ReportWire

Tag: workplace

  • How a Failed Startup Can Set You Up for Success

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    People go into business because they believe in the power of their ideas. Still, almost 1 in 5 new businesses fail within the first 12 months of launching. The experience can be disheartening, but as a Harvard Business School study showed it is not detrimental to entrepreneurs’ career growth according to the Harvard Business School.

    Research by professor Paul Gompers published in 2022 concluded that most entrepreneurs tend to fail up. It showed that failed founders rise to senior positions faster — contradicting the belief that a failed business leads to a crisis in confidence, manifesting itself through lower-paying jobs.

    So why does failure seem to propel some entrepreneurs forward rather than holding them back? We tapped Samir Mayekar to explain this phenomenon. Mayekar is the associate vice president and managing director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, which supports entrepreneurs. Under his leadership, the center’s startups have raised funding or had exits or exited a total of $2 billion since 2023. He also co-founded and served as CEO of NanoGraf Corporation, a global manufacturer of advanced battery technology that is now valued as much as $390 million, according to dealroom.co.

    He says failure, rather than discouraging entrepreneurs, can enhance resilience, creativity and long-term success. Here are three key takeaways.

    Urgency fine-tunes a leader’s priorities

    Starting and running a company requires understanding the business as a whole, not as a single-job function, so founders must take on a wide range of tasks, some outside their previous experience. Time and money are in short supply, meaning startup founders have to quickly decide where they focus their attention for the highest impact. They build leadership skills such as negotiation, operational management and decision-making as they hustle to build their companies.

    “The sense of urgency and ruthless prioritization of what you have to do becomes very evident to you as a founder,” said Mayekar. “When you’re working at a startup, you’re going to be working at a pace that is almost unparalleled anywhere else. You’re working against the clock before money runs out. Time becomes your biggest enemy as a founder. That’s not the case when you’re just an employee.”

    Failure is a better teacher than winning

    Success can be misleading. A mistake or poor judgement is easy to overlook when things are going right. This can reinforce bad habits that might not show up for years. But when a startup fails, a founder is likely to turn over every decision in their mind, looking for a path that could have led to a different outcome.

    Failure triggers reflections that can lead to growth

    “Sometimes successful founders can learn the wrong lessons,” said Mayekar. “Luck or good timing can cause people to interpret their success as the result of everything they did. I’ve seen a lot of founders make that mistake. Whereas when you fail, the amount of self-reflection that is required is extreme. Founders who’ve been in failed startups tend to have a lot more emotional resilience.”

    Experience beats a perfect record

    A failed startup does not erase the lessons learned along the way. The information from the experience can be repurposed and applied to the next endeavor.

    “It’s one of the reasons why a lot of venture capitalists want to fund multi, repeat founders, even if they failed once,” said Mayekar. “Because they know that if they’ve taken the right leadership lessons away, then their next venture is going to have a much greater chance of success, versus someone who’s never been in the game.”

    Trial and error creates data points entrepreneurs can pull from as they continue on their career. It can help them make better decisions in the future and recognize patterns that signal when to pivot—or when to walk away altogether.

    That lesson came too late for Joseph Hawke, founder of Uniflight, a Delaware helicopter maintenance company he founded in 2007. At the company’s peak, it had $24 million in revenue. When it shuttered last year, that figure dropped to less than $2 million.

    “I did not do as I preached. I would say ‘fail fast,’ but I failed slowly,” said Hawke. “Have the fortitude to cut bait sooner rather than later.”

    Hawke is now a contractor for Fundamental Advisors, an infrastructure fund with approximately $4 billion in assets under management. They are the capital equity sponsor of his new, unnamed-venture in the helicopter industry — proving that failure does not define an entrepreneur’s future, and that new opportunities can bounce back and apply hard-earned lessons to new ventures.

    Still, it’s hard to get to that point 

    “There’s a certain level of delusion you need as a founder,” said Jordan Wannemacher, co-founder of SaladSprinkles. “You see this vision for a thing that doesn’t exist yet. It’s really hard to realize how something you so strongly believe in is not going to work.”

    Her Maryland based company launched in 2024 and raised $200,000. Its promise to consumers was a healthier alternative to croutons through toasted flavored rice. The company is in the process of shuttering. 

    As she runs through the list of red flags that led to the decision, it’s clear she’s gained invaluable, hands-on experience in fundraising, marketing, and operations that will serve her well in whatever she tackles next.

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    Ximena N. Beltran Quan Kiu

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  • A Manager Accidentally Leaked Everyone’s Salaries. The Fix Is Simple—But Rarely Done

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    A manager made a terrible mistake and accidentally sent a spreadsheet with the whole department’s salaries to an employee, according to a post on Reddit’s antiwork group.

    The employee then discovered that they were earning $15,000 less than a similarly situated coworker and that even the new hire is making more than they are.

    This is a rotten position for a boss to be in. Sharing confidential information, such as salaries, in violation of company policy, can get someone in real trouble. And having an employee discover that they are woefully underpaid is also a nightmare. You should avoid this scenario at all costs. I will teach you how, and this works every time it’s tried:

    The secret to avoiding bad reactions to accidental salary disclosure

    Are you ready? Because this may be a little bit difficult to set up but once you do, I guarantee you won’t have any problems with salary leaks. Here it is:

    Stop paying people less than they deserve.

    That’s it. That’s the secret. If the poster had received a salary sheet that showed that all similarly situated employees were earning roughly the same, there wouldn’t have been a post, and there wouldn’t have been a problem. 

    So, paying people properly might be a little more complicated than just keeping salaries confidential, so here’s how to keep salaries at the proper levels.

    First, do an audit

    You need to get everything corrected. And that means conducting an audit, at least every six months, says Brenda Neckvatal, a human results professional and author of The Leadership Survival Manual. “If you are monitoring compensation on a regular basis, this won’t happen.”

    Regular audits catch inequities before employees do, and before they hit Reddit.

    Embarrassing (and often illegal) salary discrepancies often happen through error or bad company policies, rather than maliciousness. But when you have a situation where two people doing the same job have some sort of difference in race, gender, or other protected characteristic, it can be hard to prove to a court that you’re just bad at compensation.

    Fix your bad policies

    Bad salaries happen because of bad policies. Some of these policies you’ll want to review, revise, and eliminate could be:

    • Allowing managers to make job offers or promotions without consulting human resources. It’s not that HR has power over what you should pay someone; it’s that they have the knowledge to say, “Hey, we have three people doing this job and they make $X. You’re offering $X+15k, and that will cause internal equity problems. 
    • Limiting the raise you can give to an internal candidate. Many companies have policies that limit an internal candidate to, say, a 10 percent raise. But if you promote them into a position where everyone else is making 20 percent more than they were, you could end up with bad feelings and the loss of a good candidate. Your policy should be to offer internal and external candidates the same amount.

    These two bad policies permeate businesses, stressing the ideas that they save money and gives managers freedom. But it can make for messy situations.

    Then, make sure it doesn’t happen again by changing how you hire.

    Set the salary for the role before you interview

    Don’t go into interviews with vague ideas. Many states require you to post your salary ranges, but I still see ridiculously wide compensation spans. Don’t do that.

    Before you even post the job, figure out what the salary for that role should be. Yes, there can be variances depending on certain skills. Like, for instance, you might be willing to pay $5,000 more for someone who can speak Spanish or has a master’s degree. That type of difference is fine (assuming they will help with the role.

    Take your qualifications for the position and create a grid that you can match your candidates up against. The goal is that, after interviewing candidates, there will be a clear salary that each one would match up to. That’s the salary you offer.

    Don’t negotiate

    Candidates are taught that there is always a little bit more money out there and to ask. But not everyone does, and not everyone does so well. 

    It makes zero sense to pay someone more money because they ask. People should be paid based on their skills. 

    So make your highest and best offer first. People will still try to negotiate, but just say no, this is my highest and best offer.

    What to do if your employee finds out they are underpaid?

    Now, what would you do if you were this Redditor’s boss? Apologize profusely, get the salary increased to the proper level, and provide back pay.

    That’s the right thing to do. Then go back and audit all positions to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

    Check your attachments before you hit send. But honestly, if people are paid fairly, there’s no reason to keep salaries confidential other than tradition.

    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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  • The Dunning-Kruger Effect Has Been Cited for 26 Years, but Most People Still Misunderstand It

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    Few psychological rules have as high a public profile as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Way back in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that the people who were least competent at a given task were also the most confident in their abilities. Meanwhile, the most skilled are the most unsure.

    In the 26 years since Dunning and Kruger published their landmark paper, scientists have debated the details of the findings. But the public has run with it. It’s not hard to see why. A theory that states the dumbest among are often the loudest and most overconfident seems to explain so much about modern life.

    Plus, it’s a handy grenade to throw in a social-media fight. Search “Dunning-Kruger Effect” online and you’ll find huge numbers of people labeling those they disagree as obvious cases of the effect in action.

    It’s a satisfying way to dunk on your opponents. But there’s one big problem with using the Dunning-Kruger as a weapon in this way. David Dunning himself insists it’s a misunderstanding. 

    You probably misuse the Dunning-Kruger Effect

    On a recent episode of the ZME Science podcast, host Corey Powell sums up the popular understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect this way: “Stupid people don’t know they’re stupid.” Is that a correct understanding of the theory that bears his name, he asked David Dunning. 

