place in the world.

    What the science says

    A good way to acknowledge these nuances, and yet still predict whether a person is likely to access better jobs, is to examine why some individuals have more choices than others. That is, in any job or labor market, available job or career opportunities may have different degrees of appeal or attractiveness; but from a job seekers perspective, the more employable you are, the more likely to are to find and maintain a desirable job—whether we look at subjective or objective dimensions of desirability. With this in mind, here are some critical learnings about the science of employability that explain why certain people are better able to access in-demand jobs:

    (1) Their personality
    Research has consistently shown that employability is largely a function of personality. Traits such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, curiosity, and sociability predict not only who gets hired, but also who thrives once employed.

    Personality shapes reputation (the way others see us) and reputation determines whether we are trusted, promoted, and retained. For instance, people who are reliable, calm under pressure, and open to learning tend to be more employable than those who are erratic, avoid feedback, or difficult to work with. Moreover, personality also predicts job satisfaction: even in objectively good jobs, neurotic or disagreeable people are less likely to feel content, whereas optimistic and adaptable individuals find meaning in a wider range of roles, and are resilient if not satisfied even with jobs that make most people miserable. In short, who you are determines both the jobs you can get and how you feel about them once you do.

    (2) Their social class
    While most advanced economies like to think of themselves as meritocracies, the data on social mobility suggest otherwise. In the United States, only about half of children born to parents in the bottom income quintile will ever move up the ladder, and just 7% will reach the top quintile. In the U.K., the “class pay gap” between working-class and professional backgrounds persists even among graduates.

    Privilege still buys access to education, networks, internships, and employers willing to take a chance. Sociologists call this social capital; in plain terms, it means your parents’ contacts and credentials still matter more than your own potential. The world may be trending toward meritocracy, but it hasn’t quite arrived there yet.

    (3) Where you are born
    Location remains one of the most powerful predictors of career outcomes. The “Where-to-Be-Born Index” ranks countries by the opportunities they afford their citizens, and being born in Switzerland, Denmark, or Singapore gives you exponentially better odds of landing a good job than being born in Haiti, South Sudan, or Bhutan. Access to education, infrastructure, technology, and basic security all shape employability. The same talent, if born in a country with weak institutions or unstable governance, is far less likely to achieve its potential. In that sense, geography is more likely than talent to mean destiny, at least until global mobility or remote work meaningfully narrow the gap.

    (4) Their values, interests, and preferences
    Even within similar contexts, people differ in what they want from work. Psychologists like Shalom Schwartz and Robert Hogan have shown that our motivational values (e.g., achievement, power, altruism, security, stimulation, and so forth) determine what “fit” looks like for us. Someone who values adventure and creativity will flourish in startups or design roles, while a person who craves structure and predictability may prefer government or finance. Misalignment between values and job environment (say, a highly independent person in a bureaucratic culture) leads to burnout or disengagement. The better your job matches your values, the more likely you are to perceive it as a good one.

    Adapt, evolve, and improve

    In the end, “better jobs” are not just better paid or better designed; they’re better matched to the people who hold them. Some of this is luck: being born in the right family, in the right country, with the right temperament, will simply afford you a higher range and choice of matches, so you are bound to find more options. But much of it also depends on deliberate self-awareness, namely understanding what kind of environments bring out the best in you, and aligning your career moves accordingly.

    From a societal perspective, the goal should be to expand access to good jobs by improving education, reducing inequality, and helping people develop the skills and traits that make them employable. That means focusing less on pedigree and more on potential, less on connections and more on competence.

    Ultimately, the world of work will never be perfectly fair, but it can be fairer. And while none of us can control where we start, we can control how we grow. The most employable people are not just those who fit the system, but those who learn to adapt, evolve, and turn whatever job they have into something better.

    BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

    This article originally appeared in Inc.’s sister publication, Fast Company.

    Fast Company is the world’s leading business media brand, with an editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, world changing ideas, creativity, and design. Written for and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company inspires readers to think expansively, lead with purpose, embrace change, and shape the future of business.

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  • How New-Collar Jobs Are Shrinking the Value of Degrees in Hiring

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    Among the many workplace evolutions now in full swing is the trend among employers to place as much emphasis on the skills and experience of candidates without college degrees as they do the diplomas of university graduates. As that shift in recruitment criteria has continued, it has created new career pathways—many involving over $100,000 salaries—in so-called new-collar jobs that are enjoying increasing demand.

    The growing range of new-collar jobs is filling the gap between two traditional work categories: office workers, who were initially hired on the strength of their college degrees, and manual laborers without those diplomas. People now flourishing in ‘tweener positions, by contrast, use skills and experience they earned in technical training, certification programs, or simply by working to strengthen the knowledge and abilities that many companies are now clamoring for. That also permits new-collar hires to hit the ground running and immediately produce results for employers, who often previously needed to onboard and train recruits fresh out of universities.

    As with so many developments today, tech is driving the growth of many new-collar jobs, but it isn’t the only sector generating them. Manufacturing, engineering, and, especially, health care companies are also increasingly hiring people who may not have college degrees but do have the skills and experience to begin performing from day one.

    “These roles focus on bridging the skills gap in industries that rely on advanced technologies and specialized training,” said a recent post by Martina Mascali on job posting platform Monster. “For example, a software developer is considered a new-collar job and might acquire skills through coding bootcamps rather than a computer science degree. The key distinction is that new-collar jobs prioritize competence and capabilities over credentials.”

