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Tag: workplace

  • One Lesson in Leadership from Robert Redford

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    As an Academy Award winning director, actor, producer, and the founder of Sundance Film Festival, the late Robert Redford, 89, was undoubtedly an impressive individual. But what made him a great leader was his “generosity to incubating new talent,” according to Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of Artist Programs at the Sundance Institute, who worked with Redford for 44 years.

    Satter penned a homage to Redford’s leadership style in TIME Magazine, where she noted that despite his many talents, Redford was very “humble” and a “good listener.” At the beginning of their professional relationship, Satter admitted she struggled with being in the presence of someone so accomplished.

    “It felt like the most important person in the world was sitting next to me,” Satter wrote. “I would often wonder to myself, how could I just be me, authentically, around someone of that stature? But Bob was uniquely humble. I quickly discovered that he only wanted us to be ourselves, and be completely present.”

    Evidently, Redford was aware of how nervous he made aspiring filmmakers, and other types of professionals trying to break into Hollywood. So how did he make these folks feel comfortable? He listened, Satter said. Perhaps business leaders can take a page out of Redford’s playbook to build the next generation of talent.

    “Watching him as a creative advisor guiding the emerging filmmakers was truly mesmerizing,” she said. “With an awareness of his own presence, he would intentionally start by listening and inspiring filmmakers to find their voice, their stories, and the confidence and skills they needed as directors and writers.”

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    Kayla Webster

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  • In U.S. First, New Mexico Launches Free Child Care for All

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    New Mexico became on Saturday the first U.S. state to offer free child care to all residents in a bid to boost its economy and lift education and child welfare levels ranked the worst in the country.

    Under the program, families, regardless of income, can receive state vouchers to cover public and private child care fees. It culminates efforts New Mexico has made to expand access to free child care since the governor and state legislature created the Early Childhood Education and Care Department in 2019.

    The launch comes as other Democratic-run states, cities and counties eye a step popular among working families. Connecticut recently passed a bill making child care free for those families earning under $100,000 per year and no more than 7 percent of income for those earning more. New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed no-cost universal child care.

    Big savings for families

    Taos special education teacher Allyson O’Brien expects to save around $12,000 a year in child care bills for her son Otis, who is nearly 2-1/2. She and her husband Shawn O’Kelly, a truck driver, earn a fraction above New Mexico’s previous income cap for free child care, which was about $129,000 per year for their family of four.

    “We’ll be able to go on vacation, we won’t have to decide what bills we’re going to pay, like, are we going to do propane or the mortgage?” O’Brien said.

    To achieve a fully universal system, New Mexico must create nearly 14,000 more child care slots and recruit 5,000 educators, according to its Democratic-run government. The state is establishing a $12.7 million low-interest loan fund to construct and expand child care facilities. It is also increasing reimbursement rates to providers that pay entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour, above the state’s $12 hourly minimum wage, and offer full-time care.

    Alison McPartlon, director of the University of New Mexico-Taos Kids’ Campus child care center, said her waiting list is so long some children do not get in before they start kindergarten. She said higher reimbursement rates will help her retain and recruit educators.

    “There will be more centers coming up,” said McPartlon, describing the shift to universal child care as “incredible.”

    Addressing poverty

    New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham told reporters child care was “the backbone of creating a system of support for families that allows them to work, to go to college, to do all the things they need to do to continue to lift New Mexico out of poverty.”

    Nearly 18 percent of New Mexicans live below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census, making it one of the poorest states. Slightly larger in area than the United Kingdom, with only 2.1 million people,

    The state will fund universal child care, estimated to cost $600 million annually, largely with interest from its Early Childhood Education and Care Fund. The fund has grown to around $10 billion primarily from oil and gas taxes since it was set up in 2020.

    The sector generates about half of total state revenue.

    It will also draw from another large trust fund and seek appropriations from the Democratic-controlled state legislature.

    Research shows quality child care lifts education outcomes, especially among low-income families, according to Philip Fisher, a professor of early childhood learning at Stanford University.

    Reading levels of New Mexican students fall far below the national average when children are first tested around age 8 or 9, according to studies by Neal Halfon, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    The Annie E. Casey Foundation has, for years, ranked New Mexico last among states in both education and child well-being.

    New Mexico joins countries such as Norway and Belgium that offer free universal child care for children under 3, and Bulgaria, where early childhood education is free for all children until elementary school. New Mexico is going further by offering no-cost child care for children up to age 13.

    Critics such as New Mexico State Representative Rebecca Dow, a Republican, say families should be given a choice between a monthly $1,200 state tax credit for a parent to stay home with a child – the equivalent cost of state-funded child care – or free child care. She said research showed the best place for a young child was at home in a healthy, safe household. Dow, the founder of a daycare center, supports targeted state-funded care where that is not the case.

    “Why not try a conservative approach of an equal tax credit for mom to be home?” said Dow, who sees a shortage of daycare slots hampering the universal program. “There is no capacity. People are going to be disappointed.”

    Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; editing by Donna Bryson and Rod Nickel

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    Reuters

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  • The Hidden Cost of ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ Leadership

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    “Her smile is not her smile.” That haunting phrase from sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wasn’t written for exhausted CEOs, but it could have been. Years ago, I was a top producer in a large sales organization, mentoring new hires by day and wrangling two toddlers by night. I was smiling on the outside and simmering on the inside—the kind of bone-tiredness that even the strongest coffee couldn’t fix. 

    What is surface acting 

    That’s what researchers call surface acting—suppressing what you feel and simply faking what you must show. In leadership, you likely treat it as part of the job description, but new research shows it’s the start of a vicious spiral. 

    Researchers from the Journal of Organizational Behavior tracked employees throughout 10 workdays and they discovered a telling pattern. When people start the day low on energy, they’re far more likely to rely on surface acting because deep acting—genuinely reshaping your emotional response—takes up-front investment. If you’re already drained, you skip it. Relying on surface acting drains energy even more the next morning. Thus, you are more likely to fake it again. Hello, loop. 

    When emotional labor becomes habitual  

    This cycle of emotional performance isn’t new. Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in her groundbreaking book The Managed Heart, describing how flight attendants and bill collectors were trained to regulate both what they showed and what they felt—not for connection, but for commerce. 

    She identified two types of emotional labor: 

    • Surface acting: Where you fake the required emotions (“nicer than natural” or “nastier than natural”). 
    • Deep acting: Where you internally align with those emotions. 

    Hochschild warned that surface acting leads to a dangerous estrangement, not just from others, but from yourself too. “Her smile is not her smile,” she wrote of a flight attendant—a line that perfectly captures how modern leaders can lose themselves when emotional labor becomes chronic. 

    That insight connects directly to what my team at Limitless Minds teaches as neutral thinking. When your mindset is reactive and has thoughts like “I just need to put on a face,” you are surface acting. When you pause and engage with perspective and think, “I feel X. What do I choose to show?” you are deep acting. 

    Surface acting may feel easier in the moment, but it’s costly over time. Research links it to lower job satisfaction, poorer well-being, higher turnover, and more emotional exhaustion. Deep acting, on the other hand, aligns your internal state with your external display and leads to much healthier outcomes. 

    What this looks like in real leadership 

    Rewind to that meeting I mentioned earlier. I wish I could say I caught myself in the act, but truthfully, I didn’t. Like most leaders, I thought holding it together was the same as holding it well.  

    What if, instead of forcing the smile, I’d taken a micro-break five minutes before—if I’d stepped away, acknowledged my exhaustion, and reminded myself of my team’s needs rather than just the message? What if I’d said, “Team, I’ll be honest with you. I’m drained. I know this quarter has been tough, and that stings. Let’s talk about it openly.” That shift—from surface to deep acting, grounded in mindset—changes everything. 

    Warning signs you might be stuck in a surface acting spiral 

    In the morning, you wake up already depleted, dreading the day. You feel disconnected from your team, as if the interactions are hollow. You struggle to manage your own or others’ emotions, so you lash out or numb out afterward. 

    Research from the National Library of Medicine confirms the negative effects. Surface acting undermines self-control later in the day, and people who deep act drink less and engage in fewer negative behaviors. So how do you break free from the cycle? From my work on mindset and emerging research, here’s a quick five-step reset.  

    1. Micro-pause at midday. 

    Take five minutes to detach—walk outside, breathe, and look at nature. Studies show stealing five minutes from the chaos and giving your brain a timeout replenishes energy and reduces the need for surface acting. 

    2. Reframe the moment.

    Before your next interaction, ask yourself, “What’s this really about? What’s under the surface?” Acknowledge it, then choose how to engage. That’s neutral thinking in action. 

    3. Focus on low-effort restoration after work. 

    Research from the Journal of Organizational Behavior shows that even simple relaxation—like reading, music, or stretching—protects you from surface-acting fatigue the next day. 

