Happy Tuesday, 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 🌀
A quick snapshot of work right now, where everything is shifting (just not in the same direction):
🧠 Leadership training… for everyone now
Leadership development is no longer just for managers. A new report from the Association for Talent Development found that 79% of organisations see improved culture when leadership skills are built across all employees, not just those in formal leadership roles. It’s a shift toward expecting everyone to think, collaborate, and lead, regardless of title.
👉HCA Mag👶 Fertility benefits get a federal push (With Limits)
The Trump administration has proposed a new rule that would make it easier for employers to offer fertility benefits, including IVF, by classifying them as “limited excepted benefits.” The proposal includes a lifetime cap of $120,000 and would exempt these benefits from some existing health coverage requirements, raising questions about how accessible they’ll actually be in practice.
👉HR Dive⚖️ EEOC sues New York Times over DEI bias claims
The EEOC has filed a lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging a white male employee was denied a promotion in favour of a less qualified candidate due to diversity goals. The case reflects a broader shift in enforcement, with regulators increasingly scrutinising how organisations design and implement DEI initiatives.
👉SHRM
All of which is happening while many of us are quietly overthinking something much smaller. Like whether our last sentence sounded a bit… too well written.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Metaview
Metaview surveyed 505 recruiting and hiring leaders, and the numbers are hard to ignore. 90% described their partnerships as "good." 58% admitted they actively wish they could work around their counterpart. That disconnect is showing up in real business damage, especially speed-to-hire and candidate loss.
🤐 The hiring tension is more serious than most leaders realize: 58% of recruiting and hiring leaders wish they could bypass their counterpart entirely
⚡ Misalignment is directly costing teams talent: Teams with excellent recruiter-manager partnerships are 60% less likely to lose candidates to faster-moving competitors
🤖 AI becomes valuable when it improves collaboration: Teams that say AI is core to hiring are 3.8x more likely to report excellent working relationships
📈 The strongest hiring teams treat AI as shared infrastructure: 85% of companies exceeding business goals are actively using AI in hiring workflows
I don’t think I realised how much AI had shifted workplace psychology until I caught myself actively trying to make an email sound less polished so nobody would think ChatGPT wrote it (which now includes aggressively deleting every em dash like they’re some kind of digital fingerprint).
It made me think about this recent Washington Post article that explored how students are being falsely accused of using AI-generated work by unreliable detection tools. And while most workplaces obviously haven’t reached that point, it does feel like a shift is happening where people are becoming increasingly conscious not just of the quality of their work, but whether it looks human enough to trust.
None of this means the concern is fake, AI is absolutely changing how we work, write and think. But it’s also created a strange new pressure: not just to do good work, but to prove it actually came from you.
🧠The behavioural science lens
The psychology of trust relies on shortcuts. We look for effort, rough edges, and visible struggle as signals that work is “real.” But as AI makes polished output effortless, those cues start to break down. This is where it starts to shift:
Humans use “effort heuristics” to judge value: Research has consistently shown that people tend to value work more when effort is visible. We instinctively associate struggle, time and complexity with competence and quality. But AI disrupts that relationship. Someone can now produce something polished in minutes, which creates uncertainty around how much effort actually happened behind the scenes.
Suspicion changes behaviour even before rules do: We know that people change their behaviour when they know they’re being observed (the Hawthorne effect). And it doesn’t require formal monitoring to kick in, just the feeling of being evaluated. We’ve already seen versions of this with recorded meetings and AI note-takers. Now it’s extending into writing itself. People are editing phrasing, changing punctuation, or even adding imperfections to avoid sounding “too AI.”
The workplace is becoming more focused on authenticity signalling: When polished output becomes abundant, people start looking elsewhere for proof of authenticity. Research suggests that in AI-rich environments, people place more weight on cues that feel distinctly human, things like originality, imperfection, and visible thinking. As a result, there’s growing pressure to demonstrate not just competence, but evidence that the work genuinely came from you.
Over-monitoring can quietly erode trust: At the same time, organisations are under real pressure to manage AI use responsibly. There are real concerns here, around plagiarism, accuracy, privacy, and what happens to actual thinking. But there’s a difference between creating thoughtful guidance and creating a culture where employees feel constantly audited. Research on workplace monitoring consistently shows that excessive surveillance can increase stress, reduce intrinsic motivation, and damage trust.
🚀What this means for leaders
The challenge for organisations now isn’t deciding whether AI is “good” or “bad.” That question is already a bit outdated. The more useful question is: what kind of culture forms when people feel pressure to constantly prove their work is genuinely theirs?
A few things are worth paying attention to:
Be careful not to confuse visible effort with value: For years, workplaces have relied on visible struggle as a proxy for contribution. But if leaders become too focused on proving work was done “manually,” people may start performing effort rather than focusing on meaningful outcomes.
Don’t create cultures where employees feel socially audited: Most people understand there need to be guardrails around AI use. But once employees feel every email or presentation is being quietly assessed for authenticity, communication can become more guarded and risk-averse.
Focus more on judgement than detection: The real differentiator is unlikely to be whether someone used AI at all. It will be whether they used it thoughtfully. Knowing what to trust, challenge, edit, or handle with human nuance still matters enormously.
Accept that “human” work may start looking different: One of the stranger side effects of this moment is that people are beginning to associate imperfections with authenticity. Leaders should be careful not to create environments where employees feel pressure to artificially perform humanness just to reassure others they did the work themselves.
Have you ever changed your writing so it wouldn’t sound AI-generated?
💬 Final thoughts
I don’t think we’re heading toward some dystopian future where everyone is secretly interrogating each other’s punctuation choices. But I do think we’re entering a strange transition period where the social signals we used to rely on at work no longer feel as stable.
Sometimes that looks like better AI policies. Sometimes it looks like employees deliberately making their work sound a little messier, rougher, or less polished just to reassure people there’s still a human behind it.
And sometimes it apparently looks like me deleting an em dash at midnight because I suddenly became worried my sentence sounded “too ChatGPT.”
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
P.S. If you want to get a feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
💡 Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the founders, creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and AI founders.