    Monster compiled a list of some of the booming new-collar positions, providing an idea of the varied sectors, specialties, and salaries increasingly open to people without degrees. While many of those positions sound highly technical, they are all open to self-taught candidates or people who attained required skills on the go and are ready to put them to use.

    These include cybersecurity analysts, now in high demand to protect companies from online criminals, who are fetching salaries of $85,000 to $141,000 as they do. Data analyst roles are also multiplying for people with experience with “Excel, SQL, and Tableau, as well as programming languages like Python or R… [and have] strong problem-solving abilities and an eye for spotting trends and anomalies in data,” Mascali writes, adding that those employees tend to make $64,000 to $114,000 in annual pay.

    Similarly, candidates with cloud computing experience are finding a rising number of work opportunities, most fetching between $95,000 and $160,000 annually. Even people who earned their HTML, CSS, and JavaScript chops developing websites for friends, family members, and neighbors can now export those skills to companies wanting to create state-of-the-art web platforms—and which are willing to pay $56,000 to $109,000 annually for help with that.

    But not all jobs Monster listed are based only on computing skills. Mascali notes that businesses needing in-house electricians now pay between $47,000 and $78,000 in annual salaries to those employees. People who both broaden and adapt that electrical know-how into other areas find ample work as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technicians (whose pay ranges from $36,000 to $61,000 per year), and wind turbine specialists (who earn from $49,000 to $61,000 in salary).

    And how many people currently slaving away over college textbooks and cramming for exams wouldn’t be at least a bit tempted by working as a video game tester instead? The growing number of those jobs becomes especially alluring, with Mascali noting they only require “attention to detail, patience, and a passion for gaming… [to] identify bugs and usability issues.” The pay for putting those skills to use in vetting games many college students spend hours playing for free? Between $72,000 and $124,000 annually.

    That sociology degree may start losing its luster compared to a career playing Minecraft or Pokémon Go for a living.

    Still, employers can face some challenges in hiring new-collar workers. For starters, many of those job seekers still assume companies continue favoring degree holders and therefore don’t bother applying to those roles open to them. Others may assume those positions are effectively blue-collar grunt jobs set within professional environments and look elsewhere for more promising prospects.

    To prevent this, Monster and other job posting platforms advise companies to stress the importance of skills and experience over degrees in their recruitment announcements. Businesses should also underline the critical contributions to the business those hires will provide and opportunities for advancement the positions offer.

    Another suggestion for human resource managers with new-collar jobs to fill is to visit the online networking and social-media platforms favored by people pursuing activities that hone the skills being sought—and use those platforms to initiate contact. Many hiring officials may be surprised at the receptiveness and enthusiasm they find there.

    “I love it. Modern education needs a serious overhaul,” said one contributor in response to a thread about the new-collar trend on social-media platform Reddit. “No reason for kids to go into a lifetime of debt for their sociology degree. A portfolio is way more valuable than a resume for a lot of tech jobs. Show me you can do it versus telling me where you learned how to do it.”

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  • How Much Do I Need to Accommodate an Employee’s Religion?

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    Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

    Here’s a roundup of answers to three questions from readers.

    1. How much do I need to accommodate employees’ religion?

    I was curious about where the line is on religious accommodation, and at what point it’s OK to say an accommodation cannot be made.

    I had an employee who needed an accommodation that allowed them to take lunch at a different time from the rest of the company once a week. This was somewhat inconvenient but I was able to accommodate them. Later, they let me know that they were going to need additional accommodations, which again were doable but inconvenient. I also noticed that their work performance suffered during certain times when they told me they needed to fast for their religion. They didn’t make me aware of any of these needed accommodations until they’d been hired and working for a couple of weeks. At one point, someone suggested that in order for me to accommodate this employee, I should to work additional hours myself.

    Ultimately, I was able to accommodate this employee with minimal frustration, but what if it hadn’t been as easy? What if there’d been a standing meeting that they were needed for during the time they needed to take their lunch that couldn’t be easily moved? I want to be as supportive and flexible as possible but at what point am I able to say “this goes past reasonable”?

    Green responds:

    The law says employers must accommodate employees’ religious needs unless it would cause “undue hardship.” The bar for undue hardship is high—generally something that’s costly, compromises people’s safety, requires others to do more than their share of difficult or undesirable work, or infringes on other employees’ rights. Moving a meeting is unlikely to meet that bar, although you having to work more hours probably would.

    If the person’s performance suffered when they were fasting, I’d look at how you handle it when someone else’s performance suffers because they’re sick, tired, hungry, etc. Presumably you figure that everyone has ups and downs, and unless it becomes a pattern, it’s generally just part of working with humans. (I’m assuming the fasting periods were relatively rare. If they weren’t, then you’d address the performance issues just like you would any other—no need to bring the fasting into it.)

    But it’s absolutely fine that the employee didn’t address the accommodations they needed until a few weeks on the job. There’s no requirement, ethical or legal, that they address it earlier than that. (Keep in mind that you can’t legally rescind a job offer over it, so there’s no real reason you needed to hear it earlier; it’s fine for them to raise it when they’re comfortable raising it.)

