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 🌀
Some weeks the workplace feels relatively predictable… this was not one of them:
☕ Starbucks is tying bonuses to performance
Starbucks is rolling out new performance-based bonuses for hourly workers in the U.S., with eligible employees able to earn up to $1,200 a year. The move sits within its broader “Back to Starbucks” strategy, although tensions with unionising workers are still lingering in the background.
👉The HR Digest🤰 Pregnancy accommodations aren’t just about FMLA
A new EEOC lawsuit is highlighting a common mistake: treating Family & Medical Leave as the limit of what employers need to offer. In this case, a company allegedly required employees to resign if they needed more than two weeks off and weren’t eligible for FMLA, rather than exploring other accommodations.
👉SHRM📉 Strong job numbers… but still a strange market
The U.S. added 178,000 jobs in March, beating expectations, and unemployment dipped slightly. But underneath that, hiring remains uneven, participation has declined, and job growth is concentrated in a few sectors like healthcare. It looks solid on paper, but can still feel slow if you’re trying to move roles.
👉SHRM
Which brings us to this week’s piece, and why so much work right now feels surprisingly hard to actually point to.
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Fun fact: I used to work in a soap shop.
I would spend hours making bars of organic soap, cutting them, wrapping them, stacking them up at the end of the day. I could literally see (and smell) the fruits of my labour.
These days? It’s a lot harder to take stock of what I've actually achieved at the end of my workday. Sure, I’ve worked on reports, run research projects, managed teams, contributed to important things, but honestly, most of it lives in folders, slides or somewhere in a filing system (that an intern has just been tasked with cleaning out).
Of course it’s all real work but it’s lost any real tangible, concrete form.
And this gap is starting to show up more and more. A recent HR Dive piece noted that Gen Z interns are increasingly asking for work that “can’t be digitalised” (i.e. tasks where the output is visible and immediate). And the data behind it points in the same direction. KPMG’s 2026 Winter Intern Pulse Survey shows early-career workers placing more value on work that feels applied and connected to something tangible.
I’m not suggesting that work itself has become less meaningful, but for many of us it’s become harder to see where it lands, or to feel properly involved in how it comes together.
🧠The behavioural science lens
What’s sitting underneath this isn’t a rejection of digital work. It’s a shift in what people need in order to feel connected to it:
We’re more engaged when we can see the impact of what we’re doing: Research on task significance shows that people are more motivated when they can see how their work affects something or someone. When work is several steps removed from its outcome, that connection gets weaker, even if the work itself still matters.
Learning (and confidence) comes from doing, not just contributing: Experiential learning research shows that people build understanding through action and reflection, not just observation. For early-career employees especially, being involved in something tangible helps them make sense of how work actually operates.
It’s easier to value work when you can locate your role in it: When work is shared across multiple people, tools and iterations, individual contribution can become harder to trace. That doesn’t reduce the importance of the work, but it does make it harder to feel ownership over it.
This isn’t really a pushback on digital work. It’s more that people want to be closer to it, to actually do it, not just contribute small pieces into something they never fully see.
🚀What this means for leaders
If this is about how work is experienced, then the shift isn’t about abandoning digital work. It’s about making sure people can actually connect to what they’re doing.
Bring people closer to the outcome: Where possible, reduce the distance between the task and its impact. Show how work is used, where it lands, and what changes because of it. Without that, work can feel like it disappears the moment it’s done.
Don’t treat practical work as low-value work: There’s a tendency to see hands-on tasks as less strategic. In reality, these are often the moments where people understand the work most clearly and feel most confident in it
Create more opportunities for people to actually do the work together: Not just review it, not just comment on it, but be involved while it’s happening. That’s where a lot of the learning and confidence builds.
How “real” does your work feel day to day?
💬 Final thoughts
For a long time, the focus has been on making work more efficient, more digital, and easier to scale. And honestly, that’s largely worked.
But alongside that, something has shifted in what people want work to feel like.
It’s getting harder to stay connected to work that mostly exists somewhere in a system. People want to see it take shape, understand where it lands, and feel like they were part of something that actually happened.
And once you notice that, it’s quite hard to unsee.
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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