    As pleasant as it might be to write off those you disagree with as hopelessly dim and deluded, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t actually about anyone’s general intelligence, Dunning explained. It’s about what happens when you gain just a little knowledge in a particular domain.

    When you first start learning a bit about a particular subject, you’re highly likely to overestimate your understanding. That applies to all of us, not just those with less than sky-high IQ scores. 

    “It’s not about general stupidity. It’s about each and every one of us, sooner or later,” he says. “We each have an array of expertise, and we each have an array of places we shouldn’t be stepping into, thinking we know just as much as the experts.” 

    A warning, not an insult 

    Dunking on others’ oblivious idiocy, as tempting as it can be, isn’t actually the takeaway message of the Dunning-Kruger effect according to Dunning. Instead, it’s to be mindful of your own overconfidence, especially in areas where you don’t have deep domain expertise. 

    The point isn’t to help you spot others’ stupidity. It’s to alert you to the constant potential for your own. Or as Dunning puts it: “Our ignorance is an everyday companion that we will all carry for the rest of our lives.” 

    That might seem bleak, but Dunning actually sounds pretty upbeat in the interview. How can that be? Because, he says, while there’s no way to outrun the human tendency towards overconfidence, there are steps you can take to guard against it. 

    7 ways to avoid falling prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect 

    The podcast discussion doesn’t delve deeply into how to do that. But elsewhere, Dunning and other psychologists have offered plenty of suggestions: 

    • Lean on feedback. “A lot of the issues or problems we get into, we get into because we’re doing it all by ourselves,” Dunning told Vox. “If we consult, chat, schmooze with other people, often we learn things or get different perspectives that can be quite helpful.” Stress test your ideas and knowledge by talking to other people.  
    • Imagine the worst-case scenario. “Ask yourself where you could be wrong if the decision is an important one. Or how can your plans end up in disaster? Think that through—it matters,” Dunning suggests.
    • Think in probabilities. Citing the work of fellow psychologist Philip Tetlock, Dunning observes that people who think “in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.” So don’t ask, “Will X happen?” but instead, “What’s the probability X will happen?”
    • Apply the 10-Percent Principle. Psychologist Adam Grant agrees that being smart and educated doesn’t protect you from overconfidence. In fact, it can make it more likely. His solution is the 10-Percent Principle: “Be 10 percent more skeptical of people you agree with—and 10 percent more charitable to people you disagree with.”  
    • Know when to trust your gut. Dunning believes slower decisions are usually better decisions. But according to the late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, you can trust your gut in situations that meet three conditions: the area you are looking at is actually predictable (so yes to chess, no to the stock market), you have a lot of practice, and you have received firm, fast feedback in the past. 
    • Approach problems like a scientist. Scientists are trained to look for evidence to disprove their hypotheses, which acts as a brake on the Dunning-Kruger effect. But you don’t have to be a scientist to think like one. Grant also suggests more of us should “look for reasons why you might be wrong, not just reasons why you must be right” and approach questions with curiosity rather than a desire to prove ourselves right. 
    • Practice saying “I don’t know.” Research (and titans of industry) say intellectual humility boosts both IQ and EQ. It also helps you avoid overconfidence, so Dunning suggests practicing saying “I don’t know.” MIT’s Hal Gregersen advises asking yourself, “What will I be wrong about today?” each morning. It will act as a healthy reminder that you are just as likely to fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect as anyone. 

    News flash: You’re overconfident too 

    The Dunning-Kruger effect has been a frequently invoked term for nearly three decades. That doesn’t mean most people understand it correctly. It often gets used as a clever way to call those you disagree with dumb. But according to one of the authors of the original study, a better use of the effect is as a reminder that we’re all prone to stupidity. 

    If you remember that tendency, you’re far more likely to correct for it. 

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

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    Jessica Stillman

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  • How Your Company Can Retain Talent as Child Care Costs Drive Women Out of the Workforce

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    Today, DEI is a loaded term in a fraught politcal and cultural climate, but current disfavor doesn’t change the fact is that inequalities of many types persist in the workplace. Cue a new ABC report that highlights how women are actively leaving the U.S. workforce in increasing numbers because the cost of child care is so high. “It’s the 21st century,” you may be thinking, “shouldn’t this be impacting men as caregivers on an equal footing?” Explain that to the nearly half-million women who’ve dropped out of the labor market since January, the report says.

    The surge in women workers deciding that the working life isn’t for them has been “driven largely by women with young children,” Minnesota’s ABC affiliate 5 Eyewitness News reports. Some 450,000 women have followed this path since the start of 2025, and the news outlet points to one clear reason: “the high cost of daycare has been to blame.”

    The report quotes financial planner Bjorn Amundson of Saint Paul-based financial planning firm Quarry Hill Advisors, who suggests that before families make this big decision they should split expenses across different accounts that reflect today’s polarizing financial realities. Mortgages, for example, won’t change, but, as Amundson notes, “discretionary expenses” will — do you really need that Netflix subscription as well as the HBO and Apple TV ones? So it may make sense to practice having one parent at home for a while, “and see what it feels like before you pull the trigger. It’s one of the toughest decisions you make as a parent.”

    But there’s a bigger trend at play here, with KSTP pointing out that the loss of so many female workers could not only “erase the historic gains women have made since the pandemic, but also reshape the labor force for years to come.” A BBC report from August that tackled this trend noted that “after years of leaning in and pursuing career growth, an emerging slice of college-educated women are either going part time or quitting their jobs entirely.” At the time, the BBC said data showed that between “January and July 2025, 212,000 women left the workforce at the same time that 44,000 men entered it.”

    Meanwhile, other reports suggest one driving factor for this trend is the emergence of the “sandwich generation.” As Business Insider recently put it, the “growing share of American workers” are facing a difficult reality of “caring for both aging parents and children at the same time.” 

    Can we blame the “tradwife” trend for some of this — a conservative-leaning notion that women’s place really is in the home? The trend, science news site Phys.org contends, is all about a “modern-day housewife who embraces traditional gender roles, typically focusing on homemaking, childcare and supporting her husband, often while sharing her idealized lifestyle on social media.” 

    But a recent study highlighted in this report suggests that there are deeper, non-political reasons involved that play into the explanation of why so many women are leaving the U.S. workforce. In a survey of 1,000 younger women age 18–34, researchers found that “what attracts them to tradwife content is less the male-breadwinner female-caregiver model and more the aesthetic of simplicity, leisure and escape from the pressures of increasingly demanding yet insecure work.”

    Meanwhile, a new op-ed at the Boston Globe shines a light on a totally different facet of this issue: it may be “provocative” to say it, but “the smartest workplaces usually have more women,” the article contends. 

    Why should you care about all this?

    Because, amid complex, changing geopolitical circumstances, the reality is that if your company’s benefits and compensation policies result in excluding more women than you may have thought, you’re simply missing out on a long list of potentially fabulous job candidates.

    Citigroup’s CEO Jane Fraser landed her company in the spotlight this year for precisely this reason: by embracing hybrid-friendly work policies that are appealing to working mothers, Fraser considered she’s putting her company at a competitive advantage for hiring talented workers who otherwise may stay at home, or seek jobs at rival firms.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • To Increase Your Company’s Productivity, Make Sure Everyone Eats Lunch

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    The spreading of artificial intelligence applications in U.S. workplaces is only the most recent method employers are using to increase productivity. Now, new data is proposing a decidedly lower-tech manner of achieving similar results in improving employee focus, happiness, and performance: Just make sure they’re eating lunch.

    The business benefits of workers getting their midday chow became clear in a survey of 1,000 full-time employees by corporate food provider ezCater. It found that 88 percent of respondents said that not eating lunch caused their job performance to dip. Around 43 percent of people skipping the noon meal blamed that slumping output on needing more time to complete tasks on an empty stomach, with 39 percent saying the distraction led them to make more mistakes.

    The consequences of those afternoon productivity declines are probably affecting workplaces more than employers suspect. About 51 percent of survey participants said they skip lunch at least once during the workweek, and 33 percent said they go without twice a week or more.

    One reason for that increasing lunchlessness is how inflation is hitting workers’ eating habits as hard as it’s pinching their wallets.

    Whether it’s brown-bagged from home or bought from a restaurant or deli, the average employee now spends $108.68 per week on lunches, a jump of more than 20 percent from last year. Those higher costs led 74 percent of survey participants to say they’d adjusted their eating habits to save money.

    But there are other reasons respondents said they go without lunch. Time restrictions from heavy workloads was one often-cited factor, as was the increase in meetings scheduled over the noon hour. Many other workers said they skipped the meal out of worries managers might frown on their taking a break, with Gen-Zers particularly concerned.

    “When your youngest employees feel guilty about taking their lunch break, it’s a big red flag,” said ezCater vice president of people Robert Kaskel in comments on the findings. “Pair this lunch guilt with employees’ tendency to skip lunch for short-term productivity gains and business leaders have a performance and burnout issue on their hands.”

    Another negative result of employees skipping lunch is what the ezCater report on the survey called workplace “hanger.” That feeling of irritability, even anger when hunger starts gnawing at employees also eats away at their focus and enthusiasm, and even creates tensions between colleagues.

    Nearly 85 percent of respondents reported battling “hanger” at least once each week. That was only slightly more than the 82 percent who said they looked forward to their lunch break, and then felt disappointed and grumpy when they had to pass it up.