    2. Is it reasonable to expect a multiyear commitment for an entry-level job?

    I am hiring someone whose work will be split 50-50 between the department I manage and another department. Both of us really need a full-time person, but the budget won’t stretch that far this year, so this is meant to be a stopgap until we stabilize a bit more. The other manager has decided she wants someone to commit for a minimum of two years, ideally three. The problem is that the job we’re hiring for is very entry-level. It’s half clerical data-entry work and half work that is more skilled/creative—but (in my opinion) anyone with the skills to do the more creative side of the job isn’t going to want to stick around in the data-entry side long-term.

    I think that’s normal and I’ve designed my half of the position to be easily replaceable, with the expectation that we’ll have to hire someone new at some point. But the other manager claims that it will take a full year (!) just for the new hire to learn the job, especially the new database system, so there’s no point hiring someone who will leave after a year.

    I have a candidate who I think would be phenomenal. Right now she works for me part-time as an intern, but she has an incredible skill set that would allow her to do both jobs (which are quite different). But, since she’s graduating this year, she doesn’t know how long she wants to stay. I think it would be better to hire her in the short term because she could do a lot of good while she’s here. The other manager would rather have someone less skilled but competent who sticks around longer. Which option is more reasonable?

    Green responds:

    Normally I’d agree with you for all the reasons you laid out, but if this particular candidate is graduating this year, does that mean she might leave you in May or June? If so, I can’t blame your colleague for not wanting to hire someone who might leave that quickly; she’d be starting the hiring and training process all over again after just a few months.

    But beyond this one candidate, point out to the other manager asking someone to commit to three years for an entry-level job is out of step with what most employers ask and will lose you good candidates. Maybe there’s a compromise—18 months wouldn’t be unreasonable. (That said, keep in mind that you can’t lock people in. You can tell them what you’re hoping for and decline to hire anyone who makes it clear they’re likely to leave before that, but unless you’re signing a contract with them—which would be unusual in the U.S.—they’re going to leave when they want to leave.)

    3. CC-ing a manager to compliment their employee

    A colleague asked me to help make his work with me more visible to his manager. We talked about me sending him an email thanking him for some recent work he did and cc-ing his manager, but it feels really awkward. I rarely talk to his manager, so there’s no natural opportunity for me to mention how he’s doing a good job. Any suggestions on writing an appreciative email, or other ways I could help show his manager that his work for my department is valued?

    Green responds:

    If you think he genuinely does good work, it’s a great idea to let his manager know! It doesn’t matter that you rarely talk to her; managers generally are thrilled to get this kind of feedback about their teams, and it won’t seem odd. You could do it as a cc, where you email the co-worker an appreciative note and cc his boss, or you could just directly email her to say something like, “I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate Leo’s work on the X project.” Then give specifics about what he did that was so great—found solutions to tricky problems, persevered around obstacles, produced a better X than you’ve seen before, wowed clients, made a difficult project easy, whatever it was. The more specific you can be, the better.

    But you want this to be genuine. If you aren’t that impressed with the colleague’s work, it’s not something you should do as a favor (since if, for example, his work is consistently subpar, it will reflect oddly on you to rave about it—unless you can find something that you can truly speak well of).

    Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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  • The Economy Seems Uncertain. Here’s Why Entrepreneurs Remain Optimistic

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    Although small company workplaces likely face margin pressures from higher costs generated by import tariffs, they’re still largely upbeat, characterized by owner optimism about their business outlook. Nevertheless, recent data shows that many entrepreneurs are using the same cautious hiring strategies as bigger firms, slowing recruiting to a crawl nationwide.

    That mix of entrepreneur confidence despite lingering concerns over the broader outlook for economic growth was captured by payroll and staff management service provider Gusto. Its recent “State of Small Business 2025” report surveyed 1,148 owners of midsized and smaller companies, most of whom remained upbeat despite the impact of import tariffs, rising costs, and higher interest rates that have made borrowing prohibitively expensive. Indeed, an impressive 87 percent of respondents said their businesses met or exceeded performance expectations this year, including 51 percent of participant who said they’d fared better than anticipated.

    Still, entrepreneurs were divided in their views of the wider economy, with exactly half of respondents describing themselves as either somewhat or very pessimistic about its direction. By contrast, only 28 percent of participants said they were somewhat or very optimistic about the economy, while 21 percent were undecided.

    Small business owners were even more tightly split about the effects of tariffs. Half described import duties imposed this year as having had more negative consequences than previously existing duties did. Surprisingly, the other 50 percent of participants said the recent levies had generated no additional impacts beyond those of previous customs levies, or had even produced positive changes.

    But there was another way the tariffs colored entrepreneurs’ perceptions. Eighty-five percent of small company owners who voiced negative views of the economy said tariffs had influenced that view, while 65 percent of respondents who said their businesses had underperformed their expectations blamed import duties at least partially for that.

    “(T)he costs of tariffs are felt by many small business owners, who told us that tariffs are creating a clear drag on margins and forcing them to rethink supply chains and possibly scale back expansion plans,” the Gusto report said. “What began in 2025 as uncertainty is now manifesting at the end of the year as real economic costs.”

    In addition to tariff costs prompting some entrepreneurs to rethink growth plans, wider doubts about the economy have also led many small business owners to embrace the minimalist hiring patterns adopted by bigger companies since the first quarter of the year.

    Around 40 percent of owner-respondents who employ one person or more said they had hired no additional new staff this year. That was often described as a check on rising costs, a precaution that many entrepreneurs attributed to tariffs and inflation. Nearly 60 percent of 2025 Gusto survey participants said higher prices had had a negative effect on their businesses — compared to 49 percent last year — leading many to become wary of adding more staff and salary expenses.