    4. Share something real. 

    You don’t need a deep therapy session. Acknowledge to your team or a trusted peer, “I’m feeling a bit used up today, so I might lean on you.” That small act of openness eases the pressure. More importantly, it strengthens what research calls social muscle strength: your ability to connect and recover faster through genuine human moments. In other words, when you share emotions instead of suppressing them, you build the resilience that keeps you from surface acting tomorrow. 

    5. Schedule the reset. 

    Build it into tomorrow. “I’ll arrive 10 minutes early. I’ll center myself. I’ll review this question: How do I want to show up, rather than just show?” You might think, “I don’t have time for that!” That’s exactly the issue. When you’re running on empty, surface acting feels like the shortcut, but it’s actually the long road. It drains you, disconnects your team, and strips away your chance to lead deliberately. 

    Coming back to neutral is the mindset shift that says, “I’m not just going to act. I’m going to observe, respond, and choose.” When your inner state and outer expression finally align, you move from fake-smile survival mode into meaningful leadership mode. 

    The next time you’re in front of a drained room, skip the performance. Step into the pause and choose how you show up. You might just find that the most powerful thing you can offer isn’t the perfect smile—it’s a real one. 

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

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    Henna Pryor

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  • Ethics: My Newly Assigned Second-in-Command Keeps Undermining Me. What Should I Do?

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    A Reddit member writes: My colleague and I were both promoted by my boss a few months ago, I was promoted to Head of, and they were promoted to Director (my 2IC). Their role is split between Director and Regional Manager (not ideal). We’d worked together a little before the promotion but not extensively. Since the promotion, there have been occasions where I believe they’ve undermined me.

    [For example] They proposed shifting strategy in their region and sent me a short Word document outlining the change. I agreed with the sentiment but asked for a more detailed plan, as it didn’t consider all the risks. They agreed, but a few weeks later, I heard from someone else that they had instructed the team to move forward with the plan anyway.

    Now, I’m unsure how to move forward. I’ve lost trust in them. We’ve discussed other initiatives they’ve said they support, but I’m no longer confident they do. Their dual role limits how much they can support me anyway. They are talented, and ideally, I’d like to leverage their ideas–but I don’t have to. To make the best use of their time (and protect mine), my plan is to delegate time-consuming projects I don’t need to handle personally and focus on progressing the broader priorities, as there’s plenty to do.

    Minda Zetlin responds:

    This is a very awkward situation. You have someone reporting to you whom you did not hire or choose for the role. Which presumably means you can’t fire them at will, either. You mention in the discussion that they’re the top performer in this group, and that they work in the same U.S. office as your boss, while you’re working remotely from the U.K. None of that makes this any easier.

    Going ahead with a strategy shift after promising you they’d give you a fuller plan first is a huge red flag. Whether or not they’re actively trying to undermine you, they are refusing to accept your authority. They seem to hope that if they ignore you, you’ll go away. Perhaps they believe your new job should have been theirs instead.

    I’ll echo the advice you got from several who commented: You should document every instance of their broken commitments or insubordination. For example, what happens if the new strategy they launched without your approval turns out to be a disaster? Will they be able to claim that you signed off on it? Or is your request for a detailed report and your warning about the possible risks in writing?

    This employee has earned your mistrust.

    You are very right not to trust this person, which is why documentation is so important. Any solution must start with clearer communication. You mention that you have regular one-on-one meetings, but not how often. For example, what if you had a weekly or even daily check-in in which you asked for an update on their new strategy and on the report they promised they’d write? They would have to choose between telling your up front that they were ignoring your instructions or actually lying to you about what they were doing (rather than simply failing to let you know). Or else, they could put off implementation until they had your go-ahead. Any of these would have been better than what actually happened.

    Although you can’t yet trust them, both ethically and as a good leader, your first goal should be to create a better relationship with them. They’re a top performer and you say you would like to use their talents. They clearly have the potential to be a huge asset to you as well as to your organization. You must try and turn them from an enemy into an ally.

    It’s time to tell your boss.

    You say that your 2IC has a good relationship with your boss, but so do you. Alerting your boss to this issue and providing what documentation you can is the first step. Tell your boss know that you want to improve your relationships with this person, and you will need support to do so. Do it right away. You don’t want the boss first hearing about the problem from your subordinate rather than you.

    Then, have a friendly and honest conversation with your 2IC. Ideally, it should be an in-person conversation rather than video chat although given the distance, that might not be possible. Either way, let them know that they have to start following your instructions. Tell them you are giving them time-consuming work because you can’t trust them with anything better. But you wish that you could.

    Don’t say that they’re intentionally undermining you, even if you feel sure that they are. That gets you into a discussion of their thoughts and motivations, which won’t be helpful. Stick to just the facts: You said this; they did that.

    Tell them you’re on their side.

    Also let them know that you are on their side and would like to have a good relationship. Ask them about their aspirations and what they would most like to do. Let them know you’ll do your best to help them achieve those goals. Make a specific plan for them to check in with you very regularly about what they’re doing and to make sure communications are completely clear. Get their written agreement to this plan. And then forward a copy to your boss.

    What happens next is up to them. If they continue ignoring what you tell them, you’ll have evidence of that in writing. That evidence should be difficult for your 2IC and your boss to ignore. If the problem continues, you’ll be well positioned to initiate or request disciplinary action and/or a transfer away from your area.

    But I hope that’s not what happens. I hope that by being honest, friendly, firm, and fair, and letting them know you care about their welfare, you can gain their genuine support. And maybe even turn this enemy into a friend.

    Got an ethical dilemma of your own? Send it to Minda at minda@mindazetlin.com. She may address it in a future column.

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

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    Minda Zetlin

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  • What Your Company Can Expect As Employer Health Insurance Costs Climb in 2026

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    Open enrollment season begins November 1, and many employees are stunned by price increases in their company-provided health insurance coverage. The sticker shock many workers feel now were already a source of stress for employers, and next year’s hikes are expected to be steeper, according to a healthcare think tank’s latest report.

    The most recent alert about rising health insurance prices came from KFF, a non-profit organization that monitors the medical sector and healthcare issues. Its 27th annual survey of more than 1,800 businesses with at least 10 employees found premiums for the family plans that most workers opt for rose 6 percent this year, well over twice the 2.7 percent inflation rate during the same period. For employers, that pushed the average annual cost of those plans up to nearly $27,000, with about 23 percent of the outlays — or $6,850 —passed along to covered workers.

    Those findings were largely in line with results of a September survey by consulting firm Mercer, which pegged the rises at 6.5 percent — but only after business owners adjusted plans to pass on part of the higher costs with covered workers. Mercer also found employers expect an additional 9 percent hike in health plan prices next year, slightly lower than the 10 percent or more KFF respondents anticipated.

    “Many employers may be bracing for higher costs next year, with insurers requesting double-digit increases in the small-group and individual markets on average, possibly foreshadowing big increases in the large-group markets as well,” the KFF report said.

    The price differences between plans for small and large companies come down to volume — and leverage. Corporations with big staffs can more easily negotiate lower coverage prices with insurance providers than companies with 200 employees or less, many of which participated in the KFF survey. Consequently, most of those smaller businesses pay higher premiums.

    That means once small business owners pass along the typical 20 percent to 25 percent of those costs to staff, their employees on average wind up paying $12,000 per year for family plans, or nearly twice the national amount KFF identified. Many other entrepreneur-owned companies are denied coverage entirely, with insurers considering them too small to bother with.

    When that happens, workers usually turn to plans offered under the Affordable Care Act, which are also expected to rise even higher amid the tax and spending cuts passed in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” As things stand, pretty much all businesses, organizations and individuals seeking health insurance are on the hook for price hikes.

    Employers told KFF that a big driver of the increases are the surging costs of prescription drugs, especially GLP‑1s medication. That’s now frequently being used for weight loss, and by a far higher number of people than any insurance companies or client businesses expected.

    But prices for virtually all aspects of healthcare — including insurance itself — have spiked as consolidation across the sector continues, concentrating pricing power as competition declines. That evolution is one reason KFF warned of even bigger shocks to both employers and workers in 2026.

    “There is a quiet alarm bell going off,” said KFF President and CEO Drew Altman in comments accompanying the survey’s results, in which coverage of semaglutide weight-loss drugs play an increasingly significant role. “With GLP-1s, increases in hospital prices, tariffs and other factors, we expect employer premiums to rise more sharply next year.”

    But there’s another reason for Altman’s alert. While businesses have managed to make changes in the past to negotiate limited increases from insurers — and shift some higher costs to employees — their margin for maneuver has now significantly narrowed. That’s especially true when it comes to skyrocketing prescription drug prices, which are almost entirely out of their control.

    As a result, many employers may have no other option than to require their staff to shoulder more of their health insurance costs, or simply stop including many expensive drugs and treatments that are pushing expenses up.

