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 didn’t ease back into January. It hit the ground running:
📉 US job creation slowed more than expected
A BBC analysis finds that job growth in the United States cooled significantly in late 2025, marking the weakest pace of hiring since the pandemic era. The moderation in job creation suggests labour markets may be losing momentum faster than people expected, creating new uncertainty for 2026 workforce planning.
👉 BBC News🎮 Can Performance-Based CEO Pay Actually Change Behaviour?
GameStop’s decision to tie its CEO’s pay heavily to performance outcomes has sparked debate about whether this model could spread. While the move is being framed as accountability, it also raises questions about how much incentive design at the top really shifts culture further down.
👉 The HR Digest🏖️ The Quiet Downsides of Unlimited PTO
New insights explore how unlimited paid time off can backfire, with employees often taking less leave, not more. Without clear norms or leadership modelling, flexibility becomes ambiguous, and ambiguity tends to favour work over rest.
👉 HR Dive
Which brings us neatly back to this week’s theme: when expectations are unclear, optimistic, or poorly designed, people carry the cognitive cost. And by January, that cost is already showing up.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Gartner
AI promises growth, but most initiatives fail to deliver meaningful impact. The consequences show up in culture strain, burnout, hiring fraud, and low-quality work teams spend hours fixing.
Gartner’s 2026 Future of Work Trends breaks down the nine shifts CHROs need to act on now, from managing AI’s hidden human costs to redesigning work so technology delivers real value.
If you’re anything like me, you haven’t completely abandoned your January goals, but you’re not feeling great about them either. I write this while miserably eating my third sugar-free cookie.
The first week of January has a very specific energy. Co-workers talk about focus. Managers talk about momentum. Goals get shared with a confidence that has not yet survived a full diary.
Then work properly kicks off. The optimism wanes. The goals are still technically alive, but they already feel heavier than expected.
You might be tempted to frame this as disengagement.
More often than not, it’s total goal-setting fatigue.
🧠The behavioural science lens
Goal-setting fatigue shows up reliably because several cognitive forces collide in January:
Optimism and the planning fallacy distort early goal-setting: When people set goals, they tend to overestimate how smoothly things will go and underestimate how long work will take. This combination of optimism bias and the planning fallacy is strongest when people imagine future work in the abstract, before calendars refill and competing demands resurface. January planning often assumes fewer interruptions, faster progress, and lower risk than experience supports, which is why confidence is high early and frustration sets in quickly once reality returns.
Fresh starts boost motivation briefly, not sustainably: Temporal landmarks like the start of a new year increase motivation by creating psychological distance from past failures. This is known as the fresh start effect. The lift is real, but short-lived. When systems, workloads, and incentives remain unchanged, motivation returns to baseline quickly, leaving people confused about why their initial energy disappeared.
Goal conflict is real, and it is resource-based: When multiple goals draw on the same limited resources (time, attention, cognitive capacity), they interfere with each other. The result is more switching, less progress, and a higher likelihood of dropping the harder goal first.
Pressure changes how people perform: When goals feel evaluative or high-stakes, they trigger threat responses. Under sustained pressure, attention narrows and cognitive flexibility drops, making learning, creativity, and long-term thinking harder.
🚀What this means for leaders
Early-year fatigue is often treated with urgency. More check-ins. More tracking. More emphasis on accountability.
That response usually deepens the problem.
What helps instead is structural relief:
Use past data to plan forward: Before setting new goals or timelines, look at what actually happened last year. How long did similar projects really take? Where did work slow down? Which risks showed up repeatedly? Using historical delivery data grounds plans in reality and reduces the optimism bias that creeps into January goal-setting.
Reduce the number of active goals: Fewer goals lowers cognitive load and improves follow-through, but only when leaders actively protect them from competing demands.
Shorten the planning horizon: Breaking annual goals into near-term, achievable targets restores momentum by making progress visible.
Make trade-offs explicit: Clear prioritisation removes hidden decision-making from teams and reduces mental clutter.
Model recalibration publicly: When leaders revise priorities openly, teams learn that adjustment is expected rather than punished.
💬 Final thoughts
If your team already feels tired of their January goals, nothing has actually gone wrong.
They are responding logically to a system that increases ambition without increasing capacity.
Goal-setting fatigue is feedback. It reflects how work is designed, not how motivated people are. Until organisations treat motivation as something shaped by context rather than demanded from individuals, January will continue to feel heavier than it needs to.
Strong goals do not need more hype.
They need room to breathe.
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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