    “The smallest businesses tend to keep their headcount steady over time and hire only when an employee leaves,” the Gusto report said, noting that aligned with other aspects of national employment strategies. “The low rate of hiring among those firms suggests more workers are staying put, which is consistent with broader trends in the labor market.”

    Small business owners who have been hiring said they often filled customer-facing jobs, or other work requiring human skills that artificial intelligence applications can’t replace.

    “(A)s price increases have stressed the budgets of both businesses and consumers, small businesses who can’t easily raise prices may be investing in exceptional customer service to retain and attract customers,” the Gusto report said. “Finally, customer- and client-facing roles may be more resilient to replacement by today’s AI tools, as most of their value comes from a ‘human touch’ AI can’t replicate.”

    Another concern a majority of entrepreneurs voiced are the still relatively high interest rates that make borrowing money through bank loans too expensive. As a result, nearly 60 percent of survey respondents said they turned to alternative forms of external financing this year, with owners’ drawing from personal savings or using business credit cards cited as the most frequent forms.

    Contrary to popular belief, however, those funds were often used just to keep existing business running, and not to finance expansion plans.

    “It’s a popular assumption that small businesses primarily seek financing to grow their business,” the Gusto analysis said. “However, our survey shows financing is more often used to cover everyday expenses. This year, entrepreneurs have been most likely to use external financing to cover short-term costs or buy equipment and tools. Just 16 percent of small businesses that have received external financing this year have used it to invest in long-term growth.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • The Modern Day Tech Worker Is Obsolete. Amazon’s CEO Just Told Us Why

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    In over 25 years working in tech—from my first days as an entrepreneur developer, through co-inventing some of the first generative AI, to my current stint helping all kinds of companies figure out the AI evolution—I’ve never seen the employer-employee relationship this toxic.

    It’s more than the effects of an employer-friendly labor market. That shift happens every five years.

    It’s more than a technical evolution being sold as magic fairy dust that can increase productivity a jillion percent. That happens every 10 years.

    It’s more than the definition of work changing from accomplishing great and unexpected things to pushing buttons until the investors are happy with the quarterly numbers. That’s a constant battle.

    After Amazon announced another massive round of job cuts last week—anywhere from 14K to 30K corporate employees on the block—CEO Andy Jassy got on their quarterly earnings call—where the company announced $21 billion in profits—to give us the real reason behind all those layoffs.

    And it might be the tipping point that finally destroys the notion of a tech job as anything but a short-term contract to be filled by whoever is available and cheap.

    Here’s why.

    Layoff Reasons Roulette

    Yeah, this one is gonna be a little dark. I just wrote one on AI porn. It’s funnier. Go read that. 

    Anyway, I also wrote a column a couple days ago, right after the layoffs were announced, listing the reasons I keep hearing from tech companies about why these layoffs are necessary.

    I’ll try to make the layoff reasons funny:

    1. AI is better than humans at most jobs, and Claude makes us feel validated.  
    2. No one wants to return to the office, so those losers are 86’d. 
    3. Oops. We overhired and we’re “fixing the glitch.”
    4. Hey investors, we heard you like EPS so we got you a bunch of EPS.

    Ugh. Humor is gonna be harder than I thought. 

    But like a drunk football fan making bolder and bolder braggadocious statements as his team keeps winning, it’s only a matter of time before big tech jumps off a porta-potty through a flaming, flimsy plastic table. 

    Funnier? What if I made that table the leadership table?

    “Culture.” You Keep Using That Word…

    From the Amazon CEO’s comments during the earnings conference call:

    “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven—not right now, at least,” he said. “Really, it’s culture.”

    First of all, love the “not right now.” Total gangster.

    Second. How? How is this a cultural move?

    I mean, I’m not saying it’s not. Culture is a corporate term that has been redefined, reshaped, and smothered to death over the last two decades. It used to mean actively cultivating an environment where all the pieces—from leadership to employees to customers to partners—felt good about their relationship with the company. 

    And not even in a squishy way, like it is today. The goal of culture was literally to get everyone to believe, “I like doing business with this company.” 

    To call axing up to 30K of the workforce a cultural move is a little like saying, “We’re all one big happy family… so I’m gonna borrow $1,500 from you and show up drunk to your niece’s wedding.”

    “It’s Not AI”

    I don’t want to “yes it is” this. I really don’t.

    I get it. It’s not an AI move… yet. But the “productivity gains” that are coming with AI automation are real, and they’re going to make the generative AI “chatbot” productivity gains look as silly as they turned out to be.

    What the scrappy entrepreneurial class is doing with AI will make your head spin. And, once you get past the nominal chicanery, it’s not just dorm-room and garage startup stuff. These are companies getting to $1M ARR in days and $10M ARR in a couple months. Or so they say, but there are a lot of these stories around, enough to keep a megacap CEO up at night.

    So if it is indeed an agility move, let’s talk about what Amazon’s CEO means when he says he wants to run Amazon like… 

    The World’s Largest Startup

    Amazon is not a startup. 

    I got into a fight with a former big oil executive about this.

    Not really. We exchanged a couple of pleasant emails, but he initially reached out because he misunderstood something I said in the layoffs reasons column, where I also referenced Amazon’s goal of “running the company like it’s the ‘world’s largest startup.’”

