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.
Trust is one of those things that works in the background until it doesn't. Most of the time nobody names it directly. We just notice when emails start feeling more careful, or when people start performing effort rather than doing the work. Four essays on how trust at work is changing, and what's driving it.
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How badge swipes, desk sensors, and calendar analytics are changing the feel of hybrid work.
The tools organisations use to track attendance and activity have been growing for a while. What's changed is that employees are noticing, and adjusting. This piece looks at what low-level surveillance does to workplace behaviour, why the research draws a clear line between feeling trusted and feeling watched, and what leaders lose when they cross it.
What happens when escalation becomes effortless, and judgement becomes the bottleneck.
A formal workplace complaint used to take effort. You had to structure the timeline, choose your words carefully, and think hard about how it would land. AI can now do most of that in minutes. This piece looks at what changes when escalation gets easier, who ends up holding the harder question of whether to act on it, and what it means for the people and teams in the middle.
💬 When it comes to trust at work, what feels most strained right now?
As AI becomes normal at work, people are worrying less about doing good work and more about proving they did it themselves.
I recently caught myself deleting em dashes from an email so nobody would think ChatGPT had written it. The impulse is small, but it points to something bigger. As AI becomes a normal part of how people work, the anxiety is moving on from whether AI is useful to whether the work looks human enough to trust. This piece looks at what that does to communication, culture, and the way effort gets read at work.
When a system stops producing reliable signals, people look for them somewhere else.
Recruiters are finding candidates at bars, airports, and the cereal aisle. That's not just a quirky trend. When every CV looks polished and every cover letter sounds the same, the formal process stops feeling like it tells you anything real. This piece looks at why hiring trust has broken down, what the informal encounter offers that the structured interview can't, and what it means for the way organisations find and choose people.
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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