    “Employers have nothing new in their arsenal that can address most of the drivers of their cost increases,” Altman warned. “(T)hat could well result in an increase in deductibles and other forms of employee cost sharing again, a strategy that neither employers nor employees like but companies resort to in a pinch to hold down premium increases.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • How a Work Permit Renewal Change Threatens Companies and Employees With Legal Troubles

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    Things just became even more complicated for companies employing foreign nationals, and for the people working here on specialized visas. The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday announced the end to automatic extensions of work permits that expire while their renewal applications were being processed. The change means many legal immigrants — and their employers — risk finding themselves stuck in an employment limbo if that documentation expires before it can be renewed.

    The move is only the most recent initiative in the government’s efforts to discourage or prevent foreign nationals from taking jobs that President Donald Trump says he wants to keep open for U.S. citizens. The push previously involved reducing the flow of both illegal and authorized immigration into the country, and conducting mass deportations of undocumented people. It also featured hiking the fees for H-1B visas granted to highly-educated and -skilled tech, medical, and STEM workers from a few thousand dollars to $100,000. This week’s additional change means that as of Thursday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will no longer extend the validity of work permits whose renewal applications are being processed — often very slowly amid the huge backlog of those requests.

    The shift marks a dramatic and pointedly politically reversal of previous rules.

    Responding to the long delays in the USCIS processing work permit renewals, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden increased the automatic extension period for those Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) from 180 days to 540 days. At that time, the Wall Street Journal reported the agency was dealing with a bottleneck of 1.5 million applications. Those included renewal requests by “87,000 immigrants whose work authorization has lapsed or is set to in the next 30 days.”

    More recently, a Bloomberg Law report on the automatic extension being ended Thursday said that as of June 30, “more than 165,000 renewals were pending for all work permit holders.”

    Because most renewal applications are made by immigrants whose work and legal status is in order, they are more often than not approved. Aware of that, Biden’s initiative sought a pragmatic workaround to the long delays processing requests that usually got the green light anyway. The longer automatic grace period let visa holders keep working at their jobs until the swamped USCIS could dig its way out of the its administrative hole.

    That approach has now emphatically come to an end.

    “USCIS is placing a renewed emphasis on robust alien screening and vetting, eliminating policies the former administration implemented that prioritized aliens’ convenience ahead of Americans’ safety and security,” said agency director Joseph Edlow in Tuesday’s announcement of the change. “It’s a commonsense measure to ensure appropriate vetting and screening has been completed before an alien’s employment authorization or documentation is extended. All aliens must remember that working in the United States is a privilege, not a right.”

    That means both those immigrant workers and the businesses employing them risk legal trouble if they continue working together once visas run out during re-processing. While there are limited exemptions to the new rule, the USCIS recommends foreign workers file their “renewal application up to 180 days before their EAD expires.”

    Some legal experts suspect that precaution won’t suffice as work permits expire as holders’ renewal requests languish in long processing queues.

    “These are individuals who have done nothing wrong on their end,” Shev Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Bloomberg Law. “They’re already working, they’ve already been vetted, they’ve timely filed their paperwork. And they are being punished based on government delays.”

    Other labor law experts warn that employers of immigrant workers also risk being penalized when time runs out on working papers under renewal review.

    “This will end up having a huge impact on companies who are likely to face labor shortages as their foreign nationals will no longer be authorized to work without the automatic 540-day extension,” Shanon Stevenson, a partner at labor law firm Fisher Phillips, told human relations news site HR Dive. “Foreign nationals can apply for an EAD extension up to 180 days before expiration, but, in my experience, DHS often takes 8-12+ months to process EADs, which leaves a massive 2-6 month lapse in employment authorization.”

    In the meantime, those shorthanded companies may have a hard time finding U.S. workers to take up the slack. After all, when employers originally recruited to fill those hard, frequently low-paying jobs in construction, hospitality, healthcare, and agriculture, they often wound up hiring immigrant candidates after few Americans were interested in doing the work.

    “The crops will be rotting and won’t be harvested because no Americans want those jobs,” posted Western-Economics946 in a thread on the change on  social media platform Reddit. “How is this beneficial to anyone?”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Small Businesses Aren’t Seeing the Same AI Gains as Big Corporations. Here’s Why

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    Companies of all sizes and sectors are moving swiftly to boost productivity by integrating artificial intelligence applications to automate tasks previously performed by employees. But recent reports clash significantly in calculating AI’s effects on humans, while also diverging on whether larger corporations seem to benefit from AI more than smaller businesses.

    In the end, the difference in those analyses appears to be opinions about how fast and far AI should go in replacing humans in a given workplace, and how beneficial machines taking over from employees is to the results sought in using the tech.

    The first of those inquiries came from Wells Fargo chief equity strategist Ohsung Kwon, who compared changes in revenue generated per each worker on the staffs of big S&P 500 firms. He then made the same calculation for companies on the small-cap Russell 2000 index.

    Using the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI bot as the starting point, Kwon’s team determined that the increased scaling abilities of larger corporations allowed them to benefit from the tech’s automating capabilities to boost the output—and with it, revenue—of workers they employed. During the same period, by contrast, it found productivity in the modest-size businesses fell.

    ″While productivity for the S&P 500 has soared 5.5 [percent] since ChatGPT, it’s down 12.3 [percent] for the Russell 2000,” Kwon wrote in a recent note to clients that was featured in a CNBC report on the differing results of AI adoption in business. “We see other examples of diverging trends in consumer, industrial, and financial markets.”

    But much like today’s big news that Amazon is laying off 14,000 corporate employees as it expands its use of AI across the business, Kwon’s measurement of productivity gains appears to depend mainly on human workers losing their jobs to the tech. Even if overall output remains the same or even dips following tech-driven head count reductions, the lower number of total workers—and payroll savings added back into the bottom line—mechanically boosts per employee claims of revenue generated.

    In addition to Amazon, the CNBC report lists big companies—including Meta, UPS, Starbucks, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google—that have announced big staff cuts this year. Those were undertaken to streamline their structures, but primarily to make way for use of AI to automate many of the tasks eliminated that employees previously performed.

    That willingness of big companies to sacrifice employees, cut labor costs, and boost revenue by scaling their use of AI appears to explain why they’ve benefited more from the tech than small-business owners under Kwon’s analysis. After all, even entrepreneurs responsive to investor demands for increasing returns tend to be more hesitant about laying off people they’re often working in close contact with than corporate managers.

    Any aversion to company founders cutting staff as an integral part of AI adoption may well also explain another of Kwon’s findings. While the S&P 500 rose 74 percent since use of AI took off in 2022, the Russell 2000 increased by just 39 percent—probably reflecting investor views about where the biggest, fastest potential boosts to share prices are.

    Still, none of that means smaller companies are holding back on introducing the tech to their workplaces or missing out on the productivity gains it can offer.

    A recent survey of small-business owners in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K. by Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Insights found nearly 70 percent of respondents used AI on a daily basis, with 75 percent reporting increased productivity as a result. Around 15 percent of participants said adoption of the tech had allowed them to create jobs, with only 5 percent saying they’d cut head counts instead.

    Results of a recent study by business consultancy Deloitte also measured successful adoption of AI in ways other than merely reducing head counts and costs. Its Humans x Machines report argues that both big corporations and small businesses that focus primarily on the tech rather than the employees who use it end up with disappointing results.

    Its survey found that nearly 60 percent of responding companies that deployed AI first and asked workplace questions about its use and effectiveness later are 1.6 times more likely to report lower return on their investment than other businesses.

    Companies with the best outcomes, the report said, are organizations that allowed human relations and other managers to work with staff to identify the most useful kinds of AI applications, train workers to adopt them, and then encourage continued deployment of those tools across the business. The report concluded that the tech will never meet its effectiveness potential unless business leaders prepare employees to enable that beforehand.

    “[M]ost organizations are investing heavily in AI, but not enough in the work design needed to unlock its value,” said Deloitte U.S. human capital head of research and chief futurist David Mallon in comments about the study. “This shouldn’t be an ‘either/or’ approach—it should be a ‘both/and’ strategy to maximize value. Organizations that take a technology-first approach struggle to scale, while those that intentionally design roles, workflows, and decision-making to integrate humans and machines are more likely to exceed their ROI expectations.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Remote Work Boosts Employment for People With Disabilities, Survey Shows

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    The language of DEI may be currently out of favor, but a new report from the country’s largest human resources trade association, SHRM, suggests that the American workforce is far more diverse since the Covid pandemic effectively ended in 2021. The surprising change happened almost by default, but SHRM’s data show that there’s been a huge surge in the numbers of people with disabilities participating in the workplace — partly thanks to the shift toward hybrid and remote working. 

    In fact, SHRM says the rates have hit a “historic high.” As of July this year “nearly 25 percent of people with disabilities participated in the labor force,” the organization notes, adding that the numbers represent a 30 percent surge since the beginning of the covid pandemic. The rising numbers are partly attributed to the shift to teleworking which has ”lowered traditional barriers to employment,” and SHRM also notes that research shows “workers with disabilities are more likely to work fully remote schedules compared to their counterparts without disabilities.”