    Big oil guy said I shouldn’t expect Amazon to run like a startup.

    I didn’t say Amazon was a startup. I didn’t say Amazon should run like a startup. Them are quotes. Their CEO says this, and in fact repeated it on the earnings call. 

    And when we get past the misunderstanding, I think we can all agree. Amazon is not a startup, and no amount of workforce optimization is going to make Amazon run like a startup, even the World’s Largest Startup. This includes cutting 30K on top of the 27K since 2022 out of the roughly 350K corporate employees at the heart of their 1.2M total employees.

    Hell, startups have a hard time running like startups once they reach 50 employees. 

    Ultimately, I have no qualm with big corporations trying to recapture the flexibility and fleetness of their startup days. In fact, I also get paid good money to help companies do just that. And while removing bloat is always a necessary evil, the 1.2M denominator here is just too high.

    Damn man, even big oil agrees with me on that. 

    I’m Not Judging You, I’m Begging You

    I believe every time I talk about this in public, I add to the list of CEOs and leaders who get mad at me. Fine. I’ll take that. I’m a big boy and I know the kind of value that comes with doing these things the right way.

    But please understand, I’m not calling anybody out here, not even Amazon. I’m not judging these moves or this messaging. I’m trying to make all of us – including them, you, and me – more successful. This isn’t about anyone’s political or business beliefs, or their methods, or ignoring what kind of pressure they’re under. 

    When I coached my kid at baseball, and he kept swinging under the ball and popping up, eventually I just had to start telling him, “You’re doing it wrong.”

    That’s not judgment. He’s doing it because he wants to hit the ball out of the park. I want him to hit the ball out of the park.

    I’m begging these leaders to change their tone. That’s it. You run the company however you see fit. But if you don’t change the way you value and respect your workforce in public, you’re going to force more and more of that workforce to come up with a backup plan. 

    We need to fix the relationship before it gets damaged beyond repair.
    Please join the rebel alliance of over 10K professionals on my email list. My goal is to run my email list like it’s the “World’s Largest Email List.”

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Joe Procopio

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  • Small Businesses, Big Ouches. These 7 Weird Workplace Injuries Stand Out

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    The frequency and costs of workplace accidents leave entrepreneurs particularly vulnerable, because they have a much bigger impact on smaller companies. The latest annual study by Denver-based Pie Insurance detailed the rate and financial impact of those mishaps to small-business owners, and listed some of the weirdest incidents in the past year.

    The main finding of the recently released Pie Insurance 2025 State of Workplace Safety Report was the high percentage of small businesses involved in workplace accidents. Its survey of 1,018 company owners found 75 percent saying they’d had to manage worker injuries over the past year, and that 50 percent of those were preventable. Nearly a third of those entrepreneurs said on-the-job incidents had cost them an average of $20,000 per employee involved, as well four workdays typically lost while an employee recovered.

    That’s all part of the $176.5 billion toll workplace accidents cost employers annually in recent years. Most larger companies suffer even higher losses from accidents than small-business owners, with their average per-injury cost rising to $43,000.

    But if expenditures for accidents in founder-owned workplaces were less than half of those suffered by larger companies, smaller businesses outdid themselves in the category of strangest mishaps reported over the last year.

    Among what Pie Insurance charitably referred to as the “most unique and unusual” of those included truly strange accidents involving employees who:

    • Refused to stop hitting golf balls in the workplace, causing another worker to be knocked out after being hit in the head by one
    • Suffered third-degree burns after sitting on “a freshly cleaned hot office chair”
    • Were knocked unconscious by a frozen fish propelled by a malfunctioning conveyor belt
    • Slipped on a pickle in the lunchroom and cracked their spine
    • Forgot to turn off the lights, leading to a blown fuse that caused burns to another employee the following day
    • Choked on a bone at a Christmas party, resulting in a trip to the emergency room
    • Stapled their hand instead of the document they were working on

    Authors of the Pie Insurance report further demonstrated their gift of comic understatement by citing incidents worthy of a workplace sitcom with the reminder that, “despite our best efforts, workplace safety can sometimes be affected by the most unexpected circumstances.”

    Nevertheless, some small-business owners who participated in the survey were apparently determined to improve their workplace safety records—even if that meant anticipating improbable, and in some cases seemingly impossible, accidents. As a result, new measures they introduced over the past year included:

    • Requiring employees to have their pupils checked before using ladders to ensure they’re not under the influence of prohibited substances
    • Instituting a “no high-heels” rule to reduce foot and ankle injuries from long hours of walking on hard floors
    • Prohibiting employees from making their own coffee to prevent burns, with only managers being allowed to operate brewing machines
    • Establishing a “no drone zone” policy after an employee’s aerial hobby became a workplace safety hazard
    • Banning chewing gum after an improperly disposed wad resulted in a worker’s injury

    And last but not least, there was the small-business owner who formally prohibited employees from swatting golf balls in the workplace, after learning the painful and costly lesson of that activity one too many times already.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Most Gen-Z Employees See Traditional Career Paths Coming to an End

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    Many employers and co-workers have voiced exasperation at Gen-Zers’ reputed resistance—if not defiance—to conforming with traditional workplace roles and demands. New data indicates the workforce’s youngest members not only don’t plan on bending to that criticism, but even view the long-held business models those gripes are based on as doomed.