    “Our data shows that hangry workers are bad for business: Forty-three percent take longer to complete tasks, 38 percent report being blunt with colleagues, and 25 percent avoid interacting with their peers,” Kaskel said.

    But a rising number of employees have found a solution to both fulfill their lunching desires, and deal with workloads or other obligations getting in the way of those. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they now tuck into a midday meal during meetings scheduled over the noon hour, with half of those saying they do so every week.

    That compromise allows workers to enjoy the lunches they’ve been thinking about all morning, and provides employers the better performance benefits from employees working on full stomachs.

    What’s the downside for companies in that? Many survey participants said having to work while they eat also increases their appetite for bosses providing and paying for those working meals. Meaning that for business owners, there’s still no such thing as a free lunch.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • How to Protect Your Company From the Worst Effects of Social Media

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    For years, public handwringing about the impact of social media on the minds and lives countless millions of teen users has dominated conversations about this increasingly prominent communications medium. Plenty of research suggests it can do real damage, and sites like Instagram have been forced to take steps that try to limit the harm the apps do. But it’s not just teens using social media, and a new report explores its use at work and its impact on the productivity. Its conclusions may prompt you to rethink if and exactly how you allow your staff to doomscroll through Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok and their ilk during office hours.

    The report, from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, tried to work out which type of social media content caused the most upset in the office environment and how social content changed worker’s moods — potentially reducing their productivity — in separate experiments that returned very similar answers, industry news site HRDive notes.

    Firstly, if people were watching “attractive” social media content while at work—material like clothing fits — as well as typical family-life posts, workers’ moods shifted to feeling more confident and boosted ability to tackle their work tasks. But if they watched difficult materials, like politically charged posts or even “rage bait” content, workers were more anxious afterwards and were more likely to seek their own space away from colleagues — potentially damaging productivity and team working ability. 

    At this point you may be slapping your forehead and muttering about how this is all just common sense.

    But it is important, if only for the following reason: the report cites earlier research that showed around 77 percent of U.S. workers regularly consume social media during work hours. That’s nearly eight in 10 people in your workforce, which means the type of content they’re consuming is going to impact your company’s productivity. 

    The authors said their study “offers a practical contribution by providing a more balanced view of the benefits and/or drawbacks of employees participating in social media throughout their workdays.”

    They suggest that the study can provide a toolbox for “leaders and employees as to when and how to use social media as a motivational tool.” One simple example of this, they suggest, is that a manager could “support employees’ use of social media as a daily work break.” You may even think of it as the Insta-equivalent of a sneaky smoke break, for example. The fact that you’ve given explicit permission is also a boon, because it shows you understand the fascination of social media, and you’re not punishing people for slacking off work for a handful of minutes.

    The researchers go further though, and say that if you “directly encourage employees to focus on posts that they perceive as attractive or family-oriented because of their uplifting qualities” you may even be able to “enhance work productivity.” Admittedly you’d be fighting against human urges to watch different content, and the various apps’ algorithms which generally only care about keeping users watching, no matter the content.

    But it may be worth a try — especially if you tell them to proactively avoid contentious content during work hours to avoid productivity problems. If team tasks are on the agenda that day, tell your staff to leave watching social content until later, since that could lead to emotional withdrawal and weaken overall results.

    This may give savvy leaders some useful tips on how to keep employee distraction down, and maybe even keep workforce motivation up.

    But there’s another issue that may be taking over the average worker’s urge to watch endless TikTok reels: AI. AI tools can be fascinating, fun and distracting — just as they can be useful in the workplace. But a new report shows that the emerging issue of AI “workslop,” where AI tools spit out reams of partly useful, partly distracting material that ends up leaving people to pick out the signal from the noise, may be much worse than you think. It also suggests that much of this material really is being generated by the average worker noodling around on generative AI apps.

    So maybe it’s time to have a talk with your workforce about the distracting power of both social media and AI. 

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Using AI to Replace Jobs? Layoffs Will Cost You. Do This Instead

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    There’s been much debate on how artificial intelligence tools will change the way people work, and that it will take jobs away from humans. Indeed, mass layoffs have abounded in recent years, while entry-level jobs seem to have disappeared. But a new report argues the merits of a third option: upskilling, reskilling, and otherwise training current employees on new roles—positions that might not exist yet, but will be vital to helping businesses remain resilient in the face of rapid change.

    Those are the broad conclusions of the just released Talent Resilience Index (TRI) by labor market analytics company Lightcast, and Guild — which matches customer enterprises with education, upskilling, and retraining programs for their workforces. That effort allows businesses to retain employees by enabling them to perform new tasks created by ongoing change. In doing so, those businesses can shore up against an uncertain future, and prepare to capture trillions in extra revenue.

    “More than $280 billion has already been committed to semiconductor manufacturing, with hundreds of billions more flowing into infrastructure, supply chains, clean energy, AI, and advanced nuclear,” said Guild CEO Bijal Shah in emailed comments to Inc. “These are once-in-a-generation investments, but their success depends on whether the workforce can keep up.”

    Reskilling is key to keeping up, says Shah, arguing that increased workforce mobility translates to enhanced company performance and growth: “By moving employees into higher-impact roles, they unlock productivity, loyalty, and innovation.”

    Higher sales and retention

    According to Guild’s TRI, upskilling and reskilling has the potential to generate $8.5 trillion in extra revenue generated by 2030. That revenue would be lost if companies pursue their current habits of filling talent needs through external hires — instead, they’d pay an average 28 percent salary premium to lure outside recruits.

    By reskilling current employees instead, companies increase their internal mobility capacities, slash recruitment and onboarding costs, and allow their more valuable retrained workers to receive an average 15 percent boost in annual earnings.

    In other words, the training pays for itself. “Organizations that fill 60 percent or more of roles internally achieve four times higher sales per employee than those that don’t,” the TRI notes. There are other advantages to upskilling current staff, too. Employees whose retraining allows them to move upward to new positions within the same company also stick with their companies 60 percent to 65 percent more than external hires.

    But in addition to internal talent mobility and resilience delivering enormous advantages to individual businesses, they’re increasingly becoming essential to thriving economies. Indeed, the TRI calls workforce mobility “an economy within an economy: a hidden engine of bottom-up growth that rivals entire sectors in its economic contribution.”

    According to Guild, workforce mobility alone generated an average of $221 billion in additional annual earnings between 2016 and 2024 — equivalent to 1 percent of U.S. GDP. That additional wealth creation peaked at $255 billion in 2023. Those gains also explain why countries like Singapore, India, Saudi Arabia, and others are investing billions into programs retraining and upskilling employees, and enabling them to answer the new needs their employers face amid rapid change.

    But those investments in mobility abroad come at the very moment the TRI shows resilience in the U.S. slumping. Its recent reading of workforce mobility dropped to its lowest level since 2016, amid a shrinking national workforce, economic uncertainties, and increasing demand for AI skills by employers. Those forces have resulted in one out of three core jobs skills changing in the U.S. within the last three years — a mutation that rose as high as 75 percent in some professions.

    Reversing U.S. mobility slump

    How do U.S. companies reverse that slide? Shah thinks it will “likely come from a public-private model, where businesses lead the charge in building workforce mobility systems and government clears the roadblocks” for advancing those faster.

    “That means aligning education incentives, expanding credential portability, and treating workforce development like critical infrastructure,” she says. “Companies cannot solve the skills gap alone, but government policy alone also will not keep pace with technology, it is the intersection of the two that unlocks lasting resilience.”

    In drawing conclusions from the TRI’s results, Guild urges businesses to reformat their HR strategies to make mobility potentials a key focus in recruiting, along with continual upskilling of employees so they can step into new roles meeting emerging demands.

    As part of that, Guild says key performance indicators, job definitions, and promotion decisions should focus on employee resilience as a key criterion. The same holds true for setting salaries, with Guild using AI literacy as an example of why that makes good business sense.

    “Roles requiring AI skills command salaries 28 percent higher — an $18,000 premium on average,” the TRI says of current trends to recruit externally for those. “For employers, this creates a stark choice: pay unsustainable premiums for AI-ready talent that barely exists, or build it internally. The math favors building, but execution requires a resilience strategy.”

    In short: The payoff of building resilience usually dwarfs the investment.

    Take Guild customer OSF HealthCare, which made essential changes to the way it upskilled employees, and placed those at the heart of its HR strategy. The result was a 3-to-1 return on every dollar it invested; 60 percent less contract labor use in the first year alone; and an 89 percent retention rate, versus 54 percent in the wider healthcare sector.

    Similarly, Salesforce launched its Career Connect bootcamp to help less qualified employees harness emerging AI and other generative tech, and use those to attain new skills in jobs the company needs to fill. The response was a 75 percent employee adoption rate, allowing Salesforce to fill 50 percent of its new positions internally.

    That strategy, according to the TRI report also allowed Salesforce to retain workers and the talents they were initially hired for, while repositioning those into forward-facing jobs generating even greater value for the company. That’s precisely the resilience goal Guild urges all companies to aim for.

    “When companies enable workers to move from underutilized roles into in-demand positions, productivity rises, wages grow, and business performance accelerates,” Shah said. “But today’s reality is that talent is constrained, access is uneven, and time is short. If we do not act intentionally to skill, reskill, and mobilize the workforce we already have, we will fall short on innovation, competitiveness, and shared prosperity.”