    An interesting factor in the growth is that it may skew toward younger people with disabilities: labor force participation of people in this group aged 16 to 24 has grown by nearly 60 percent since February 2020, SHRM says, higher than the average growth. This may mesh smoothly with the technological skills of digital-first age cohorts.

    Of course the rising workforce participation of people with disabilities isn’t evenly spread, and the data show it’s lowest in jobs like “life, physical, social science and health care practitioners, and technical roles,” and high in work like building, maintenance and grounds cleaning. It’s possible this is linked, the report notes, to lower barriers to entry for these types of work. This may be a representation, SHRM says, of persistent societal challenges for people with disabilities, including “higher unemployment rates and lower educational attainment compared to those without disabilities.”

    Nevertheless, the positive note here is that the surge in participation numbers are a “a vital opportunity for employers to address ongoing labor shortages,” SHRM’s report suggests, and it also says the data should be a call for HR teams and companies to persist in recruiting and advancing workers with disabilities. The research shows that having inclusive hiring habits, along with flexible or remote working models can help “foster a more diverse and competitive economic environment.”

    The takeaways from this data for your company are very clear. SHRM’s report notes that workers with disabilities right now make up nearly 5 percent of the total employed workforce — that’s 1 in 20 people. If your company’s benefits and working models aren’t disability-friendly, then your recruitment process may be skipping potentially talented, valuable workers without addressing that pool of prospective job candidates.

    But there’s much more value in hiring people with disabilities, starting with presenting an image of a company that has a good reputation — a recent report says that this characteristic may be more important when hiring the right candidates than ever. 

    Meanwhile, a 2018 study of 140 American companies by consultancy giant Accenture found that companies that actively hire people with disabilities recorded 28 percent higher average revenues compared to companies without this policy, and their profit margins were 30 percent higher. Data also show that if an employee with disabilities is happy in their place of work they tend to remain with that employer for longer than people without disabilities. This can lead to cost savings over time, due to lower costs from reduced staff turnover.

    To support your workers with disabilities, it’s also important to remember that there’s more work to do. Reports show that one-third of people in this cohort experience workplace discrimination of one sort or another, including a quarter who say discrimination began with interviewers, and 12 percent who said they’ve had difficulty even accessing the interview.

    The other fact to remember is that there is much wider support for hybrid and remote working models than you may have thought. Offering this to your workers is known to be a good for business as well as a good incentive, and, as SHRM’s data show, it also has benefits for workers with disabilities.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • A New Forecast Sees Less Seasonal Holiday Hiring This Year. Here’s Why

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    There may be a lot less ho-ho-hoing in 2025’s holiday season hi-hi-hiring. Early evidence suggests that businesses may be planning to fill fewer jobs than usual during the last three months of the year, even as the number of people looking for those positions surges.

    The looming holiday season employment slowdown comes as national job creation has essentially flatlined since spring. The last official data before the government shutdown indicated monthly hiring rates dipped to an average of 26,750 new positions from May through August, largely because companies concerned about the economy’s health limited recruitment to replacing departing employees. Now that caution appears to have also been adopted by retailers and other businesses that typically add extra staff during the last months of the year to handle the expected boost in consumer buying.

    A report by executive outplacement company Challenger, Gray, and Christmas released in September forecasted retailers to only add 500,000 seasonal positions this year. It noted that volume would represent the lowest rate of year-end hiring since 2009. The company said those cautious staffing plans reflect the same concerns as other business owners who aren’t doing much hiring. Those worries include the impact of import tariffs, relatively high and enduring inflation rates, and potentially reduced spending by consumers whose budgets are being pinched by higher prices.

    A report by job posting platform Indeed painted a less Grinchy holiday season employment picture, but it still wasn’t terribly merry.

    An analysis by its Hiring Lab research unit found year-end employment opportunities on September 30 were just 2.7 percent higher than on the same date last year. But at the same time, the number of people seeking those positions were 27 percent greater than in September 2024, and 50 percent higher than during the same month in 2023.

    “The level of searches related to seasonal work is far above levels seen immediately before and after the pandemic,” wrote Indeed economist Cory Stahle in a recent Hiring Lab blog post. “But while searches have soared, the number of seasonal jobs available has not… This holiday hiring season will likely be highly competitive for job seekers, with fewer positions available and increased worker interest.”

    Of course, things may change over the next few weeks if retailers and other companies that rely on big year-end business ramp up their hiring plans as the holidays near. But another detail Hiring Lab discovered suggests those belated recruitment hopes may be a long shot. Its analysis found only 2.1 percent of seasonal job postings so far have stressed an urgent need for help, far lower than the 10 percent level in September 2021.

    By contrast, people looking for that work are really in need of seasonal jobs. The higher numbers of people searching for those opportunities indicate many employment seekers have learned the lessons from several months of a sluggish national employment market — and have started looking for year-end opportunities early. If so, that could be be worsening the supply and demand mismatch.

    “It’s possible that some of this shift in timing represents job seekers adjusting to a cooling labor market, longer hiring times, and less employer urgency,” Stahl wrote. “Beyond urgency, workers may also feel the need to get their foot in the door earlier because they are competing for a shrinking pool of holiday jobs… The result is a more competitive seasonal job market with fewer opportunities for a growing supply of workers.”

    Not all retailers are holding back as 2025 nears its end. Spirit Halloween said it’s recruiting as many people as it did last year, and Amazon is hiring 250,000 seasonal workers. Other big chains have said they’re adding unspecified numbers of employees to their staffs, while others declined to reveal their holiday season hiring plans.

    The upshot, Indeed’s Hiring Lab said, is that so far this year, businesses with doubts about the economy are showing similar reluctance to significantly expand headcounts in the holiday run-up as they did this summer. While that’s bad news for seasonal job seekers, it should make recruitment easier for employers who are adding year-end staff.

    “Seasonal work is still out there, but it’s not as easy to come by as it was a few years ago,” Stahl wrote. “All told, this year’s holiday season looks to be a tougher one for job seekers and a little easier for employers.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • 4 Tips for Holding Meetings Without Cutting Productivity

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    Workplace complaints about seemingly incessant meetings are as common as honking horns during traffic jams, or passenger protests over cancelled flights. But new survey data gives more weight to peoples’ grousing about those frequent business huddles, quantifying how many are considered an utter waste of time — and the thousands of dollars in productivity losses they’re costing employers.

    The cautionary contained in those statistics was the big takeaway from a new study of 1,000 U.S. employees by tech product advisory platform Software Finder. It found that the frequency of either in-person or online work meetings led 72 percent of respondents to complain of chronic fatigue or burnout in dealing with them. Perhaps even more troubling for business owners, participants said nearly half, or 46 percent of all staff, customer, or even one-to-one meetings with managers were “unnecessary or unproductive” — that is, wasted time.

    The sheer number of today’s workplace meetings increases the likelihood of participants falling prey to burnout. The survey found the average respondent has to attend five weekly meetings that together eat up six hours of their work week. But 16 percent of participants reported regularly having to attend 10 or more meetings each week, and 19 percent saying those lasted a total of 10 hours or more.

    As a result, Software Finder’s survey found U.S. “employees estimated wasting 146 hours annually in meetings that don’t add value.” The company’s report on the results said that wasted time translated into productivity losses of around $6,280 each year per worker involved.

    Those losses rose to $9,825 for tech businesses and $8,014 for financial companies, whose higher salaries make every hour employees spent idling in unnecessary gatherings more costly. That waste similarly grew with the increasing size of companies involved, and the rank of employees participating in meetings.

    So what can employers do to cut down on time and money lost on unproductive meetings, yet still get staff together to more effectively pursue company objectives?

    A first move could be to decrease or discourage the specific kinds of meetings that survey respondents called the biggest time wasters. Those were led by status updates, all-hands or town halls, brainstorming, project kickoffs, and one-to-one consulting between workers and their manager.

    Another remedial effort would be to encourage people leading meetings to schedule them during times the survey found to be the least disruptive.

    Nearly a third of respondents said the best period for those were Monday mornings, with 40 percent saying huddles during that slot were also the most productive. Perhaps not surprisingly, participants called Fridays — especially in the afternoon — the most disruptive and least effective time to gather teams together.

    Another tip for employers is to prioritize in-person meetings over online alternatives — which 49 percent of participants called more draining than face-to-face gatherings.

    Finally, in an effort to minimize wasted time, business owners and managers holding meetings should read the room and gauge how much people are participating — or more frequently, not.

    According to the Software Finder survey, fully 85 percent of respondents said they’ve remained silent during meetings they regarded as wastes of time. The biggest reasons cited by employees who stay mum were impressions the gathering was entirely performative in the first place; multitasking on more productive work projects; and feeling their input wouldn’t be valued anyway.

    In other words, the Software Finder survey report said, business owners can do themselves and their employees a favor — and avoid frittering thousands of productivity dollars away — by staying attentive to what kind of meetings workers consider worth holding, and the times when those work best.