    That view of traditional work and career paradigms being destined for the ash pile of history appears to explain many why many Gen-Zers are behaving in ways that alternatively confuse and annoy older colleagues. According to the latest Next Gen of Work report by freelance job platform Fiverr, its survey of 12,000 workers born between 1995 and 2012 found a majority saying the model of working one’s way through the corporate ranks will soon be sleeping with the fishes alongside cradle-to-grave employment. That view explains why many cohort members are not only disinclined to comply with workplace expectations and demands, but think conforming to a mold in order to keep a long-term job has become a road to nowhere.

    As a result, a mere 18 percent of Gen-Z respondents cited ascending a profession with a single employer as a smart way of getting ahead in the world. Bolder still, over half of survey participants—or 54 percent of the total—predicted traditional employment itself will become obsolete in coming years. And only 14 percent of Gen-Zers questioned listed working for a well-known corporation as one of their career ambitions—furthering the cohort’s break with the tenets that dominated post-war employment.

    Not illogically, many Gen-Zers who view career paths that older generations adhered to as living on borrowed time are instead creating alternatives to the 9-to-5, five-day week, working for a single employer models. As part of that, many of them are turning to income stacking—or generating multiple sources of revenue by juggling several professional activities. Fully 67 percent of Fiverr survey participants said they considered having an array of revenue sources as essential to attaining financial security.

    But in addition to Gen-Zers’ (in)famous determination to blaze their own trails tailored to their personal interests—often at the expense of workplace conformity and harmony—there’s another factor driving their multi-activity alternative. The survey found many cohort members are haunted by worries that a single job and income won’t allow them to get by.

    “Faced with economic uncertainty, Gen Z is experiencing what we’re calling ‘single-paycheck panic’—they’re diversifying income streams because relying on one job feels too risky,” said Michelle Baltrusitis, Fiverr’s associate director of community and social impact in comments on the survey results. “Instead of waiting for stability, they’re betting on themselves by embracing freelancing and building financial resilience as the smarter path forward.”

    But Baltrusitis stresses that “Gen Z isn’t rejecting work, they’re redefining it.” The survey found respondents often start doing that even before quitting the full-time jobs they consider doomed. Nearly 40 percent of survey participants said they had or currently were taking on freelancing work in addition to 9-to-5 jobs they held down.

    The reason for that transitioning? Nearly half of respondents cited not making enough money as their biggest career worry. In addition to whatever presumably insufficient salaries they were earning from full-time positions, many Gen-Z survey participants said external costs like high rents, increasing prices, and paying off student loans have made working just one job too risky.

    And as they shift from a single job to the independence of juggling multiple gigs full-time, a large portion of Gen-Zers are adapting their use of artificial intelligence at work in ways that are also beneficial to their outside activities. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they trust the tech to assume some of their professional responsibilities. Meanwhile, 20 percent or more of survey participants said they used apps for help in brainstorming their multiplying workflows, generating content, and improving creative ideas.

    But even as they define what they consider post-modern work paradigms, the survey found Gen-Zers remained conscious of—and a bit hacked off by—the ways former and future co-workers viewed them.

    Nearly a quarter of respondents said older colleagues were off base in considering members of the younger cohort as lazy. As an apparent reflection of their willingness to toil away alongside previous generations, just 17 percent of respondents listed early retirement as a career ambition.

    That attitude may well earn Gen-Zers more respect from older colleagues, but they’d get even more props—plus heartfelt thanks—if they’d do something about the stare.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • My Employee Overdoes Everything, and It’s Costing Money

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    Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

    A reader asks:

    I run a small business that supplies a product to major companies. To keep the details anonymous, let’s say that we supply garments to a few mid-tier clothing retailers that you can buy in the mall. The problem is that one of my employees two levels down (he reports to someone who reports to me), Dave, behaves as though we’re making clothing for Gucci or Prada. This causes enormous production headaches. It means everything moves much more slowly through his department, because he is extremely conscientious about quality.

    That is admirable, but it results in things like being short with our subcontractors because they have not produced the products to his standard, even though they have produced them to industry standards. We’ve lost freelance designers because they’re being paid being asked to make Prada-level clothing for Old Navy-type wages. He also causes many things to be done over or redoes them himself. This dramatically drives up the cost of what we produce. He should be producing 5,000 items a year in order to justify his salary but he only produces 3,000. This means we have gotten to a point where it actually costs us more to produce these products than we are being paid for them.

    Both his manager and I have attempted to tell him directly that he is overdoing things. This angers him and causes him to dig in his heels. We’ve said, “You don’t have to redo this work. It was fine the way the freelancers produced it. Just concentrate on the big issues like the overall cut of the fabric.” What he apparently hears is, “What you do doesn’t matter. You’re wrong to be concerned about quality.” His reaction is to stay up all night and work through the weekend to try and increase his numbers instead of just not doing everything twice.

    Dave’s heart is in the right place. This is tricky because it’s not like we’re asking him to do X and he refuses. We’re asking him to do X, and he does X twice and then adds Y and Z! How can I motivate Dave to take a step back and be more in alignment with the market tier we serve instead of driving up cost and increasing everyone’s aggravation by overdoing things? Or perhaps he is just a bad fit for this job?

    Green responds:

    He might be a bad fit for the job. Whether his heart is in the right place or not, you can’t keep someone on who refuses to work in the way that you need, wildly misses your production metrics, and drives up your costs—and who, when spoken to about it, flatly refuses to change what he’s doing.

