Happy Wednesday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
Something I've been noticing lately: work keeps getting more efficient, and it also keeps feeling stranger.
Not in a dramatic way. More in the way that you finish a task faster than expected, close the laptop, and wonder why it didn't feel like anything. Or you sit in a meeting and notice everyone sounds a little too polished. Or you look at the end of the week and genuinely struggle to say what, exactly, you did.
We're not really talking about burnout here. We're talking about something subtler. A quiet shift in what work actually feels like, happening underneath all the productivity gains.
I've been writing about different corners of that shift over the past couple of months. And looking back at them together, they start to tell a pretty coherent story. If you missed any of these, here's your catch-up.
In case you missed it
Work is getting faster. So why does it feel so flat?
A few weeks ago I finished a document in fifteen minutes that would normally take most of the morning. Objectively impressive. But when I closed it, I felt oddly underwhelmed, like my brain had been outsourced. It turns out there's a name for it, and the behavioural science behind it is more interesting than "AI bad." This piece looks at why efficiency and engagement don't always move in the same direction, and what leaders need to watch before the productivity numbers start hiding a quieter problem.
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The world is heavier. Work still expects the same version of you to show up.
This one came from something I kept hearing, in different forms, from different people: that they're fine, technically, but not quite okay. Global uncertainty doesn't pause for quarterly targets. Economic anxiety doesn't clock out at 9am. And yet most organisations haven't updated what they expect from people who are quietly carrying all of that alongside their actual work. Here's what that gap costs, and what it actually asks of leaders to close it.
Why Gen Z want work they can see, feel, and actually point to.
Early-career workers are increasingly asking for tasks that "can't be digitalised." Things where the output is visible, immediate, and clearly theirs. Not because they're anti-tech, but because something important gets lost when you can never quite locate your own contribution in the final result. This piece gets into why tangibility matters more than most job design frameworks account for, and what it means for the way we structure work at every level.
AI note-takers are making meetings more efficient and quietly changing who speaks, and how.
When everything is recorded, people adjust. Not dramatically. Just enough to sound a little more certain, a little more polished, and a little less like they're still figuring things out. That might sound like a small thing, but it's often where the best thinking actually begins, before it's fully formed, before it's fit to be summarised. This piece looks at what gets lost when conversations become permanent, and what that means for psychological safety, honest disagreement, and the rooms where real decisions get made.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If any of these land differently read together, I'd love to hear it.
Until tomorrow,
Frank
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