    “Meeting fatigue is eating up time, money, and energy,” the report’s conclusion warned. “Poorly planned meetings lead to wasted hours and disengaged teams, and the costs add up fast. But it doesn’t have to be the norm. Listening to what employees need and rethinking how meetings happen can turn things around. Cutting even one off the calendar can mean less burnout and more focus.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • A New Survey Says Employees Using AI Believe It Will Create New Jobs

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    The spreading use of artificial intelligence (AI) in business has generated much debate about its potential to replace many duties now done by humans — and also fears about the tech eliminating those jobs. But new data indicates that rather than spending time worrying about that risk, a majority of employees have been actively embracing AI, and using it to become increasingly valuable to their companies.

    That proactive approach to AI, and its positive benefits were a main finding in the recently released Global Workforce of the Future annual report by staffing and tech advisory company Adecco Group. Its survey of 35,700 global employees — 5,500 of whom were in the U.S. — showed 77 percent of respondents reporting use of the tech permitted them to perform tasks that had previously been beyond their reach. Another 71 percent of participants said nothing is holding back increased use of AI applications — up from 19 percent the previous year. That lead 37 percent of surveyed employees to describe themselves as already “future-ready” to keep pace as the tech continues changing their work, and ways they can serve employers.

    Significantly, vanishing jobs wasn’t the workplace mutation from AI that respondents cited most. Indeed, only 23 percent said they expected AI to eliminate company positions — a view shared by 20 percent of U.S. workers.

    By contrast, 76 percent of global participants believed the tech will create new jobs — an opinion also held by 90 percent of U.S. employees — with 70 percent of thinking it will redefine the ways they work (an evolution forecast by 73 percent of Americans).

    One consequence of most respondents viewing AI as an opportunity rather than a threat was the increased influence it had on their working lives in 2025. As a result, factors that topped the 2024 survey — including working flexibility and economic uncertainty — were pushed down the list by the spread and adoption of various forms of AI, which rose from the fifth to the first spot this year. Receiving more instruction, training, and guidance to use the tech more effectively for work were also top desires cited by participants.

    “Our research shows that three in four employees view AI as an opportunity, not a threat,” said Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel in a foreword to the report. “In 2025, the workforce is more confident, ambitious, and ready for AI.”

    Still, the positive survey findings were partially offset by several concerns that employers should be aware of.

    For example, increased use of AI has not only left employees feeling confident and capable of doing more tasks than before, but also enjoying more flexiblility. On average, respondents said the tech saved them two hours of weekly work. While some participants said they used that time to check the quality and accuracy of content the tech produced, others said they invest the extra hours on upskilling, doing more creative work, and collaborating with colleagues.

    But at the same time, many respondents said they wanted more input and direction from employers on how to measure the impact of their use of AI for their company. Others said they’d similarly benefit by being briefed on and included in how the business intends to use AI in its strategic planning, which would allow them to more proactively adapt their jobs.

    “On one hand, there’s real excitement about what AI can do,” Machuel wrote. “On the other, there’s a need to set honest expectations about how it will change jobs in the long run. Getting this balance right means involving employees in the journey not just as technology adopters, but as co-creators of the future of work… AI and technology play an enabling role, but it’s clear they must be aligned with human needs, recognizing how a sense of purpose at work correlates directly to feelings of value and belonging.”

    What do business owners get from making that effort? In addition to employees increasingly embracing AI and improving their performance with it, they saw other benefits.

    For starters, fully 99 percent of respondents who described themselves as “future-ready” said they planned to stay with their current employers for the foreseeable future, compared to 53 percent of less AI-capable people. Meanwhile, the more employees said they’d been informed about how their work with the tech improved their own performance as well as their company’s results, the more inclined they were to go farther and faster with their AI upskilling.

    Progress is already being made in that area. The new survey found 41 percent of “future-ready” respondents reporting they were already involved with their employers’ efforts to redesign tasks and entire jobs to increased AI use, compared to just 24 percent in 2024. But participants in the recent study said they needs to go even farther in supporting their use and confidence in AI as an ally, rather than a rival.

    “Redesigning roles successfully will depend on open collaboration between employers and employees,” Machuel wrote. “Leaders have a responsibility to clearly communicate their vision, showing how people and AI in harmony can contribute meaningfully to the organization’s goals… There is no substitute for human connection. It will be people — not technology — who build resilient, adaptable workforces fit for the future.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • 9 Scary Workplace True Stories for Halloween

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    It’s the spookiest day of the year, and often a nightmare for HR professionals who have to handle people who show up to work costumed as terrorists, wearing blackface, or dressed as Adolf Hitler.

    But it’s not only costumes that can be spooky. Sometimes the scary thing isn’t a bad choice by an employee but something that seems genuinely unexplainable. Here are nine true stories from spooky workplaces.

    The grabby ghost

    People and work strategist Robin Schooling shared:

    One of my favorite no-call, no-show resignation stories:

     Manager: “What happened? We haven’t seen you in four days.”

     Employee: “I was working Thursday night and saw a ghost in the kitchen. It grabbed my ankle. I can’t come back.”

    (And thus… he left and never returned….)

    The old hospital ghosts

    An anonymous HR professional shared:

    Our office is on the grounds of and built with recycled brick from an old hospital. Many times, while in the bathroom, you hear footsteps in front of the stalls that lead to the sink, and then the motion sensor paper towel dispenser goes off.

    Many CCTV still shots of ghostly figures in the halls.

    The cursed desk

    HR consultant Stacy Dennis shared:

    We had a desk that whoever sat at it would be fired. 🫣It was a cursed desk.

    The Halloween prank that went south

    Career adviser Chris Hogg shared:

    I worked in an aerospace company (think engineers, think Dilbert) where every Halloween, people, if they so chose, dressed up in costumes. It was a long-standing tradition, and many, but not everybody, dressed up.

    One year, an engineer dressed up as a gorilla, head to toe.

    So there were about five of us standing around a coffee station, when the gorilla-guy, with only the costume head on, came up behind a secretary (in her 40s) and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around… and screamed… loud enough to be heard in the next county… grabbed her chest… threw her coffee in the air… and backed/crashed into a nearby filing cabinet.

    Needless to say, the engineer ripped off the gorilla head, apologized profusely, while I imagine visions of him being hauled away and charged with manslaughter danced around in his head.

    Later that day, he and I were talking, and he told me he would never, never, never-ever again put on a Halloween costume.

    I’m pretty sure he never did.

    The puppy ghost

    HR consultant Katie Tanner shared: 

    Been in skilled nursing for a while.

    Lots of stories of “people surrounding patients” during their final breaths, or patients “talking to walls” and then saying it was a loved one.

    In one of the nursing homes, there is a “puppy” ghost that roams the halls barking and “licking the hands” of the patients. (I swear I heard it a few times when I was there.)

    The movie theater ghost

    Senior HR professional Tim Baker shared:

    Years ago, before my HR days, I was the general manager of a large Cineplex Movie Theatre in the Greater Toronto Area. This is back in the day of “film projectors.” We had 14 cinemas in the building, so the projection booth was huge and divided into two sides—east and west. Needless to say, at 2 a.m. while closing down the projection booths, it was quite spooky—a long dark corridor with several projectors. And typically, only two of us were left in the building. Ghost stories were aplenty.

    One night, I went up alone to close the west booth. I was shutting down a projector, and someone called me from the end of the corridor. I distinctly heard my name. It could only have been the other manager. When I walked in that direction, nobody was there. And then the other manager came walking toward me from the other direction. There is no way he could have run down the stairs, across half the building, and back up the other stairs in that time frame. 

    I felt the blood run from my face, and I felt cold. He asked what was wrong. I just said, “Let’s get out of here.” He knew what I meant, and we left. I didn’t tell him about it until the next day.

    The laughing ghost

    HR professional Stacie Racho-Ortiz shared:

    My Tribe’s casino is built right next to the cemetery, and the guard shack is at the bottom of the hill. When the graveyard security would work in the guard shack, they would experience sounds, laughing, hearing steps next to the shack.

    The stocking-stealing ghost

    An anonymous HR professional shared:

    I worked in a psychiatric hospital, and the HR offices were in the building that was the female ward. There was talk of if you were in the basement alone, one female would tug on your hair. I was watching security footage around Christmas time, and there were stockings that had been hung up on the wall for about three weeks. Twice, we saw those stockings, one by one, slide off the wall and halfway down the hallway 😬. People also saw a female figure in the attic window.

    And for some people, perhaps the scariest chair of all (and for others, the best chair of all)

    HR consultant Michelle Vernon shared:

    We once had a pregnancy chair—whoever had it as their designated chair fell pregnant. 😊 Does that count as spooky?

    Happy Halloween, everyone!