    But first make sure you have been very, very clear with Dave. Not just “Concentrate on X, not Y” clear. This needs to be, “If you do not immediately start doing X and stop doing Y, we are going to need to let you go” clear.

    You need to say it that way to make sure Dave understands the stakes. It’s possible that he has been hearing, “We would like to have the level of care and quality that you’re providing and obviously it would be better if we could, but sadly we cannot find a way to sustain it.” And he’s thinking, “Let me show you how we can do it!”

    So you need to be crystal clear that you don’t want it and will not allow it. You also need to be clear about the consequences if he continues—that you will fire him. If you don’t spell that out explicitly and then you let Dave go, he sounds like he might be shocked because he’s focused on how much he cares and how hard he’s working (and in his mind, who would fire someone who cares so much and works so hard?). So it’s a kindness to let him know now that that’s the path he’s heading down.

    If you have this conversation and the problem continues, then you’ll know that he just can’t do the job you need done. At that point, you can move forward with a clear conscience because you’ll have told him clearly what he needed to do to stay in the job and will have given him a chance to do it.

    Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Alison Green

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  • How Companies Are Turning No-Hire, More-Fire Into a Growth Strategy

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    Job creation by U.S. companies has nearly flatlined since last spring, with most employers only hiring to replace departing staff members, or leaving those positions vacant. The bad news for people looking for work is that this trend may be gaining momentum as many businesses decide they can continue growing while either maintaining or cutting current headcounts.

    That thinking contrasts the conventional wisdom often cited to explain why hiring rates have fallen to a measly monthly average of 26,750 new jobs filled since May. Many analysts said that hesitation to recruit was based in large part on uncertainties employers faced about future economic growth. Other experts pointed to the still evolving effects that import tariffs, mass deportations, and relatively robust inflation are having on businesses.

    Another reason cited was the spreading effort by companies in adopting artificial intelligence(AI) to automate tasks that many employees previously performed. That move has provoked thousands of layoffs, while also fully taking over many entry-level positions that younger job seekers have habitually relied on.

    But while all those factors may be shaping the wider business community’s current aversion to hiring, other evidence suggests some companies recently made indefinitely freezing or decreasing their headcounts a central growth strategy.

    “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth Galetti, Amazon senior vice president of people, experience, and technology wrote in a staff memo Tuesday announcing “an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.”

    Similarly, on Tuesday UPS said it has already cut 48,000 jobs in 2025 alone in an effort to improve productivity. Other companies have also adopted the tactic.

    “By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, said in a memo obtained by Business Insider that announced last week’s 600 job cuts at the company’s Superintelligence Labs division.

    ‘Preemptively hold the line’

    Both Wang and Galetti noted their dramatic cuts would be followed by the creation of future, presumably far fewer jobs. But a recent Wall Street Journal report offered evidence that the trend to continually reduce net staffing levels is spreading across big U.S. businesses.

    The paper quoted a JPMorgan Chase executive’s observation that the bank now has a “very strong bias against” reflexively hiring people for needs it might fulfill otherwise. It also noted Goldman Sach’s stated intention to “constrain head count growth through the end of the year,” and Walmart’s similar objective of keeping overall staffing flat.

    In many cases it examined, the Journal said the increased use and performance of AI are allowing businesses to continue growing, innovating, and serving customers with fewer employees than previously required.

    “If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people,” Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky told the paper, saying he plans to keep headcount stable at around 7,000 employees over the next year. “I see a lot of companies preemptively holding the line, forecasting, and hoping that they can have smaller workforces.”

    Yet there are also signs that in addition to hedging against economic uncertainties and reaping the efficiencies provided by AI, there may be another calculation in the current moves to freeze or cut staffing levels. That thinking may internalize the habitual approval of Wall Street investors to layoff announcements, as companies move to reduce their salary bases, increase efficiencies, and boost their bottom lines.

    “(H)istorically, if someone leaves, if Jane Doe leaves, I’ve got to backfill Jane,” Intuit chief financial officer Sandeep Aujla told the Journal. To weaken that that reflex, Aujla said, company managers are required to make convincing arguments for replacing departing employees to get approval, with new hiring now viewed as a last resort.

    As a result, Aujla said, both layoffs and voluntary quits encourage managers to ask, “Is there an opportunity for us to rethink how we staff?”

    ‘Companies do not want to hire’

    A similar reflection process in the opposite direction is now underway across social media platforms. A growing number of users are posting their beliefs that even companies that advertise job openings no longer have any intention of actually filling them.

    Whether commentators attribute that to continual downsizing strategies, AI as an opportunity for replacing employees, or the economic uncertainty that has reduced hiring levels since May, many online commentators now suspect the entire employment and recruitment process is broken, or even rigged.

    “Companies do not want to hire new employees,” posted JackReaper333 on a recent Reddit thread. “They want their current employees to (a) produce more and (b) do the work of any other employees that quit… Companies will only hire new employees when they are forced to do so, that is to say, things have gotten so bad that even the higher-ups have to finally admit that their current employees cannot produce anymore.”

    Some redditors sharing that view also interpret the abundance of job openings overlapping with flat or shrinking hiring rates as reflecting an ulterior motive behind recruitment notices. One thread claimed employers who are advertising opportunities, or even interviewing candidates, “are prospecting, not hiring.”

