Recognition is now cited as a driver of #burnout at roughly twice the rate it was a year ago. The organisational response has been MORE: more structured Comp&Ben programs, more public shoutouts on Slack, more AI-generated appreciation messages. But more is NOT better, and it's definitely not addressing the deeper issue. Three forms of recognition, three kinds of protection Research identifies 3 distinct forms of #recognition, each protective against a different dimension of b

"My problem isn't just getting through the workday. It's that I've stopped believing that it's going to get any better." If that sounds like you, you may be struggling with more than just tiredness - and it's a surprisingly common pattern. The truth is we have been naming #work exhaustion for a long time. In 1869, neurologist George Miller Beard called it neurasthenia, a nervous exhaustion from the pace of modern industrial life. A century later, Herbert Freudenberger gave it

How can I be burning out and still keep going? Someone once described it to me as feeling like a car running on the reserve tank. You’re still moving but you’re ignoring the red light signaling low fuel on your dashboard. I’ve heard versions of this more times than I can count, in #coaching sessions, exit interviews and individual conversations with people who were DOING absolutely fine, and yet, not FEELING fine. So, what is actually going on here? A 2024 DHR Global survey o

There’s a moment in a Simone Stolzoff talk that gets me every time. He’s at a hostel. He asks a Chilean man, "What do you do?" The man responds, "You mean for work?", genuinely puzzled, as if the question could obviously be about dozens of other things. Across sectors, organizations have been shedding layers, and the middle management tier has taken some of the heaviest cuts. These are not people who lost a #job and will find the same one elsewhere next quarter. Many of them

Is your #office looking fuller and fuller these days? Almost hitting pre-pandemic levels? And yet Gallup's 2026 global workplace report, published this month, found that, although physical presence has increased in offices globally, daily loneliness among workers is still a struggle. 5 years after the pandemic, with people back in buildings, the emotional state of the workforce is worse than before COVID hit. #RTO mandates were supposed to fix this. But they didn't. Here's wh