    The good news, she adds, is that workers are ready, but need “a system built for the speed of today that invests in human adaptability, not just technological advancement.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Few Employer Health Plans Cover Ozempic. This Company Can Help

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    Many American workers want to use GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, to meet their weight loss goals. The trouble is, most employee health plans don’t cover them — but a new company hopes to change that.

    A prescription drug employee benefit company, called Andel, announced its debut at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas on Monday. Early next year, Andel will help reduce the cost of providing GLP-1 medications in employee benefits packages by forming an employer co-op. Under this setup, Andel is able to buy the medication in bulk directly from drug manufacturers instead of negotiating prices from pharmacy benefit managers, which are usually owned by insurers. Employers can reduce the cost even further by adding subsidies.

    “Instead of asking [employers] to sign up to a fully-funded insurance plan, which is really expensive and unpredictable and challenging, all we would ask for is a small 50 to $100 per claim subsidy, which we pass directly to reduce the cost of the drugs,” Andel CEO and Co-founder Jay Bregman says.

    Employers are legally required to cover GLP-1 medication for diabetes, but not for weight loss. The injectable version of the drugs typically costs between $1,000 and $1,500 a month — which isn’t doable for most employers, especially with premiums projected to spike by 9 percent next year. Currently, 64 percent of employers do not cover GLP-1 medication to help workers shed pounds — but boy, do they wish they did. Up to 35 percent of Americans say they “are interested” in using the drug to lose weight, according to a PwC survey.

    Lesley Grady, senior vice president of enterprise marketing at Sequoia — a benefits brokerage known for serving Silicon Valley tech startups and large companies — confirms strong interest in GLP-1 coverage. She says their clients are looking for creative solutions to make the medication more affordable for employers. The brokerage plans to start offering Andel to clients who are looking to beef up their benefit plans.

    “Employees in tech have high expectations of their benefits, but I think employers obviously know that if they include it with unchecked access, it will blow up their budget,” Grady says. “So they’re really under pressure to find solutions right now that don’t just open up their floodgates — we see that strategy with Andel.”

    Andel doesn’t plan to stop with weight loss drugs — in the coming years, the company hopes to apply the same cooperative, subsidy model to preventative Alzheimer’s drugs and potentially gene therapy, the co-founders told Inc.

    “Expanding access to healthcare is the cornerstone of our mission,” says Andel Co-founder Ritu Malhotra. “Andel gives employers an innovative new pharmacy-benefit solution that fills the coverage gap.”

    Andel was co-founded by Bregman, who successfully exited three companies — including the ridesharing network Hailo, rebranded to Lyft Europe — and Malhotra, who’s also a pharmacist and former CVS Health executive. At the conference, the founders announced they raised $4.5 million in capital to launch the platform. Investors include Lightbank, Seedcamp, Bertelsmann Investments, Houghton Street Ventures, and Springboard.

    Eric Ong, partner at Lightbank — a venture capital firm that invests heavily in benefit tech companies — told Inc. that Malhotra’s PBM experience and Bregman’s entrepreneurial success is uniquely positioned to help tackle the high cost of in-demand prescription drugs. The firm invested in the company because they haven’t seen any other solutions addressing this challenge, he says.

    “There’s a disconnect between employers wanting to offer good benefits and health benefits and keeping their employees healthy — at the same time, they can’t afford it. So, we just found that really interesting and sort of novel in the market today,” Ong says.

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    Kayla Webster

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  • The Penny Shortage Is Adding Up Frustration Among Small Retailers

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    Consumers may want to avoid offering retailers a penny for their thoughts from now on. What they could get for their cent is a blast of complaints from many businesses owners now struggling with premature shortages of the soon-to-vanish copper coin. That’s in turn creating awkward moments at the checkout stand, and requiring improvised solutions when making correct change for customers isn’t possible.

    The small coin conundrum is the result of President Donald Trump’s February decision to order “my Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to stop producing new pennies.” The move followed the Department of Government Efficiency first putting the penny in its sights, when its founder and leader at the time, Elon Musk, explained the lowest valued coin “costs over 3 cents to make and cost U.S. taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023.” With arguably more of the coppery orbs filling jars, car ashtrays, and spaces between sofa cushions than used in payments, Trump decided to halt minting of the coin and allow it to gradually disappear from circulation.

    So, why are retailers reacting now? Because a growing number of those businesses report they’re already coming up short on pennies when trying to make exact change for customers. That’s occurring as several centers that distribute the coins for the Federal Reserve Bank have stopped making deliveries. They‘re also slated to halt minting any new metallic portraits of Abraham Lincoln next year, when their use is expected to slowly taper off.

    For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, that gradual count down on the penny’s active service has already resulted in a shortage at many shops, restaurants, and chain stores — months earlier than anyone had expected. As a result, business owners are having to come up with workarounds when they can’t give customers the change they’re owed.

    According to several press reports, that forced Wisconsin-based convenience store chain Kwik Trip to start rounding cash purchases down to the nearest nickel. Rival Love’s Travel Stops are reportedly also rounding sales, but instead upward to the next five-cent level.

    Family-owned convenience chain Sheetz is taking another tack. It’s urging customers to come in and offer up their extra pennies in exchange for a donation to charity in their name. Sheetz partners with the Salvation Army to provide children with clothes, toys, and holiday parties.

    “Customers can also choose to trade in their extra pennies for a free self-serve drink or donate their spare pennies to support Sheetz For the Kidz,” Sheetz public affairs manager Nick Ruffner told the Nexstar news group. “Sheetz Donations can be processed through the register at all Sheetz locations to ensure all funds go directly to Sheetz For the Kidz, and the coins will then be recirculated for other customers.”

    Meanwhile, Sheetz and other retailers that are suffering penny shortages — and cringey moments having to explain their workaround solutions to customers — are urging clients to pay with cards or phone apps instead of cash. But the cent-less dilemma is spreading quickly enough to other businesses that their trade organizations are taking action.

    In September, NACS retailer group — whose members include the National Association of Convenience Stores and the National Grocers Association — did something rarely seen in the private sector. It asked the government to come up with regulations — this time for companies dealing with the penny’s spreading shortage, and eventual demise.

    “NACS has raised industry concerns with Congress and the Administration and is advocating for federal legislation to permit the rounding of cash transactions,” Anna Ready Blom, NACS strategic advisor of government relations said in a recent article on the organization’s site. “Businesses are desperate for Congress to address this issue by passing a law allowing them to round to the nearest nickel. Without federal legislation, businesses are left in the impossible position of trying to figure out what to do and at risk of being out of compliance with other laws.”

    The reason for the concern is that many states and localities have their own laws that prohibit rounding in cash transactions. As a result, NACS is urging the government to pass federal statutes to permit that solution when pennies run short, and define exactly how rounding should be carried out.

    If that happens, it should protect retailers from any potential legal pushback from consumers seeing their $5.63 purchase rounded up to $5.65. But it won’t spare cashiers the embarrassment while explaining to customers that they can’t make exact change, or prevent them from disappointing young clients who wanted an increasingly rare penny for the one cent gum machine.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Why Gen-Z Is Turning to TikTok for Their Benefits Info

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    The complexity of the U.S. healthcare system is only one reason it’s more important than ever for workers and employers to have a proper handle on workplace benefits. In a rapidly changing labor market, coupled with shifting employee expectations, the right benefits package can be a big motivator for workers, and a draw for highly qualified job applicants. But a new report suggests that many employers may not be adequately explaining their companies’ benefits to their employees. It’s a wakeup call for business onwers to drag their communications into the 21 century and educate people versus the social media platform that are the source of most of their online information.

    According to a new survey from New York-based financial services outfit Equitable, younger members of the workforce are turning to online sources and social media to help them properly understand the workplace benefits they’re offered. You might think “great! Job done…less effort for the HR team!” but the data shows otherwise: some 40 percent of the 1,000 people Equitable surveyed said they didn’t feel confident in understanding the voluntary benefits their employer offered. And while the data show 55 percent of all workers “still rely on HR materials and information sessions from employers to understand their workplace benefits,” 37 percent of Gen-Z have used social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and even YouTube (that great source of “how to” videos) to seek out benefits information — the highest percentage of any generation responding to the survey. Meanwhile, Millennials lead the age groups who use AI for the same info: fully 30 percent say they’ve used AI like this. 

    What’s driving the trend of people trying to figure out benefits on their own? It may be mostly about medical costs in the complex, layered U.S. health system. Equitable’s data show 80 percent of Americans think an unplanned medical expense — like an accident, or a sudden serious illness — could “derail” their long term financial planning. Younger workers are more anxious, with 89 percent of Gen-Z and Millennial workers feeling this way, compared to 65 percent of baby boomers. This could be thanks to the macroeconomic financial disparities between generations, with report after report showing how the boomer generation has money set aside in ways that’re inaccessible to younger generations.

    The amounts of money concerned aren’t that onerous, either: Equitable’s data show that over a quarter of the people who say an unexpected bill could upset their plans pin the financially damaging limit at around $1,000. 

    Why should you care about this? 

    Equitable’s report has a clear reason for you: it notes that a survey of over 500 small to medium-size businesses, nearly every respondent said voluntary workplace benefits are “key to attracting and retaining employees.” And nearly three in four small business owners think these benefits show that they’re caring and committed employers. Reputations like this, a recent report showed, are perhaps more important than they’ve ever been. 

