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 🌀
This week’s headlines show how work can feel like it’s being pulled in different directions, from the future of service work to old-fashioned leadership failings:
🤖 Robot baristas inch closer to reality
Starbucks is testing AI and robotics for taking orders and brewing coffee, sparking conversation online about what customer service (and frontline jobs) might look like if machines start handling traditionally human tasks.
👉 BBC🚨 Harassment claims settled after leadership ignored complaints
Operators of Detroit-area Taco Bell restaurants agreed to a $100,000 settlement after sexual harassment persisted for months and wasn’t addressed promptly by management. The case underscores the very real consequences when leaders fail to act decisively on employee safety concerns.
👉 HR Dive🧠 AI ambition still outpaces organisational reality
SHRM’s latest summary of workplace tech points to the growing gap between how leaders talk about AI adoption and the practical challenges of integrating it responsibly into everyday work. Organisations are still figuring out the balance between AI promise and human readiness.
👉 SHRM
All of which sets the scene for this week’s main question: what gets noticed at work, and what quietly doesn’t.
I watch the Grammys the same way each year. Half-invested, mildly judgemental, insisting I don’t really care, turning it off, then Googling who won Best Album.
And every year it’s the same cycle. People argue about snubs. About politics. About how the awards are out of touch. About how none of it really matters.
And yet, everyone still has an opinion.
Which is exactly how awards at work function too.
Organisations keep handing out Employee of the Month trophies, performance awards, peer recognition badges, and leadership shout-outs, even as employees quietly acknowledge they’re subjective, political, and rarely capture how work actually gets done.
So if we know awards are flawed, why do we keep using them?
🧠The behavioural science lens
Awards carry far more psychological weight than their glossy certificates suggest:
Awards simplify messy work into something legible: Most work is collaborative, slow, and difficult to attribute cleanly. Awards collapse that complexity into a single name and moment, reflecting our tendency to rely on visible social signals to make sense of ambiguous environments. When impact is hard to see, people gravitate toward whatever makes status obvious.
They reshape social dynamics, not just recognition: Awards rarely affect just one person. They ripple outward, subtly changing how people relate to one another and how collaboration unfolds afterward. A 2021 study shows that performance awards can alter peer interactions and cooperation among those who were considered, not just those who ultimately received recognition.
They distort behaviour more than they motivate it: Recognition systems tend to shape how people work rather than how much effort they expend. Decades of research on incentives show that extrinsic rewards can shift attention toward the reward itself and, in many cases, undermine intrinsic motivation for the work.
They create silent losers: For every award recipient, there is a larger group of non-recipients who did meaningful work but received no signal that it counted. Research on social comparison and justice perceptions shows that recognition systems can increase disengagement, resentment, and withdrawal among those who feel overlooked, particularly when criteria are ambiguous or outcomes feel political.
🚀What this means for leaders
Awards are not neutral. They teach people how to read the organisation.
They signal where effort should go, what kind of work is safe to prioritise, and which contributions are likely to disappear from view.
A few questions worth asking:
What behaviour does this award actually reward? Not what the criteria say, but what reliably gets recognised.
Whose work becomes easier to see, and whose becomes easier to miss? Awards tend to favour visible, individual contributions over the work that keeps systems functioning.
What pressure does recognition create? Winning often raises expectations without raising support, quietly narrowing what feels possible next.
Leaders don’t need to abandon awards. But they do need to treat them as powerful signals, not harmless perks.
💬 Final thoughts
The Grammys frustrate people because they try to rank work that’s subjective, collaborative, and hard to compare. Workplace awards struggle for the same reason.
Recognition makes work feel legible. It tells people what’s worth noticing and what quietly fades into the background.
Like the Grammys, awards say less about absolute merit and more about what a system knows how to recognise. The question isn’t whether they belong at work. It’s whether you like what they’re teaching people to value.
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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