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

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    Suzanne Lucas

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  • We’ve Talked About Burnout for Decades. Here’s How to Finally Solve It

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    What can you do to reduce burnout in your own life, and in your organization? The World Health Organization defined burnout as a workplace syndrome more than six years ago. It first included burnout in its catalog of workplace ills more than 30 years ago. Yet after all this time, we’re no closer to solving it.

    “If we’re all having the same problem, why has no one figured it out yet?” An HR leader put that question to stress expert Paula Davis at a recent event, she writes in a piece for Psychology Today. In the piece, she takes a fascinating deep dive into what causes burnout and how to prevent it. Burnout isn’t a wellness problem to be solved with meditation and exercise classes, she explains, it’s a structural issue. Management needs to address it a strategic level. Her whole article is well worth reading. But in particular, she calls out one primary cause that she says is the most common.

    An unsustainable workload

    “You consistently have too much to do, and you feel like you’re treading water and at any moment you might sink,” Davis writes. “This is by far the biggest driver of burnout I see across industries.”

    I think there’s a very simple, very deep-rooted reason. It’s how we define our jobs. We think of the parameters of a job in terms of the work that must be done. For example, a northeastern sales director might define that job as being responsible for all sales in that region. But what if you defined it instead as being responsible for as much of the northeastern sales as you can manage during a 40-hour work week?

    It’s a radical concept, I realize. It runs counter to how jobs are defined pretty much everywhere. That’s especially true for startups, where both founders and employees routinely work extra-long hours, especially during the earliest days. But while that may be normal, it’s ultimately not sustainable. This may be why most startup employees report that working at their job is bad for their mental health.

    Company founders are often happy to work extra-long hours in the startups that they love. But ultimately, that isn’t great for them either. Research shows that if you push yourself beyond the boundaries of a normal workload, your productivity and effectiveness will suffer. Worse, your judgment will too, because burnout can actually damage your brain. It can affect your cognitive function and your judgment. That may explain why we often see very smart, high-profile entrepreneurs from Travis Kalanick to Elon Musk make some bone-headed moves.

    Limiting time at work will make you more productive

    I’ve learned from interviews with thousands of high-powered founders and other executives, as well as from my own work life, that setting limits on how much you work will actually make you more successful, not less. That’s because it forces you to be ruthless in eliminating anything that takes up your time but doesn’t move you toward your goals. You become much more efficient during your work hours, in part because you’re less exhausted and better able to focus. Working reasonable hours allows for things like better sleep, better nutrition, more exercise, and more time with loved ones. Research shows that all these things will make you healthier and happier, which in turn will make you a better boss and generally better at your job.

    This is why I propose the 1-2-48 Rule, a simple method to put reasonable boundaries around your work time. To follow the rule, make sure to take at least one day completely away from work out of every week, at least two weeks’ vacation every year, and avoid working more than 48 hours in any week. Research supports setting these limits as a way to preserve your productivity, as well as your happiness and health.

    In these days of widespread layoffs, everyone is supposed to “do more with less.” Managers who are stretched thin themselves pile work that would have been done by laid-off employees onto their remaining work force. Those remaining employees, fearful of losing their own jobs, may feel they have no choice but to accept the extra work.

    But it ultimately doesn’t work to expect your employees, or yourself, to complete more and more tasks just because there’s no one else to do them, and they seem to need doing. Putting guardrails around your work time won’t just help you avoid burnout before it happens, it will also help you see what’s truly essential and what isn’t.

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

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    Minda Zetlin

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  • This Report Says Most People Don’t Have ‘Quality Jobs.’ Here’s How Your Business Can Change That

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    A new study by research firm Gallup called the American Job Quality Study found that, essentially, the majority of Americans don’t have what’s defined as “quality” employment. The poll defined this as a job that pays fairly, has reliable scheduling and offers good routes for advancement and personal growth, among other positive characteristics. The data might prompt you to check in on your own staff and make sure their needs are properly met.

    The study’s data are stark: only four in 10 US workers have quality jobs, meaning six in 10 workers are being let down by their work in some way or another. Gallup’s data back this up, with the survey finding, for example, that while 71 percent of workers agreed that they could decide how to carry out their job, 62 percent of people said they didn’t have reliable work schedules — a characteristic that can drive up stress and worker disengagement, news site HRDive notes. Men are more likely than women to say they’ve got quality jobs (45 percent versus 34 percent), and while high-quality jobs are spread across the nation, they’re more common in western states than other regions. 

    Among the other unsettling results, Gallup’s survey of over 18,000 people working in different industries and job types found that 29 percent of people say they’re “just getting by” or “finding it difficult to get by.” A sizable 43 percent say they’re doing “okay,” and just 27 percent said they’re living “comfortably.” The report notes that this backs up other data showing half of all workers earn at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty line for a family of two.

    On the topic of job satisfaction, 85 percent of respondents agreed they were respectfully treated by colleagues and customers. But 69 percent said they had less influence than they should over their pay and benefits, and 55 percent feel the same about technology adoption at work. Though the survey doesn’t look into this too deeply, this latter point tallies with numerous other reports about the accelerated way many workplaces are adopting AI and requiring their workers use the tech to boost efficiency, even while they’re failing to provide adequate training and usage guidelines. Another data point in the Gallup study underlines this, since only half of the respondents said they’d taken part in workplace training and education in the last year. 

    The data on job quality are important, Gallup’s report notes, because having a quality job is linked with higher levels of job satisfaction: 58 percent of workers in quality roles have high job satisfaction compared to 23 percent of people in lower-quality jobs. Satisfaction is “consistently linked in prior research to lower turnover, higher productivity, and stronger business performance.”

    What’s the takeaway for your company? 

    Essentially it’s possible that even if you think your staff are doing well, and they seem happy and secure in their jobs, there may be undercurrents of worry or dissatisfaction that don’t reach your ears, either because workers don’t want to gripe or they worry about the implications of raising a red flag. Savvy leaders may use this report as a trigger to check in with their employees and see how they rate the “quality” of their jobs — there are a few simple organizational levers you can pull that would improve their feelings. 

    This is important for long-term growth, says Gallub senior partner Stephanie Marken. If your staff feel their job is a high quality one they may be “healthier, more engaged, and more productive.” Taking steps to boost job quality is not just “the right thing for workers; it’s a smart investment in stronger businesses and a more resilient economy,” Marken said. 

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Going Global? How to Hire Ethically While Growing Your Business

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    I’ve noticed that whenever leaders talk about growth, the conversation almost always turns to global expansion. And it makes sense — new markets and global talent can unlock enormous opportunities. But I’ve also seen that how you expand matters just as much as where. 

    Some organizations expand responsibly, creating opportunities for workers and building long-term business resilience. Others fall into extraction, chasing short-term gains at the expense of local talent and economies. 

    We believe there’s a clear difference between expansion and extraction. Our latest Global Impact Report highlights what responsible expansion looks like in practice through a review of data across our platform and first-hand feedback from those hired via Oyster. Based on that information, we see three areas that matter most: trusting and tapping into emerging markets, committing to fair pay, and equipping managers to lead with empathy.

    To fully understand the difference between expansion and extraction, here’s a quick breakdown. 

    Expansion happens when companies enter a new market in a way that benefits everyone. The business gains access to skilled talent, while workers and local communities gain new opportunities and investment. It’s a mutually beneficial model: as the company grows, so does the positive impact for people.

    Extraction, on the other hand, is when companies enter a market to take advantage of short-term benefits, like lower labor costs or weaker regulations, without regard for fairness or sustainability. It may seem efficient at first, but the reputational damage can quickly erode a company’s ability to thrive in that market.

    The difference matters. Global hiring is one of the most powerful ways to fuel growth. But done irresponsibly, it can backfire. That’s why ethical hiring practices, like the ones we’ll explore below, are the true differentiator between expansion and extraction.

    Trusting and tapping into emerging markets

    When it comes to the impact on people, expansion means meeting talent where they are and creating pathways for long-term success. Our report shows steady progress for both initial and subsequent hiring in emerging markets. Our definition of “emerging markets” is based on the International Monetary Fund classification for emerging economies, and it refers to regions with growing economies and vibrant talent that are often underserved in the global employment landscape. 

    On our platform, 37 percent of companies’ hiring through us bring on talent from emerging markets. For subsequent hires, this figure jumps to 48 percent. This increase between first and subsequent hires shows that employer confidence in emerging market talent often grows over time.

    Remote work makes this possible. By building distributed teams, companies can hire across borders without requiring relocation or establishing local entities. The result is a democratization of opportunity. Skilled workers in regions once overlooked now have access to high-quality jobs, while companies benefit from fresh perspectives and diverse thinking.

    In my experience, the best way for leaders to approach emerging markets is to:

    • Invest in development. Building skills and career readiness in emerging markets means you’re not just hiring talent, you’re helping fuel growth. Training, mentorship, and career development unlock long-term value.
    • Engage as partners. Expansion works best when companies treat talent not just as workers, but as collaborators who shape business growth.