    But the same survey said four in 10 employers said low participation was a barrier for them offering or expanding voluntary benefits. What may be driving this? Overly complex, old-fashioned pamphlets perhaps? Or a benefits education program that’s slightly out of date with current offerings from third party suppliers? 

    The big take-away is that younger workers really are looking for meaningful workplace benefits when they’re choosing which jobs to apply for — and emphasizing those that can benefit their mental health. As Gen-Z joins the workforce in increasing numbers, this is definitely something you need to plan for, lest you may miss out on excellent new talent. 

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Why a Quarter of Employees Don’t Take Any Company-Provided PTO

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    If a sizeable portion of your workplace seems to be dragging a bit these days, there’s a good reason why many staffers may be feeling fatigued. New data indicates a full quarter of U.S. employees took no personal time off (PTO) last year to unplug from work and recharge their batteries. Meanwhile, a third of workers who did merely caught up on their sleep.

    It remains a source of astonishment in many countries — and in some cases smug superiority — that even a quarter of the way into the 21st century, the U.S. remains the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee a minimum number of employee vacation days. Often overlooked in that gloating is that most American employers voluntarily provide PTO and most national holidays off to their workers. In recent years, that’s allowed U.S. employees to take an average 10 and 14 days annually, according to most estimates — even if that falls well short of 42 days in France, 36 in Spain, 30 in Australia, and 25 in Canada.

    But in spite of employers’ efforts to provide paid leisure time to staff, a little more than 30 percent of the workforce still has no access to PTO. Now, new survey data from remote job listing site Flexjobs finds that nearly a quarter of employees, or 23 percent of the 3,063 people it questioned didn’t take a single day off during the last year.

    The reasons? Even though 82 percent of those respondents said their employer provided paid time off, many failed to take some or all of those days “due to heavy workloads, manager expectations, and unsupportive company cultures,” the report said.

    Concretely, 43 percent of respondents said they had too much work to take PTO days, with 30 percent saying stepping away from the office risked them falling behind tasks they’d managed to keep pace with. Nearly 30 percent of survey participants said they’d feel too guilty, or be worried about looking like a slacker by going on vacation.

    More problematic was the 19 percent of respondents who said they didn’t dare take PTO in a workplace that “clearly doesn’t support taking time off.” That pressure dissuading employees from taking an extended break from work was felt in other ways as well.

    A quarter of survey participants said their managers discouraged them from taking a full week off, resulting in 42 percent of respondents saying they’d limited total PTO they took in the last year to between one and 10 days.

    “Most employees have some form of paid time off, but there’s a big difference between a company that offers this benefit and one that actually encourages workers to use it,” said Flexjobs career expert Toni Frana in comments accompanying the survey’s results. “Without a company culture that supports rest, many workers feel they can’t really step away without risking their professional reputation.”

    Despite those concerns, it’s clear most U.S. employers aren’t mistreating their workers in Miranda Priestly’s ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fashion.

    Eighteen percent of survey participants said they took more than 15 days of PTO during the last year, and nearly the same number stepped away from work for 11 to 15 days. That may not match the six weeks — plus 11 national holidays — employees in France get annually, but it beats the five paid days workers in Nigeria have free each year.

    So how are U.S. workers who do take PTO spending that leisure time? While a majority still take to the beach, mountains, or global tourist destinations, a recent survey of 1,200 employees by mattress company Amerisleep found over a third use vacation time to just sleep.

    Its polling found 37 percent of respondents said they’ve used PTO days primarily to catch up on their shuteye. At 43 percent Millennials were the most likely to spend time off hitting the hay, followed by 34 percent of Gen Xers, 33 percent of Gen Z, and 20 percent of Boomers.

    That PTO slumber option also has the advantage of economizing the heavy costs of gas, airfare, and lodging that more traditional vacations require. On the down side, it also virtually eliminates the opportunity to cross paths with all those French and Spanish people on perpetual holiday.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Want to Keep Your Workers Happy? Don’t “Fake Promote” Them With New Job Titles

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    Shakespeare really nailed the “what’s in a name?” question — roses do smell as sweet no matter what you call ‘em. But when it comes to writing business text and job titles, rather than poetry and names, things get a little more complex as workers’ egos and motivational benefits like pay rises join in. Now a new report shines an interesting light on a strange job title-related phenomenon that’s afflicting the average worker: “title inflation.” Even Shakespeare would have a hard time shaping this story into a beautiful verse.

    As you may have expected, the workers don’t emerge on the positive side of this trick. In fact, 92 percent of the 1,000 U.S. workers questioned by online resume building service MyPerfectResume said they’d seen companies use overblown job titles to make it seem like their career was progressing. And this played out even as their managers weren’t accompanying the “fake” promotion with meaningful benefits like higher pay or extra recognition alongside an inflated job name.

    As someone who’s held an innumerable number of job titles over the years, from junior business analyst to technician I’ve seen some of this go on. And if you think about it, you certainly have too: I bet you know a junior section manager of XYZ or two who’s been “promoted,” and lost the “junior,” but that’s as far as things went in terms of pay or other compensation.

    MyPerfectResmue’s data also show that two in three workers think this habit of job title inflation is actually happening more than in the past. And, as industry news site HRDive notes, there’s a sad, mind games-related reaction happening to this sort of managerial trick: workers admitted that they were afraid to negotiate with management when this occurs, and 9 percent have been given a new more senior title without a raise, and shockingly 15 percent had even accepted a more “senior” job title that came with a functional salary cut. Worse, perhaps, some 37 percent of the survey respondents said they had felt pressured to accept a new job title without negotiating more pay.

    We can assume that the gloomy job market, endless headlines reporting layoffs and the ever-growing threat that AI may take people’s jobs is playing a role here. After all, reports say that people are so afraid of being fired that they’re feeling guilty about taking vacations, and they’re “task masking” too — pretending to work hard even when their workload is light so that managers see them and think they’re busy, and not worth replacing with an AI. 

    Combine a nervous job-hugging workforce with a management system that’s under constant pressure to deliver more productivity, without necessarily being given budget or authority to “reward” workers properly, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for managers pulling off dirty tricks like offering someone a new, grander-seeming job title that comes with extra duties, but no managerial authority or, indeed, extra pay. This is backed up by MyPerfectResume data which showed 20 percent of workers think employers inflate job titles to justify assigning more responsibilities, 19 percent think it’s merely about flattery, and 16 percent think it’s a ploy to retain workers long term.

    Now, you can argue that job titles don’t matter, and you may feel that in your small enterprise everyone’s got a simple, meaningful one that doesn’t overstate or overpromise their role.

    But the thing is job titles do matter in subtle ways. For example, 41 percent of survey respondents in this new study said a title had made them seem either over or under qualified when they were applying for a new role, and 11 percent said that an unusual job title had made it harder to explain and justify their work experience. 

    And, just like being given the corner office, a new, more senior-seeming job title without an accompanying raise or other benefit really represents no advancement at all for a worker. Keep pulling this trick off and you could build up resentment in your workforce, which could then drive down engagement and, with that, your profits.

    Simply: it might be time to audit your promotions and rewards program, and to check that everyone feels they’ve got the right job title and that their pay reflects that title properly.  

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    Kit Eaton

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  • How Do I Mentor a Very Timid Employee?

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

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

    1. How to mentor a very timid employee

    I’d love some advice about how to help out a very timid staff member, let’s call her Jane. Jane and I have 1-1 weekly professional development meetings where I can offer support, mentorship, and advice. She is not my direct report and we don’t work in the same department so our workflows never cross; our company culture is that each senior staff member (i.e., me) has regular mentoring meetings with some junior employees.

    Jane is very, very timid. She doesn’t feel like she can advocate for herself in her own team, and she doesn’t push back when she’s given unachievable deadlines. If she knows she can’t meet a deadline, she tries to anyway because she doesn’t want to say no to her team leader. This results in Capital S stress for her, and a missed deadline for the team.

    Recently, Jane ended up crying in my office, totally overwhelmed by her workload, and feeling like she’s not able to do anything about it. I investigated with her team leader, Kate, who told me that Jane always produces brilliant work, even if it’s sometimes after a deadline. Her team has nothing but positive feedback about Jane’s work ethic, even though it seems like she often works overtime to try and meet a deadline (something else that causes her stress). All in all, it seems to me like a supportive team environment. Kate and I are peers, and I know for a fact that she is an incredibly supportive leader who would not react badly to Jane speaking up at the right time.

    Kate and I have tried for months now to give Jane some ways to help her communicate to her team members when she’s struggling, and how/when to speak up when she’s given a deadline that she knows is unachievable. The problem is that Jane is so timid that she refuses to actually carry out any of the ideas that we discuss in our meetings. She just says that she “doesn’t think she can say that to Kate.” Jane’s stress levels are getting worse, and I’m at a loss with what to try next.

    Green responds:

    Well … you can try giving her specific language, role-playing it with her, and setting specific plans  that you then check back about (“you were going to say X to Kate at your 4 p.m. meeting — did you? why not? so what next?”). You can also name the pattern for Jane — “We’ve worked on this for months but you haven’t implemented any of the ideas we’ve come up with. What do you think would really help?”

    But if you’ve already tried those things, I think it’s likely that you can’t fix this. Mostly it needs to come from Jane herself, although Kate is also better positioned to fix it if she wants to.

