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 🌀
Work is getting “smarter,” more efficient, more optimised… and somehow also a little weirder:
🍸 Recruiters Are Now Hiring… at the Bar
AI-generated applications are flooding hiring pipelines, so recruiters are going offline. 52% say they’ve sourced candidates in places like bars, gyms, and even dating apps, with 84% reporting strong hires. The more polished hiring becomes, the more valuable it is to see someone just… being a person.
👉 HR Dive🎲 “Play” Is Back (But Not in the Way You Think)
With burnout rising, some organisations are reintroducing play, not as forced fun, but as low-stakes ways to build skills and connection. With links to cognitive decline and even ER visits, burnout is pushing leaders to rethink how work actually feels. It’s less about ping pong, more about lowering the stakes.
👉 SHRM⚖️ 50 Cent and the Limits of Accountability
A former employee has filed a lawsuit against Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, alleging years of harassment, intimidation, and retaliation after refusing to engage in illegal activity. The case points to a familiar (and uncomfortable) dynamic: when misconduct sits at the top, accountability becomes much harder to enforce, regardless of process.
👉 HR Dive
Work is getting more optimised by the day. But it still doesn’t quite line up with when people are actually at their best…
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Software Advice
Struggling to pick the right payroll and HR software for your team? The new HR Software Comparison Guide from Software Advice makes it easy. See how ADP Workforce Now, Paylocity, and Paycor stack up with clear pricing and feature comparisons, plus pros and cons and real user insights on usability and learning curve. Our expert assessment helps you choose the best fit for your HR needs. Download your free guide today and make your next software decision with confidence.
I’ve realised something slightly unfair about how I experience work.
As soon as I wake up, I’m ready. Coffee, laptop, brain fully on. By 10am, I’ve usually done my best thinking for the day. If something important needs doing, I want it in the morning. That’s when I’m sharp, decisive, and efficient to an annoying degree.
My husband, on the other hand, is a completely different species. Mornings are… not it. Slow, foggy, mildly resentful of the world. But around 9 or 10pm though? He comes alive. Ideas, focus, energy. It’s like someone upgraded his operating system.
And yet, we both work within the same structure. Same 9-5 hours. Same expectations of when “good work” happens.
Which is why this piece from Harvard Business Review on tapping into your team’s circadian rhythms is so interesting. The science isn’t new, but it exposes something we don’t really talk about: Work hasn’t been designed around how people function. It’s been designed around when they overlap.
🧠The behavioural science lens
The idea that people have different natural rhythms isn’t controversial. What’s more interesting is what happens when you try to fit those rhythms into a system that was never built for them:
Chronotypes aren’t just preferences, they shape performance: Research on circadian rhythms and chronotypes shows that people have biologically driven differences in when they’re most alert, focused, and cognitively sharp. Morning-types tend to peak earlier, while evening-types hit their stride much later, and these differences meaningfully affect attention, decision-making, and creativity. The catch is that the standard 9-5 workday aligns closely with morning chronotypes, which means some people consistently get to do their highest-value work at their natural peak, while others are operating slightly off. Over time, it shapes how performance shows up, and who looks “on” during the hours that matter most.
We optimise for coordination because it’s easier to manage: In theory, designing work around individual energy sounds obvious. In practice, it runs straight into coordination costs. Teams need overlap. Decisions need people in the same (virtual) room. So organisations default to shared hours, not optimal hours. It’s not that leaders don’t care about energy, synchronising people is just operationally simpler than optimising them.
You can override your rhythm… but you don’t get it for free: There’s a quiet expectation in most workplaces that people should be able to “shift” their energy with enough discipline. Wake up earlier. Be more structured. Push through. And people do. But chronobiology research is pretty clear that working consistently against your natural rhythm carries a cost. Usually in the form of fatigue, reduced cognitive performance, and over time, burnout.
Flexible work didn’t actually fix this: We talk a lot about flexibility as if it solved the problem. But in most cases, it didn’t actually change when important work happens. Meetings still cluster in the same windows. Decisions still get made during standard hours. So while people might log on from different places, they’re often still aligning to the same collective rhythm (just with slightly better lighting).
🚀What this means for leaders
Most advice here stops at “let people work when they’re most productive.” Which sounds great, until you try to run an actual team.
The reality is more nuanced:
You’re balancing two competing truths: Individual performance peaks are real. So are coordination demands. The goal isn’t to fully optimise one. It’s to be deliberate about the trade-off. Right now, most teams default entirely to coordination without realising that’s what they’re doing.
Look at when your most important work happens: Not everything needs to be energy-optimised. But high-stakes thinking, complex problem solving, creative work? If all of that is consistently happening at times that only suit a subset of your team, you’re systematically narrowing who gets to do their best work.
Stop equating visibility with capability: The people who are sharp, articulate, and “on” at 9am aren’t inherently more capable. They’re just aligned to the system. If your perception of performance is shaped by who shows up best in standard hours, you’re not measuring what you think you are.
Protect energy, not just time: We’ve become very good at talking about calendars, but less so about cognitive load. It’s not just about reducing meetings, it’s about creating conditions where people can actually use their peak hours for the work that matters, rather than filling them with coordination.
Accept a bit of inefficiency in service of better thinking: Fully synchronised teams feel efficient but they can come at the cost of depth. Slightly more fragmented schedules, if done intentionally, can create space for higher-quality work.
Does your workday match when your brain actually works best?
💬 Final thoughts
The 9-5 workday has held up surprisingly well for something that was never designed with how people actually think in mind.
It works beautifully if your brain happens to cooperate. But for a lot of people, it means doing their most important work just slightly out of sync with when they’re at their best.
And over time, it subtly tilts the playing field toward the people who happen to be wired for it.
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.