    Fair pay is the foundation of expansion

    Even the best intention to grow through expansion can slip into extraction if compensation isn’t fair. An ethical compensation strategy is the foundation of responsible expansion. Without it, global hiring risks perpetuating inequality or undervaluing local talent.

    That’s why benchmarking is essential. Leaders must ensure that salaries are competitive both locally and globally, and that they close gaps where inequities persist.

    Besides being the right thing to do, fair pay is also a strategic advantage. Employees who feel valued are more engaged and more likely to deliver their best work. And increasingly, it’s not just about values—pay transparency and equity laws are being enacted across countries, making compliance another reason leaders must get this right.

    For leaders, the takeaway is simple but critical: 

    • Pay equitably. Fair and equitable compensation should be a non-negotiable part of your hiring strategy across new and existing markets. 

    Management needs to expand, not extract

    The way companies lead their distributed teams is an important part of expansion. Too often, leaders fall into the trap of imposing their own cultural norms, expecting one-size-fits-all conformity. This form of leadership extracts, because it prioritizes efficiency and control over empathy and respect.

    True expansion requires managers who adapt their style to local contexts. Empathy and cultural sensitivity are the hallmarks of leaders who can unlock the full potential of global teams. 

    When I think about how to best support managers through global expansion, I always come back to this:

    • Management isn’t one-size-fits-all. It requires adapting and understanding local cultures. This cultural empathy is essential to global success.
    • Autonomy should be encouraged, while continuing to respect local norms and hierarchies. 

    Choosing expansion helps your company grow globally

    Expansion fuels growth. Extraction undermines it.

    Companies that will thrive in the next decade are those that expand responsibly, by trusting talent in emerging markets, ensuring fair pay, and training managers to lead with empathy. These practices strengthen teams and create shared value for both businesses and communities.

    At Oyster, we’ve seen firsthand that the more we grow, the more positive impact we can deliver. That’s the promise of expansion over extraction. And it’s the future of global business: growth that’s mutually beneficial and built to last.

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

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    Tony Jamous

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  • How to Build an HR Department Your Employees Won’t Hate

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    Human resources is not popular with workers — many would go so far as to say they hate working with their HR department. Some 86 percent of U.S. workers are actually afraid of approaching these professionals and have no desire to talk to them about their grievances, according to a survey by MyPerfectResume. Of those that did bring concerns to HR’s attention, 90 percent said their grievance was not handled properly. Meanwhile, 65 percent of startups do not have an HR department at all, according to a BambooHR survey.

    But it doesn’t have to be that way, especially when you’re building your own company. One of the perks of starting your own company is you can build your team exactly the way you want to—and that includes HR. In a breakout session at the Inc. 5000 conference in Phoenix, I spoke with Christie Horvath, CEO and founder of Wagmo, a pet wellness company and employee benefit, about how she built her dream HR team. It didn’t happen overnight and mistakes were made, she said, but she eventually found the solution that works best for her company.

    “When you are cash constrained — which I think the vast majority of startups would consider themselves — figuring out where you’re going to put that incremental dollar matters a lot,”  Horvath said. “And it’s a really hard decision when you’ve got the option to invest it in customer acquisition that’s going to directly drive revenue or go hire someone to run your HR division.”

    For a while, Wagmo operated without HR for that very reason, but after the company raised Series A funding, investors told Horvath she should start thinking about adding HR. Investors, Horvath said, see HR as a tool to prevent internal lawsuits because “at some point you’re going to have an employee issue, it’s inevitable.”

    To appease investors, Horvath hired a vice president of people with a long work history in HR — it was “a disaster,” she said. The person hired was “awesome,” Horvath said, but not the type of HR person the company needed. This person’s specialty was in “employee relations,” but Wagmo needed someone to build internal systems like “employee reviews” and “career ladders and compensation bands.”

    Not only was this employee’s experience a poor fit for the company’s needs, their salary and job title were a drain on the company’s finances. The VP of people’s salary was upwards of $200,000 — which was “an insane amount of money to be paying when you are a Series A stage company with 15 people,” she said. 

    “If you don’t know what to look for as a startup founder, you can find yourself spending quite a lot of money on someone that’s objectively very skilled at their job, but that’s not actually the job that you need done,” Horvath said.

    Ultimately, Wagmo’s VP of people departed the company “on amicable terms” because it “wasn’t the right fit,” Horvath said. After the VP’s departure, Wagmo contracted an independent consultant the company used for the past few years as a “factional HR” role. The consultant was able to implement the internal reviews and processes the company needed, but because she only works part-time, Wagmo was able to pay her $7,000 a month — considerably less than the former VP.

    The company eventually grew to 30 employees, with plans to hire 10 more in the future, Horvath said. At this point, Horvath said it seemed like a more appropriate time to look for a full-time HR role because a staff of 30 plus workers is “when internal issues start happening.” This time around, Horvath knew she didn’t want someone with a traditional HR background. She was looking for “someone pretty entrepreneurial, pretty scrappy, and who’s willing to roll up their sleeves and get in there.”

    For Horvath, that person ended up being her chief of staff, someone who’s been her “right hand woman for the past couple of years.” This employee approached Horvath about taking on some HR responsibilities within the company because she wanted to learn them. While Horvath noted that hiring someone without HR certifications and experience is “risky,” the role can be learned if the person in question is a go-getter. 

    “She’s got that entrepreneurial fire in her belly where she fully recognizes she’s not been in HR, but she went and she found a coach that comes from that category,” Horvath said. “She’s got all the right component parts, she’s simply missing experience.”

    In addition to lessons from an executive coach, the new people officer is taking the necessary classes and training for HR certification on her own. But when it comes to building trust with the workforce, Horvath said this employee already has it because she’s an internal candidate — someone who understands the frustrations of her peers. In Wagmo’s case, building an HR team with an internal candidate has made all the difference. 

    “I personally think that hiring non-traditional people, it’s actually easier, because these people aren’t necessarily coming in with baggage or playbooks that may have mirrored what you’ve seen at other large companies,” Horvath said. “They do things a bit differently, which is always helpful.”

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    Kayla Webster

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  • 3 Ways to Get Credit for Your Success—Without Sounding Like a Braggart

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    Some people are insufferable. You don’t want to be around them because they talk nonstop about how awesome they are.

    Other people are just as accomplished (if not more so!), and are great people you want to spend time with. Obviously, you know they are super accomplished, so at some point, they must have mentioned what they do.

    What’s the difference? How can you get credit for what you do without sounding like an annoying know-it-all?

    Build strong relationships first

    If you walk into a room of strangers and say, “Yes, it is I, the person who developed the system you use every day!” people may be impressed, but they will think you’re insufferable.

    Lorraine K. Lee, author of Unforgettable Presence, said on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, “If you have strong relationships with the people with whom you’re sharing the work, that is very important. Relationships are the foundation of business, and if people know you and they know your intentions and your personality, it’s very unlikely they are going to think…[they] are just bragging all the time about themselves, they’re just trying to be helpful.”

    You can certainly see the difference. When your friend or respected colleague accomplishes something, you are proud of them and rejoice in their success. 

    So, building strong relationships first is the most important thing. This isn’t to say you can’t accomplish anything at a new job until you’ve become besties with people. In fact, being best friends isn’t necessary to a strong relationship.

    How to build relationships at work

    Gorick Ng, the author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right, gave a four-step process to building relationships at work. Writing at Harvard Business Review, Ng says to:

    1. Break the silence. This is easy enough–say hi, introduce yourself and don’t wait for others to introduce themselves first.
    2. Turn “Hi” into “Hi again.” This is reaching out a second time. It may be saying hi in the hallway again, or saying, “It was lovely to meet you today” in a text. Just do it a second time.
    3. Turn “Hi again” into “Let’s chat.” Ask them for their input or advice on what you’re working on. Or, ask them to share their story and ideas with you.
    4. Turn “Let’s chat” into “Let’s build a relationship.” At this point, you can share your goals and hopefully some of the people you chatted with can be helpful, but keep in mind that helpfulness goes both way — you should be looking to help others.

    Note that none of this requires you to share personal information. You can build great professional relationships without letting them know about your marital issues or workout routines.

    Once you have strong relationships, you don’t need to worry about bragging around the people with whom you have relationships. But one more thing is very, very important: Recognizing other people’s successes.

    Recognize and acknowledge others

    If you have strong relationships, you will also want to credit those people with successes. So, if your success was 100 percent your own effort, then yes, take that credit! Tell other people. But if your success involved others (which almost all successes do) make sure you acknowledge that.

    Leanne Calderwood, a personal branding expert, explains that recognition not only serves to make others happier and well respected, but it boosts your visibility as well. She writes:

    “In any group — be it your workplace, your circle of friends, or your online community — the person who consistently recognizes others takes on a leadership role. Leadership isn’t always about titles or formal authority. It’s about influence, support, and the ability to inspire others to perform their best.”