    Ideally Kate needs to ask Jane some probing questions about her workload and take a fresh look at it herself, check in on Jane’s progress toward deadlines earlier in the process, and give her explicit instructions about how she wants her to handle it when something is in danger of going off-track. Is your role one where it would be appropriate to suggest those ideas to Kate or even set up a meeting for the three of you, or are you really just supposed to be coaching Jane behind the scenes?

    It’s also possible Jane mostly just wants a place where she can vent. If that’s the case, it’s useful for you to know that so you aren’t racking your brain for a way to move her to action.

    2. I gossiped and upset my coworker

    I was talking with a manager in another department when she expressed frustration with one of her employees — not that much, just that she is dealing with a lot. Soon after, I saw an ad for that person’s position posted, and I talked about it with a coworker in my department. I came in Monday to a full-blown rumor mill situation with that employee thinking they were being fired and their manager upset that I had talked about it! I take full responsibility; I was the one who spoke about it and that’s on me, regardless of who spread it afterwards. I apologized to the employee and their manager and said I truly didn’t mean to upset them and am so sorry they had to deal with it.

    I’m not a gossiping person! I mostly stick to myself, but I made a poor choice and hurt someone. How do I let my colleague and the hurt employee know that this won’t be a pattern without completely walling myself off from everyone?

    Green responds:

    I know this isn’t a satisfying answer, but now that you’ve apologized, the only real way to show it is by demonstrating it through how you operate and that takes time. Going forward, be scrupulously professional and discreet and you should be able to repair any reputation damage.

    But also … that manager who shared her frustration with you about the employee? That was a bigger breach than anything you did. She’s the one who had the real responsibility for discretion. Yes, you shouldn’t have shared what you heard, but she shouldn’t have said it to you in the first place. If she’s the person who chastised you, I hope she acknowledged her own responsibility as well.
    (On top of that, if she’s already advertising someone’s position when they don’t know they’re going to be replaced, there are bigger problems here — although it’s not clear if that’s what the ad was.)

    3. Is pushy networking the new norm for college students?

    I’m curious about some interactions I’ve had with a student from my alma mater who has been contacting me for networking and “advice.” I’ve always been more than happy to pay it forward for students from my school and do networking coffees and have helped them with recommendations and getting internships before, as I work in a somewhat difficult to enter public policy field, but I’ve been thrown for a loop with this latest student.

    We met up once and the student used the whole time to talk about himself and all the people he knew in the city where I’m located and didn’t ask me questions, but I still gave him the usual advice I give students. I was not impressed, but this student has sent me several emails over the past year to “update me” on his GPA, where he was moving, his extracurricular activities, etc. At one point I didn’t respond quickly enough and he messaged me on LinkedIn saying he’d been trying to contact me and hadn’t heard back.

    Is this the new norm for college students now? I understand things are very difficult for those graduating right now. I’ve been polite in my responses, but don’t feel like I need to respond to every email, and I’m curious how you would handle it.

    Green responds:

    Nah, this isn’t a new norm. This is just one obnoxious guy!

    There is advice out there for people to stay in touch with those they’ve networked with, and for early-career networkers to let people who helped them know how things are going as time goes by. Maybe that’s what’s he’s doing. But the level of pushiness is all him.

    His “I haven’t heard back from you” message actually gives you a good opening — you could respond to that and say, “Glad to hear you’re doing well. I’m swamped these days and behind on correspondence. Best of luck in whatever comes next for you!” And then give yourself permission to stop replying to future messages if it’s not a relationship you want to maintain.

    Someone could argue it’s better to be straight with him (“You’re coming across as demanding more of my time when you didn’t make good use of our meeting last year”), but I don’t think that’s a burden you need to take on. It’s not on you to explain to him why his approach is wrong, although you certainly could if you wanted to.

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

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

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    Alison Green

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  • A Study of 1 Million People Reveals Key Ingredient for Happiness That Most Leaders Ignore

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    What’s one thing every leader can do to make sure employees are happy at work and engaged with their jobs? Make sure they can trust in you, your organization, and each other. That’s the finding in a 2024 meta-analysis of studies more than 1 million participants. When leaders seek to improve employee wellbeing, they typically think about things like remote work, flexible schedules, and wellness offerings such as gym memberships. But trust may be the most valuable perk of all.

    A 2024 meta-analysis by an international research team led by Minxiang Zhao and Yixuan Li of the Renmin University of China Psychology Department examined 132 studies on trust from around the world. The studies had a total of more than 1 million participants. The researchers focused on two types of trust, interpersonal trust and institutional trust, exactly the two types than can occur in workplaces. They found that both types of trust correlate with social, psychological, and to a lesser extent, physical wellbeing.

    If trust is so important, how do you get more of it? Unlike some other things, you can’t mandate trust, and you can’t demand that employees trust you, your company, or each other. But you can provide a workplace culture where trust can flourish. Here are some ways to do that.

    1. Be transparent.

    If you want employees to trust you and your company, it’s obviously important to treat them fairly. But it’s almost as important to let them know what’s going on. You may have to find a delicate balance between sharing competitive information and keeping too much to yourself. But half the employees in a recent survey said lack of information about what was going on at their companies was their biggest source of stress. Keep that in mind when considering whether to share bad news.

    2. Be predictable.

    Many years ago, a CEO known for turning troubled companies around told me that his employees should never have to guess how he would answer a question. He told them his top priorities so they could always predict what he would say. He never wavered from those priorities.

    We may be fascinated with leaders like Elon Musk who often change their minds. But we trust those like Warren Buffett, who consistently say the same things year after year. The more they can predict what you will say and do, the easier it is for employees to trust you.

    3. Be trusting yourself.

    It may be hard for employees to trust you if, say, they know you’re using software to monitor their keystrokes. Admittedly, treating employees with trust can backfire in the short term if you trust the wrong person. But in the long term, research shows that more trusting organizations tend to perform better, even in the often mistrustful retail industry.

    I believe the reason for this is that, while we can easily see the cost of employee dishonesty when it happens, we don’t always recognize that our mistrust comes at a high cost as well. If an employee has their bag searched every time they leave work, they won’t feel the same trust or affection for the company that they otherwise might. And it’s human nature for them to try and figure out a way to sneak items out despite the search.

    4. Help employees trust each other.

    Setting up competitions that pit employees against each other for important things like compensation can bring about acrimony and mistrust among employees. Here again, the short-term gain may not be worth the long-term loss. Employees who trust their co-workers are more likely to collaborate effectively with those co-workers. They’re also likely to be happier, and to stay in their jobs. Relationships at work are often the biggest deterrent to leaving company.

    You can help foster those relationships by asking people to collaborate on important projects and letting them share the credit equally. You can also create teams across different functions so that employees get to know their colleagues outside their immediate areas. And of course, any opportunity for employees to socialize, get together outside work, or work together on community projects, can help create those relationships and that trust.

    In my book Career Self-Care, I explore workplace happiness, and how relationships at work can contribute to that happiness, or detract from it. The more employees can trust in you, your company, and each other, the happier and less burned out they’ll be. It’s your job as a leader to make that happen.

    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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  • Paramount Skydance to Cut 2,000 US Jobs Starting Week of October 27

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    Paramount Skydance will begin mass layoffs the week of October 27, eliminating around 2,000 U.S. jobs as part of a $2 billion cost-cutting plan under new CEO David Ellison, Variety reported on Saturday.

    The layoffs follow the $8.4 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount Global, which closed in August.

    Additional international job cuts are expected, with the company aiming to disclose full details in its third quarter earnings report on November 10, the report added.

    Variety had reported on August 22 that Paramount was looking to cut between 2,000 and 3,000 jobs by early November.

    As of December 2024, Paramount had nearly 18,600 full- and part-time employees, and 3,500 project-based staff.

    Paramount Skydance did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

    Reporting by Rajveer Singh Pardesi in Bengaluru; Editing by Jan Harvey and Marguerita Choy

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    Kayla Webster

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  • Agreement Reached to Avert Broadway Actors’ Strike, Union Says

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    Broadway actors have reached a tentative agreement to avert a strike that would shut down 32 stage productions as theater attendance approaches its peak season, according to their union.

    Actors’ Equity, a union that represents more than 51,000 actors and stage managers, said it reached a tentative, three-year agreement with The Broadway League, the trade association that represents theater owners, producers and operators.

    However, the producers have yet to reach an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, which represents Broadway’s musicians, so a strike by that union is still possible. The actors union said it would put its full support behind the musicians union as it works to reach an agreement.

    Al Vincent Jr., executive director and lead negotiator for Actors’ Equity, said that the agreement “saves the Equity-League Health Fund while also making strides in our other priorities including scheduling and physical therapy access”.

    The agreement for the contract has been sent to members for ratification, according to the union. The previous three-year contract ended on September 28.

    The union had earlier in September threatened to walk off the stage as it had not reached an agreement. A central issue in bargaining had been healthcare and the contribution the Broadway League makes to the union’s health care fund.

    Other sectors of the entertainment industry have been roiled by labor unrest, with Hollywood actors and writers striking in 2023, as they fought for better compensation in the streaming TV era and curbs on the use of artificial intelligence.

    Video game actors staged a nearly year-long walkout as they sought protections against the use of artificial intelligence, before reaching a tentative agreement with game studios in July.

    Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru and Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Franklin Paul

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    Reuters

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  • Novo Nordisk Hires US Pharma Veteran as Trump Pricing Pressure Mounts

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    Novo Nordisk has appointed U.S. pharmaceutical executive Greg Miley as its new global head of corporate affairs, as the obesity drugmaker faces growing pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump on drug pricing.

    Miley recently served as senior vice president of government affairs at U.S. pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. He posted a statement about his appointment on LinkedIn on Friday and Novo Nordisk shared the statement with Reuters.

    A Novo spokesperson said on Saturday that Miley would join the company in early November, overseeing global communication and global public affairs.

    Novo is turning to an American executive with deep U.S. pharmaceutical experience to help navigate political risks under the Trump administration in the United States, its largest market.

    New hire to focus on relations with Trump administration

    The appointment comes as new CEO Mike Doustdar tries to revive investor confidence through a restructuring to sharpen Novo’s focus in a fierce obesity drug battle against U.S. rival Eli Lilly. The overhaul includes cutting 9,000 jobs, with 5,000 positions being eliminated in Denmark and layoffs under way across multiple U.S. departments.

    “In this new role, I see great potential to strengthen our Global Communication and Public Affairs efforts,” Miley wrote on LinkedIn, adding that he would relocate to Denmark, Novo’s home market.

    Miley’s urgent priority will be improving Novo’s relations with the Trump administration, said a source familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information.

    Other big pharmaceutical companies have hired public affairs experts with long backgrounds in Republican circles in order to navigate the administration’s pressures on the industry, a source at a European drugmaker told Reuters on Friday.

    Trump says Ozempic price in U.S. will be lowered

    Shares of Novo and Lilly fell on Friday after Trump said that the price of Novo’s Ozempic diabetes treatment would be lowered. Ozempic contains the same active ingredient as its weight-loss drug Wegovy.

    Miley spent the past decade at AbbVie in Chicago and was promoted two years ago to senior vice president of government affairs, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry since 2004, building his career at U.S. drugmakers including more than four years in public affairs at Abbott and nearly five years at Pfizer.

    AbbVie did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Miley did not reply when contacted by Reuters earlier on Friday.

    Reporting by Maggie Fick in London and Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Editing by Louise Heavens, Kirsten Donovan and Cynthia Osterman

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    Reuters

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  • Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Weighs Heavy on the US Labor Market

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    Maria worked cleaning schools in Florida for $13 an hour. Every two weeks, she’d get a $900 paycheck from her employer, a contractor. Not much — but enough to cover rent in the house that she and her 11-year-old son share with five families, plus electricity, a cellphone and groceries.

    In August, it all ended.

    When she showed up at the job one morning, her boss told her that she couldn’t work there anymore. The Trump administration had terminated President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which provided legal work permits for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans as well as Nicaraguans like Maria.

    “I feel desperate,’’ said Maria, 48, who requested anonymity to talk about her ordeal because she fears being detained and deported. “I don’t have any money to buy anything. I have $5 in my account. I’m left with nothing.’’

    President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is throwing foreigners like Maria out of work and shaking the American economy and job market. And it’s happening at a time when hiring is already deteriorating amid uncertainty over Trump’s erratic trade policies.

    Immigrants do jobs — cleaning houses, picking tomatoes, painting fences — that most native-born Americans won’t, and for less money. But they also bring the technical skills and entrepreneurial energy that have helped make the United States the world’s economic superpower.

    Trump is attacking immigration at both ends of spectrum, deporting low-wage laborers and discouraging skilled foreigners from bringing their talents to the United States.

    And he is targeting an influx of foreign workers that eased labor shortages and upward pressure on wages and prices at a time when most economists thought that taming inflation would require sky-high interest rates and a recession — a fate the United States escaped in 2023 and 2024.

    “Immigrants are good for the economy,” said Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University. “Because we had a lot of immigration over the past five years, an inflationary surge was not as bad as many people expected.”

    More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has also helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. Economists fear that Trump’s deportations and limits on even legal immigration will do the reverse.

    In a July report, researchers Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the centrist Brookings Institution and Stan Veuger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute calculated that the loss of foreign workers will mean that monthly U.S. job growth “could be near zero or negative in the next few years.’’

    Hiring has already slowed significantly, averaging a meager 29,000 a month from June through August. (The September jobs report has been delayed by the ongoing shutdown of the federal government.) During the post-pandemic hiring boom of 2021-2023, by contrast, employers added a stunning 400,000 jobs a month.

    The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, citing fallout Trump’s immigration and trade policies, downgraded its forecast for U.S. economic growth this year to 1.4 percent from the 1.9 percent it had previously expected and from 2.5 percent in 2024.

    ‘We need these people’

    Goodwin Living, an Alexandria, Virginia nonprofit that provides senior housing, health care and hospice services, had to lay off four employees from Haiti after the Trump administration terminated their work permits. The Haitians had been allowed to work under a humanitarian parole program and had earned promotions at Goodwin.

    “That was a very, very difficult day for us,” CEO Rob Liebreich said. “It was really unfortunate to have to say goodbye to them, and we’re still struggling to fill those roles.’’

    Liebreich is worried that another 60 immigrant workers could lose their temporary legal right to live and work in the United States. “We need all those hands,’’ he said. “We need all these people.”

    Goodwin Living has 1,500 employees, 60 percent of them from foreign countries. It has struggled to find enough nurses, therapists and maintenance staff. Trump’s immigration crackdown, Liebreich said, is “making it harder.’’

    The ICE crackdown

    Trump’s immigration ambitions, intended to turn back what he calls an “invasion” at America’s southern border and secure jobs for U.S.-born workers, were once viewed with skepticism because of the money and economic disruption required to reach his goal of deporting 1 million people a year. But legislation that Trump signed into law July 4 — and which Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — suddenly made his plans plausible.

    The law pours $150 billion into immigration enforcement, setting aside $46.5 billion to hire 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and $45 billion to increase the capacity of immigrant detention centers.

    And his empowered ICE agents have shown a willingness to move fast and break things — even when their aggression conflicts with other administration goals.

    Last month, immigration authorities raided a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, detained 300 South Korean workers and showed video of some of them shackled in chains. They’d been working to get the plant up and running, bringing expertise in battery technology and Hyundai procedures that local American workers didn’t have.

    The incident enraged the South Koreans and ran counter to Trump’s push to lure foreign manufacturers to invest in America. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung warned that the country’s other companies might be reluctant about betting on America if their workers couldn’t get visas promptly and risked getting detained.

    Sending Medicaid recipients to the fields

    America’s farmers are among the president’s most dependable supporters.

    But John Boyd Jr., who farms 1,300 acres of soybeans, wheat and corn in southern Virginia, said that the immigration raids — and the threat of them — are hurting farmers already contending with low crop prices, high costs and fallout from Trump’s trade war with China, which has stopped buying U.S. soybeans and sorghum.

    “You got ICE out here, herding these people up,’’ said Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association . “(Trump) says they’re murderers and thieves and drug dealers, all this stuff. But these are people who are in this country doing hard work that many Americans don’t want to do.’’

    Boyd scoffed at U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ suggestion in July that U.S.-born Medicaid recipients could head to the fields to meet work requirements imposed this summer by the Republican Congress. “People in the city aren’t coming back to the farm to do this kind of work,’’ he said. “It takes a certain type of person to bend over in 100-degree heat.’’

    The Trump administration itself admits that the immigration crackdown is causing labor shortages on the farm that could translate into higher prices at the supermarket.

    “The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce,’’ the Labor Department said in an Oct. 2 filing the Federal Register, “results in significant disruptions to production costs and (threatens) the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.’’

    ‘You’re not welcome here’

    Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that job growth is slowing in businesses that rely on immigrants. Construction companies, for instance, have shed 10,000 jobs since May.

    “Those are the short-term effects,’’ said Kolko, a Commerce Department official in the Biden administration. “The longer-term effects are more serious because immigrants traditionally have contributed more than their share of patents, innovation, productivity.’’

    Especially worrisome to many economists was Trump’s sudden announcement last month that he was raising the fee on H-1B visas, meant to lure hard-to-find skilled foreign workers to the United States, from as little as $215 to $100,000.

    “A $100,000 visa fee is not just a bureaucratic cost — it’s a signal,” Dany Bahar, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said. “It tells global talent: ‘You are not welcome here.’’’

    Some are already packing up.

    In Washington D.C., one H-1B visa holder, a Harvard graduate from India who works for a nonprofit helping Africa’s poor, said Trump’s signal to employers is clear: Think twice about hiring H-1B visa holders.

    The man, who requested anonymity, is already preparing paperwork to move to the United Kingdom. “The damage is already done, unfortunately,’’ he said.

    Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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    Associated Press

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  • How Americans are Feeling About Their Chances on the Job Market

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    Americans are growing increasingly concerned about their ability to find a good job under President Donald Trump, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll finds, in what is a potential warning sign for Republicans as a promised economic boom has given way to hiring freezes and elevated inflation.

    High prices for groceries, housing and health care persist as a fear for many households, while rising electricity bills and the cost of gas at the pump are also sources of anxiety, according to the survey.

    Some 47 percent of U.S. adults are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a good job if they wanted to, an increase from 37 percent when the question was last asked in October 2023.

