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.
Work keeps getting more optimised, more efficient, more sophisticated. And yet the gap between how work is designed and how people actually experience it keeps quietly widening. The workday doesn't match when people think best. AI has made it hard to trust whether written work is even authentic. And hiring pipelines have become so gamed that recruiters are abandoning them for bars and airports.
If you missed any of them, here's your catch-up.
In case you missed it
Why the 9-5 quietly rewards morning people, and asks everyone else to do their hardest thinking at the wrong time.
My husband and I have completely different operating systems. I'm sharp by 8am. He comes alive around 9pm. And yet we both work within the same structure, same hours, same expectations of when "good work" happens. The research on chronotypes isn't new, but what it exposes is: the standard workday was never designed around when people actually function best. It was designed around when they overlap. Over time, that tilts the playing field in ways most leaders haven't thought carefully about.
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As AI becomes normal at work, people are starting to worry less about doing good work and more about proving they did it themselves.
I caught myself actively making an email sound less polished so nobody would think ChatGPT wrote it. Which made me realise how much AI has already shifted workplace psychology, not just in how we work, but in how we perform working. There's a strange new pressure forming: not just to do good work, but to prove it actually came from you. This piece looks at what's driving that, why it matters more than it sounds, and what it means for leaders trying to build trust in a workplace where polished output is increasingly free.
Hiring used to be structured and predictable. Apparently, it's now happening in bars, airports, and the cereal aisle.
My cousin got her dream job because she sat next to a recruiter on a long-haul flight. At the time it felt like a fluke. Then I read that over half of recruiters are now actively sourcing candidates in gyms, bars, and grocery stores, and most say those hires worked out well. This isn't really a story about where hiring is happening. It's about what happens when a system gets so optimised it stops feeling trustworthy, and people start looking for genuine signals somewhere else.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If any of these land differently read together, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Hit reply.
Until next week,
Frank
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