Happy Thursday, 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.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
Another week, another reminder that work systems crack when trust, fairness or basic planning are missing:
🏦 JPMorgan Accused of Conducting “Fake” Interviews
A lawsuit alleges JPMorgan conducted sham interviews with Black candidates to give the appearance of diversity recruiting without real intent to hire. The case highlights how performative processes can quietly erode trust long before they explode into public scrutiny.
👉 HR Dive🖼️ Louvre Workers Take Strike Action
Workers at the Louvre staged a protest over staffing shortages and deteriorating working conditions, forcing the iconic museum to close its doors. Even cultural institutions built on prestige are discovering that goodwill doesn’t substitute for sustainable working conditions.
👉 The HR Digest📉 Employee Satisfaction With Benefits Is Falling
New SHRM data shows employee satisfaction with benefits has dropped, despite employers continuing to lean on perks as a retention strategy. Expectations are shifting faster than many benefits packages are keeping up.
👉 SHRM
All of these stories come back to the same quiet problem: when systems are weak, people pay the price.
🤝 Supported by HubSpot
Tired of disconnected tools? Same. Make 2026 the year you reduce the chaos and automate what slows you down. Discover top apps that pair well with HubSpot. So you can do less busywork and more selling. Focus on the work that matters.
This image has been haunting my LinkedIn feed all week:
The post is doing the rounds because it feels painfully accurate, especially for teams moving fast and quietly piling responsibility onto the one person who “just knows how things work.”
And the reason it landed so hard is because, once, that person was me.
Not out of a desire to hoard information or feel important. It happened because I was overworked, could do things quickly, and kept telling myself I’d clean it all up later. I’ll move those folders from my personal login to the shared drive tomorrow. I’ll write this up properly once things slow down. I’ll document the process after this deadline.
Little by little, knowledge piled up in one place. People started defaulting to me because it was faster. I became the shortcut. And by the time I realised what had happened, the idea of handing everything over felt overwhelming, for me and for everyone else. That’s the Tom problem in a nutshell: a single point of failure built slowly out of good intentions, speed and far too much reliance on one capable human.
🧠The behavioural science lens
The Tom problem feels personal, but it’s driven by patterns that show up in organisations everywhere:
Knowledge hoarding often grows out of good intentions: People become the Tom because they are reliable and fast. Work flows to them, not because anyone designed it that way, but because it feels efficient in the moment. Over time, they hold more and more critical information. Studies on employee knowledge hoarding show that this pattern becomes self reinforcing when people feel pressure, low psychological safety or constant time scarcity.
Leaders and teams slide into single point of failure territory: Business continuity experts talk about single points of failure: the one element that can bring the whole system down. Applied to people, this is exactly what Tom represents. Guides on single points of failure in teams warn that when one or two employees are the only ones who understand key processes, any absence can cause major disruption.
Documentation loses to immediate tasks inside most brains: Procrastination research shows that humans prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. That is called temporal discounting. Procrastinating solving a problem right now feels rewarding. Writing up the process for some hypothetical future colleague does not. If documentation time is not designed into the workflow, most people will avoid it, including Tom.
People Share What They Know When It Feels Safe to Do So: Teams function better when knowledge is shared on purpose, and research shows that psychological safety directly fosters open communication and knowledge sharing. When people feel safe to speak up, contribute ideas and ask questions, they are more willing to exchange what they know, which supports organisational learning and innovation.
🚀What this means for leaders
Treat Toms as early warning signals, not permanent solutions: If one person is carrying the institutional memory, you have spotted a risk (not a personality quirk). The praise should focus on their capability and also trigger a conversation about how to spread it.
Fund documentation like you fund delivery: If documentation is only done “when there is time,” it will never happen. Build it into sprint goals, project close outs and performance expectations.
Reward people who make themselves less central: The hero narrative feels exciting but it quietly trains people to hoard knowledge. Celebrate those who teach others, write things down, simplify, automate and create clarity. The goal is not to keep Tom on a pedestal. The goal is to build a team that functions when Tom is on a beach with no Wi Fi.
💬 Final thoughts
Being Tom can feel flattering at first. You become the person everyone turns to when things are confusing, broken or on fire. Over time, it starts to feel less like influence and more like a trap. The organisation leans harder and harder on the one person who never says no, instead of fixing the structure that created the dependence.
If you want your team to survive holidays, resignations and the occasional curveball from life, don’t wait until Tom hands in their notice. Spread the knowledge while they are still in the building.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
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