    Electricity bills are a “major” source of stress for 36 percent of U.S. adults at a time when the expected build-out of data centers for artificial intelligence could further tax the power grid. Just more than one-half said the cost of groceries are a “major” source of financial stress, about 4 in 10 said the cost of housing and health care were a serious strain and about one-third said they were feeling high stress about gasoline prices.

    The survey suggests an ongoing vulnerability for Trump, who returned to the White House in January with claims he could quickly tame the inflation that surged after the pandemic during Democratic President Joe Biden’s term. Instead, Trump’s popularity on the economy has remained low amid a mix of tariffs, federal worker layoffs and partisan sniping that has culminated in a government shutdown.

    Linda Weavil, 76, voted for Trump last year because he “seems like a smart businessman.” But she said in an interview that the Republican’s tariffs have worsened inflation, citing the chocolate-covered pecans sold for her church group fundraiser that now cost more.

    “I think he’s doing a great job on a lot of things, but I’m afraid our coffee and chocolate prices have gone up because of tariffs,” the retiree from Greensboro, North Carolina, said. “That’s a kick in the back of the American people.”

    Voters changed presidents, but they’re not feeling better about Trump’s economy

    The poll found that 36 percent of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a figure that has held steady this year after he imposed tariffs that caused broad economic uncertainty. Among Republicans, 71 percent feel positive about his economic leadership. Yet that approval within Trump’s own party is relatively low in ways that could be problematic for Republicans in next month’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and perhaps even in the 2026 midterm elections.

    At roughly the same point in Biden’s term, in October 2021, an AP-NORC poll found that 41 percent of U.S. adults approved of how he was handling the economy, including about 73 percent of Democrats. That overall number was a little higher than Trump’s, primarily because of independents — 29 percent approved of how Biden was handling the economy, compared with the 18 percent who currently support Trump’s approach.

    The job market was meaningfully stronger in terms of hiring during Biden’s presidency as the United States was recovering from pandemic-related lockdowns. But hiring has slowed sharply under Trump with monthly job gains averaging less than 27,000 after the April tariff announcements.

    People see that difference.

    Four years ago, 36 percent of those in the survey were “extremely” or “very” confident in their ability to get a good job, but that has fallen to 21 percent now.

    Biden’s approval on the economy steadily deteriorated through the middle of 2022 when inflation hit a four-decade high, creating an opening for Trump’s political comeback.

    Electricity costs are an emerging worry

    In some ways, Trump has made the inflation problems harder by choosing to cancel funding for renewable energy projects and imposing tariffs on the equipment needed for factories and power plants. Those added costs are coming before the anticipated construction of data centers for AI that could further push up prices without more construction.

    Even though 36 percent see electricity as a major concern, there are some who have yet to feel a serious financial squeeze. In the survey, 40 percent identified electricity costs as a “minor” stress, while 23 percent said their utility bills are “not a source” of stress.

    Kevin Halsey, 58, of Normal, Illinois, said his monthly electricity bills used to be $90 during the summer because he had solar panels, but have since jumped to $300. Halsey, who works in telecommunications, voted Democratic in last year’s presidential election and described the economy right now as “crap.”

    “I’ve got to be pessimistic,” he said. “I don’t see this as getting better.”

    At a fundamental level, Trump finds himself in the same economic dilemma that bedeviled Biden. There are signs the economy remains relatively solid with a low unemployment rate, stock market gains and decent economic growth, yet the public continues to be skeptical about the economy’s health.

    Some 68 percent of U.S. adults describe the U.S. economy these days as “poor,” while 32 percent say it’s “good.” That’s largely consistent with assessments of the economy over the past year.

    In addition, 59 percent, say their family finances are “holding steady.” But only 12 percent say they’re “getting ahead,” and 28 percent say they are “falling behind.”

    People see plenty of expenses but few opportunities

    The sense of economic precarity is coming from many different directions, with indications that many think middle-class stability is falling out of reach.

    The vast majority of U.S. adults feel at least “minor” stress about the cost of groceries, health care, housing, the amount they pay in taxes, what they are paid at work and the cost of gas for their cars.

    In the survey, 47 percent, say they are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could pay an unexpected medical expense while 52 percent have low confidence they will have enough saved for their retirement. Also, 63 percent, are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could buy a new home if they wanted to.

    Young adults are much less confident about their ability to buy a house, though confidence is not especially high across the board. About 8 in 10 U.S. adults under age 30 say they are “not very confident” or “not at all confident” they would be able to buy a house, compared with about 6 in 10 adults 60 and older.

    For 54 percent of U.S. adults, the cost of groceries is a “major source” of stress in their life right now.

    Unique Hopkins, 36, of Youngstown, Ohio, said she is now working two jobs after her teenage daughter had a baby, leaving Hopkins with a sense that she can barely tread water as part of the “working poor.” She voted for Trump in 2016, only to switch to Democrats after she felt his ego kept him from uniting the country and solving problems.

    “It’s his way or no way,” she said. “Nobody is going to unite with Trump if it’s all about you, you, you.”

    Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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    Associated Press

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  • Research Shows That Political Talk Is Tanking Workplace Harmony. Here’s How Leaders Can Fix It

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    In a world where political disagreements have ripped friendships, and even families asunder, it isn’t surprising similarly acrimonious debate also arises in the workplace. In fact, those verbal dustups between coworkers have apparently broken out enough that a majority of employees now say they don’t want to hear any discussion of politics while on job.

    That was the main finding in the recently published “Navigating Politics in the Workplace” report by job posting site Monster. Its survey of 900 U.S. employees found 60 percent of respondents saying discussions about politics at work should be completely avoided. Another 68 percent said those exchanges left them feeling uncomfortable, despite 67 percent acknowledging they’d previously shared their political beliefs with coworkers. Yet 59 percent of participants said they thought having those exchanges while on the job risk negatively affecting their careers.

    What’s more, 14 percent of respondents said they dreaded workplace discussion about politics so much they’d rather get a tooth drilled than join them. What’s next — ducking out of an office discussion about religion to have an appendix removed, without anesthesia?

    In addition to the anger and accusations political exchanges can generate, there are other reasons why avoiding them at work may be wise. While 64 percent of respondents said they generally respect their coworkers’ political opinions, a third admitted they’ve formed negative views about colleagues after hearing them at the office.

    That can’t be good — and those reactions aren’t always reserved for workplace peers, either. Just over half of survey participants said they’d consider quitting their job if their employer staked out political positions they disagreed with.

    Inc.com columnist Alison Green has tracked the issue for years. She suggests people set conversational boundaries when political talk makes them uncomfortable, and taking the issue to management if it persists. It’s bad for company culture, whether it happens on the shop floor or the boardroom.

    But whether those political differences are with bosses or coworkers, the bad feelings that often arise from them frequently undermine staff harmony and stability.

    “These findings align with research from the Pew Research Center, which emphasizes that workplace culture significantly influences employee satisfaction and retention,” analysis of the Monster survey said. “Political discussions in the workplace can be sensitive and require careful handling to maintain a respectful and inclusive environment.”

    But workplace managers should also be aware and respectful of what the survey said was the desire of most survey participants to keep political talk entirely out of the workplace. But in addition to that not always being the case, 67 percent of respondents said they’d actually been pressured to join discussions about politics on the job.

    Of those that had, 40 percent of respondents said they’d felt that coercion during informal conversations with coworkers, 15 percent said it had occurred during meetings, and 11 percent reported it’d happened in discussion or reviews managers or supervisors. Sometimes the pressure came from outside the company, with 11 percent of survey participants saying they’d been dragged into political discussions with clients or vendors.

    The widespread aversion to talking politics in the workplace comes at a particularly confusing and fraught time for companies and their employees. Both rules and attitudes are shifting rapidly in the public and private sectors alike.

    For example, the Trump administration in July released guidelines ending longstanding federal practices intended to separate workplace affairs of church and state. Under those changes, public employees are now allowed to pray, display religious symbols, and even actively proselytize while at work, in sharp contrast to previous rules.

    In the opposite direction, numerous private sector companies recently moved to punish or fire workers who’d posted celebratory message in response to the September murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on their personal social media accounts. That sparked debate about undermining freedom of speech — and taught some workers a painful lesson about the First Amendment not absolutely protecting speech in the workplace.

    Those very high-profile developments over freedom of expression on the job may result in stronger efforts by people who’d rather avoid trouble or conflict by keeping politics out of the office altogether.

    “Political and religious talk is not permitted in the workplace,” said RustyBrassInstrument in a post on social media platform Reddit about limiting political discussion at work — apparently expressing a personal preference rather than legal fact. “You can be political or religious on your own time.”

    Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees.

    “Hot take, making people uncomfortable is usually the only way to make change,” redditor lovable_cube said in response to a thread titled, “Keep your politics at home” about a coworker spouting unwanted political opinions. “We have something very broken right now, we need change.”

    Monster drew other conclusions from the results of its survey. It suggested employers can find a productive balance between the extremes of banning talk about politics in the workplace, and letting debate flow unchecked in ways that risk sparking employee anger or higher quit rates.

    “Organizations that force or encourage political alignment risk alienating employees and fostering judgment rather than collaboration,” it said. “Creating a culture where employees feel comfortable, but not pressured, to share personal beliefs is crucial. Encouraging open communication about work-related issues, while maintaining neutrality on political topics, can help maintain a respectful and productive workplace.”

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    Bruce Crumley

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