    So, yes, if you want others to hear about your successes, you can talk about them, but first make sure you’ve built relationships and that you recognize others for their successes and their contributions to your success.

    That way, you won’t come across as insufferable.

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

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    Suzanne Lucas

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  • Inclusion Isn’t a Nice-to-Have, But a Must-Have Innovation Strategy 

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    You’ve surely heard it before: fail fast, build MVPs, test and iterate. For years, speed has been the golden rule in innovation. However, in 2025, the smartest path to growth isn’t building in isolation. Instead, leaders must build through inclusion. Instead of trying to craft the perfect new offer behind closed doors and nervously rolling it out to your audience, consider a different approach. The best strategy is to prototype it live, in front of your customer. You might even do this with their help. That’s not just brave, it’s smart. 

    Recent research from the 2025 Workplace Wellbeing Initiative found that teams that openly tested and iterated ideas with real stakeholders reported faster traction, stronger buy-in, and significantly less burnout. It turns out, people don’t just want you to sell them something. They want to feel part of what they’re buying. Inclusion isn’t nice-to-have. It’s a traction strategy. 

    When you’re selling ideas, involve people early. 

    While I think it works broadly, I’ve found this strategy is especially powerful in the world of services such as coaching, consulting, learning, and advisory work. Why? You don’t have the benefit of a shiny product to demo. If your business is more like mine as a coach, you’re selling transformation and possibility. So how do you prototype that? 

    You show the rough draft, and you pitch the half-baked version. You say, “I’m building this—would this work for you?” It doesn’t need to be polished. In fact, in a world flooded with AI-generated perfection, raw and real is often more compelling. 

    If you’ve been thinking about a new offer, you can ask yourself this question: Are you trying to guess what your customer wants? Are you inviting them into the room to help shape it? That shift can change everything. 

    What co-creation can look like 

    You don’t need a massive production to start. Co-creation can be simple. It might look like hosting a “service design” session with a few trusted clients, running a low-cost pilot offer with real-time feedback loops, or sharing a visual draft or one-pager and asking, “Would this solve your problem?” 

    You’re not just testing the viability of your strategy. You’re creating space for your audience to say, “Make it this way—for me.” That moment of shared authorship is where buy-in begins. It’s the new gold standard for innovation. 

    Don’t wait for perfection.  

    It might feel uncomfortable at first. However, the real risk isn’t showing something unfinished. The real risk is spending six months polishing something no one asked for. So, here’s your challenge: What service, idea, or offering have you been overthinking? Do you have one in mind? OK, agree to stop perfecting it. Instead, start testing it with your customer in the loop.  

    Build the Google Doc. Share the napkin sketch. Invite their input early. Let them shape the thing you’re trying to sell. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to exist. It also needs to evolve with the people it’s meant to serve. Action creates clarity. But co-creation? That type of strategy creates momentum. 

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

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    Robin Camarote

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  • Workers Reject Boeing’s Latest Offer After Nearly Three Months on Strike

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    Striking workers at Boeing Defense in the St. Louis area rejected the company’s latest contract proposal on Sunday, sending a strike that has already delayed delivery of fighter jets and other programs into its 13th week.

    In a statement after the vote, union leadership said the company had failed to address the needs of the roughly 3,200 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 837.

    “Boeing claimed they listened to their employees the result of today’s vote proves they have not,” IAM International President Brian Bryant said in a statement. “Boeing’s corporate executives continue to insult the very people who build the world’s most advanced military aircraft – the same planes and military systems that keep our servicemembers and nation safe.”

    The five-year offer was largely the same as offers previously rejected by union members. The company reduced the ratification bonus but added $3,000 in Boeing shares that vest over three years and a $1,000 retention bonus in four years. It also improved wage growth for workers at the top of the pay scale in the fourth year of the contract.

    “To fund the increases in this offer, we had to make trade-offs,” including reduced hourly wage increases tied to attendance and certain shift work, Boeing Vice President Dan Gillian said in a message to workers on Thursday.

    IAM leaders have pressed the planemaker for higher retirement plan contributions and a ratification bonus closer to the $12,000 that Boeing gave to union members on strike last year in the company’s commercial airplane division in the Pacific Northwest.

    Boeing’s Gillian has called the company’s offer a landmark deal and “market-leading,” and he has repeatedly said Boeing would not increase the overall value of its terms, and only shift value around.

    Boeing is expected to report another unprofitable quarter when it posts its third-quarter results on Wednesday. Wall Street analysts anticipate the company will announce a multi-billion dollar charge on its 777X program, which is six years behind schedule and not yet certified by regulators.

    In September, IAM members approved the union’s proposed four-year contract. However, Boeing management has refused to consider that offer.

    The IAM estimates that its offer would add about $50 million to the agreement’s cost over its four-year duration, compared with the company offer that was rejected. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is set to earn $22 million this year.

    Union officials accused Boeing of bargaining in bad faith in an unfair labor practice charge filed October 16 with the National Labor Relations Board.

    “It’s well past time for Boeing to stop cheaping out on the workers who make its success possible and bargain a fair deal that respects their skill and sacrifice,” Bryant said.

    Union members say they are getting by on a mix of $300 a week in strike benefits from the IAM, second jobs, and belt-tightening. Boeing has said that striking workers’ coverage under company-provided health insurance ended on August 30.

    Since the strike began on August 4, Boeing officials have repeatedly said the company’s mitigation plan has limited the effects of the work stoppage on production.

    However, it has delayed deliveries of F-15EX fighters to the U.S. Air Force, General Kenneth Wilsbach told the Senate Armed Services Committee in comments submitted for a October 9 hearing on his nomination as the Air Force’s chief of staff.

    Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle; Editing by Mark Heinrich, Nia Williams and Edmund Klamann

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    Reuters

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  • AI ‘Consulting’ Services Can Help Smaller Businesses, But Risks Persist

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    Consultancy firms can be very useful for growing businesses — giving new companies guidance or financial or management advice when needed, backed by experience and expertise. But for smaller enterprises with narrow margins, the cost of hiring top-rank consulting firms can be financially out of reach.

    Enter AI, according to a new report at Business Insider. In much the same way that generative AI tools promise to add, say, coding expertise to a small team, or free up workers from mundane tasks to engage in more productive work, AI-powered “consultant” apps are emerging from a suite of Silicon Valley startups, with the goal of helping small firms carry out market research, analyze data or to smooth and optimize their business operations. 

    Business Insider quotes Thomson Nguyen, cofounder and managing partner of Wyoming-based venture capital outfit Saga, on the phenomenon. These new AI consultancy players won’t be challenging big consulting firms any time soon, he thinks, simply because if you’re a “Fortune 500 company building AI infrastructure for your call center, you’ll still hire the Big Four,” because you’ll have the budget set aside and experience in working with third-party consultancies. But the real target for these startups is smaller companies, making under $100 million a year, who are too small to hire a McKinsey or Deloitte, for example. 

    The news outlet notes that AI apps like PromptQL, from Bangalore-based AI unicorn Hasura, are directly set up to tackle typical consultant roles — including analyzing a company’s internal data, and continually adapting over time. PromptQL even has a team of engineers that’ll help craft an AI analyst agent specifically to meet the needs of a client company. Co-founder and CEO Tanmai Gopal admitted to Business Insider that it’s “not as good as a McKinsey consultant,” but it has the benefits of being “instant.” That’s the very opposite of the sometimes protracted process where a consultant learns about their client company before tackling an analysis, since an AI can just be switched on and immediately wrestle with data. 

    Among the kind of tasks that AI consultancy startups are tackling, starting and managing call centers and customer service automation is a trend, as are firms that aim at integrating software and AI into client company’s operations, as well as firms building management and operational AI systems. There are even AI tools targeting executive coaching.

    This may not be a surprise, considering that big tech names like Salesforce are already selling their own agent-based AI services aimed at automating the sales process and call center operations. AI startups offering similar options and targeting smaller companies as clients is natural.

    Gopal told Business Insider that for now these AI consultancy tools aren’t really replacing human workers — echoing many an AI evangelist’s argument about the role of AI in the workplace. Human workers have more diverse skills, and for now it’s as much about the “network” of colleagues that a human worker can access as it is about their advice. 

    What’s the takeaway from this for your company?

    If you find yourself struggling with an expertise gap, you may find that there’s an AI-powered consulting tool out there that will fit your needs.

    But as with most AI tools, perhaps the thing to remember is that (just as with human consultants, though perhaps less obviously) AIs are not infallible. AI systems regularly make mistakes, and can hallucinate analysis and advice that they then pass off as meaningful, just as if it was real advice. You’ll have seen this by now, perhaps when you asked an AI to write a snippet of code for you. The AI may insist the code works, but when you say “No, it doesn’t,” the AI may say “Oh! You’re right!” and offer a fix. Whenever you’re using AI it’s probably best to run the results past a human worker before making, say, a business critical decision based on an AI consultant’s analysis. 

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    Kit Eaton

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