    “I have seen first hand, companies will just prospect without actually hiring anyone,” wrote thread initiator pastelpaintbrush. “They will post job listings, do interviews, and never hire. They just want to see what’s in the job pool.”

    Another redditor offered an alternative analysis that factors in the the increasing use of AI to automate the scanning and analysis of job applications.

    “They want to data mine our resumes and show their investors that they are ‘growing,’” said Feisty-Problem516. “Making job postings is a win-win. There is no intent to hire.”

    While those allegations are clearly too broad to apply to many, perhaps even most businesses recruiting people, they do reflect darkening public opinions about the health of the U.S. employment market. Those dim views aren’t likely to improve after redditors get a look at the Journal’s report quoting business leaders’ no-hire strategies seeming to confirm their fears.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Jeff Bezos’ Secret to a Clear, Focused Mind Is Puttering. Psychology Says He’s on to Something 

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    Many founders and CEOs are known for their high-octane morning routines. Not Jeff Bezos. The founder spends the first hours of his day “puttering.” 

    “I like to read the newspaper, I like to have coffee, I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. Puttering time is very important to me,” Bezos explained back in 2018. According to his wife Lauren Sanchez, his mornings still focus on slow, offline puttering today. 

    Sipping your coffee while catching up on the news sounds pleasant. But Bezos doesn’t just putter around in the mornings because he’s a billionaire who can do what he pleases. In the same interview he explains that his relaxed morning routine helps him clear and center his mind so he can make high-quality decisions during the day. 

    To the productivity obsessed, puttering might sound like the opposite of focused effectiveness. But psychology insists Bezos is on to something. Puttering, by definition, may be aimless and small in scale. But science is clear it can also help our brains work at their best.  

    Puttering as mindfulness 

    The hectic modern world means most of us spend a large portion of our time ticking through a never-ending to-do list. This frantic turning of the mental wheels can be productive. But it doesn’t leave much room for reflection, creativity, or a simple appreciation of the small pleasures of the present moment. 

    Wandering around doing this and that, on the other hand, acts as a form of mindfulness. It turns off the churn in our brains for a bit, leaving space for ideas and even contentment to bubble up. 

    “Puttering is a gesture of respect from our brains to our physical selves. It’s not about thinking, or reading, or producing. Instead, we take on ‘mindless tasks’ that need only the most minimal participation of the brain. We acknowledge our surroundings, consider what makes us comfortable, and tend to those things, however aimlessly,” explains author Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today. 

    We grit our teeth through housework drudgery. Puttering, in contrast, is a series of low stakes wins we do for the sheer satisfaction they bring. Our attention is on the task as we do it. This present focus quiets the mind in a way that is “deeply therapeutic,” Dembling insists. 

    Set “free from all constraints, my brain meandered at its own pace and in its own way, unclenching and creating space through which fresh ideas wafted. It was relaxing, refreshing, and rejuvenating,” she writes of her own puttering.  

    Research supports Jeff Bezos  

    Studies agree with her (and Jeff Bezos) that puttering is a low-key but effective way to center yourself. 

    For one, researchers explained to volunteers that doing the dishes could act as a form of mindfulness if they simply focused on the sensory details of the task, the warmth of the bubbly water, the gleam of a clean plate. Afterwards, subjects reported that six minutes of this everyday chore reduced their nervousness by 27 percent and increased their inspiration by 25 percent. 

    Puttering, it turns out, is a state of mind, a way of approaching whatever minor job is in front of us. When we tackle these tasks in this unhurried way we gain some of the same calming, creativity-boosting effects as other more formal mindfulness practices, like meditation. 

    Perhaps that’s why, at least as late as 2014, Jeff Bezos also still claimed to wash the dishes himself every night. 

    Puttering as anti-anxiety intervention 

    “Puttering has to do with cleaning and organizing; but it isn’t those things. You begin by identifying an itch in your personal space: something like a jar that has a lot of different types of things in it, or a shelf of plates where you can see a layer of dust underneath everything,” cartoonist Sophie Lucido Johnson wrote in an ode to her husband’s gift for puttering on Medium. 

    One of the great pleasures of puttering, she continues, is the joy of scratching those itches. That ability to right a minor wrong, to remind yourself that you can be effective in the world, is another science-backed benefit of Bezos-style puttering. 

    “Unlike other distracting activities – such as playing computer games or watching trashy TV – puttering also has the advantage of being proactive and useful, increasing our ‘perceived control,’” explains the BBC. The small shot of agency when you organize the junk drawer, say, reduces physical markers of stress in the body, it reports.  

    Feeling more in control in tiny ways, calms us down. That sets us up for larger, more difficult exercises of agency and control later. And if our puttering makes your environment a bit tidier, that’s all the better. Less visually crowded spaces, also soothe our brains, science shows. 

    “In general, you see much greater brain activity as you increase the number of distracting objects within a scene,” the BBC also notes. “This may lead your brain to tire so that it struggles to maintain its focus over long periods of concentration.”

    If Jeff Bezos makes time to putter, so can you

    Take all this together and you have strong evidence that Jeff Bezos isn’t just enjoying his life when he’s puttering around each morning. (Though he’s probably doing that too, which is a perfectly excellent goal.) He’s also practicing a low-key, practical form of mindfulness that helps to reset and prepare his brain for the day to come. 

    If a titan of industry like Bezos can justify spending time puttering each day, certainly you can give yourself permission to putter too. Your brain will probably thank you. 

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Jessica Stillman

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