I can still remember my first day at every job I’ve had. I remember how the nerves and the cautious optimism mixed together created a feeling that doesn’t really have a word. I remember choosing just the right outfit that was a perfect combination of professional and effortless, but still showed a little bit of my personality.

That first day is a whole vibe. You’re meeting everyone and won’t remember anyone’s name. Smiling and nodding and nodding and smiling. Taking some notes you’ll never read again and asking questions to prove they did, indeed, make a great decision to hire you. Then you leave so exhausted because you’ve been performing the “new hire” role all day.

If you’re like me, you enjoy the new-job honeymoon. You can screw up, ask dumb questions, play your “new” card. You aren’t jaded by bad processes and you haven’t discovered the villains in the company story yet. It’s the “ignorance is bliss” phase and too many people wish it away.

As each day passes, you slowly drift into wearing whatever makes your life easy, rolling your eyes after an hour-long Zoom call, and learning to balance the infinite personality combinations of all your business partners. That first day vibe becomes a distant memory.

You are not just a full-on employee anymore. You’re an informed one.

As of late, we’ve been bombarded with bad news about unhappy, burned out, and disengaged employees (we’re looking at you, Gallup!). But this month, our friends at BambooHR released the 2026 Employee Happiness Index with some news that should give us all a tiny bit of hope.

For the first time since 2023, we’re seeing an uptick in employee happiness in the first half of the year. Up 4.4% year-over-year to be exact. Naturally, this is the headline.

To be fair, this headline isn’t anything to sneeze at – this survey is analyzing over 2.5 million self-reported eNPS scores and that happiness increase is good news.

If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, though, you know how I feel about headlines.

While this is genuinely good news, there is still a lot of room to make progress.

The survey showed some really fascinating correlations.

Generational Satisfaction

The survey has consistently shown that the least happy generation in the workplace is, by far, our Gen Z coworkers. While this particular survey doesn’t go into detail on the drivers of such dissatisfaction, we have insight from other recent research to some of the root cause.

They’re early enough in their careers to have relatively little power, they’re financially squeezed outside of work, they’re experiencing workplaces as unusually impersonal, they’re being asked to adapt to enormous technological change, and they don’t necessarily believe climbing the ladder will make their lives better.

As employees age, they seem to become happier at work. Perhaps they have more decision making power, autonomy, or they simply accept the things they can’t change.

That is until they reach their late 40’s. This one is interesting because this age group saw a dip in eNPS. Anecdotally, this makes total sense when you look at the influx of people in their mid-late 40’s leaving their jobs to start their own businesses. Perhaps their restlessness is they still have plenty of time to work but enough knowledge to do something on a bigger scale that doesn’t require them to answer to anyone else.

The happiest of them all? Baby Boomers! They’ve put in their time, have plush retirement funds, many have pensions from before they went extinct, and they are so close to retirement they can taste it. Many of them also have power, titles, authority, wisdom, tenure. Put that in a mixing bowl and you get a delicious happy employee cookie. How could you not? (All generally speaking, of course.)

Time in Role

The survey also found that new hires and those after being in their role for 5 years were the happiest. This makes sense because learning gives energy.

The concerning part is that once someone reaches one year of service, their happiness eNPS score drops pretty drastically until year five. It’s especially bad for those who are in their roles for 2-3 years (33 eNPS).

So what’s happening between years 2 and 5 to drive this level of unhappiness? Is this when employees figure out where the bodies are buried? Is this when they realize nobody is going to fix that broken process because “this is how we’ve always done it”? Is it looking around and seeing the most performative getting promoted without any training to speak of to manage humans? I obviously have my theories, but the data doesn’t tell us why. But, these are the kinds of questions I’m asking in stay interviews with employees in this tenure range.

After year 5, the score slowly starts to go up again. Are employees accepting the things they can’t change? Or have they put in time long enough to have a bigger voice or decision-making authority?

After 11 years of service, there is a marked increase in happiness (from 37 to 44 eNPS). Perhaps it’s loyalty and stability coming into play here?

Whatever it is, it stands to reason that each tenure cohort needs something different from their companies and one-size-fits-all initiatives aren’t solving the problem.

Happiness by Industry

Of all the industries surveyed, Construction is the happiest (and they have been for a while). There’s a lot of research behind this industry leading in happiness. Construction workers are in high demand, have competitive wages, a sense of accomplishment and tangible results. Many construction workers report positive work environments and strong team culture, and also feel it’s a stable industry.

The industries happiness eNPS sits at 51.

The other industries on the list? Finance at 47. Healthcare at 40. Education at 39. Travel & Hospitality at 39. Nonprofits at 38. Tech at 37. And Restaurant/Food & Beverage at 34.

When I look at all of this data, I realize it still doesn’t even come close to understanding the complexity of the human condition at work. There truly is always more to the story.

I look back at that first day of work feeling. Walking through the door, you have no idea what will make you love it or loathe it. You have no idea if your teammates will become lifelong friends or just someone you used to work with one day.

You’re just sitting there, in your perfectly curated outfit, smiling and nodding and ready for whatever the job throws your way (and trying to remember everyone’s name).

And you become informed.

It’s what makes the dips after the shiny headline so fascinating. Happiness at work isn’t static because neither are we. The person who accepted the job isn’t the same person sitting in it three years later, and what was enough for us then might not be enough anymore. And that’s okay.

Maybe the most useful thing we can do is pay attention to what we’re learning along the way. About the company, yes, but also about ourselves. What kind of work gives us energy? What do we need from the people around us? What are we willing to tolerate or not? What have we officially had enough of?

You won’t know any of that on your first day. You’re too busy performing the role of the new hire.

But eventually, you’ll know. You’ll be informed.

And there will always be more to your story.

I changed my profile photo last week to a random one I had in my camera roll. The original headshot was feeling very LinkedIn-y, and I want to be very LinkedOut. I also canceled LinkedIn Premium and shut down my business Instagram because I’m getting really bullish on getting rid of things in my life that no longer serve me.

A few weeks ago, I hit six months on Substack and crossed over the 500 subscribers milestone in the same week. What!?! The coolest feeling!

I love Substack, but I also hit a wall.

There was something about that six-month milestone that was so fun to celebrate but also weird. Maybe milestones naturally make you stop and take inventory of what you’ve been doing and where you want to go next. Whatever it was, I felt it.

When I sat down last week to write my weekly article, like I had done every week for the previous 26 weeks, that feeling became “I don’t want to write about anything that’s on my list.”

I have a laundry list of topics in my Notes app, and up until now, my strategy has been pretty simple. I pick what speaks to me and write.

When I didn’t feel like doing that, I started to beat myself up about it. I couldn’t just not send my weekly article.

I love a good streak, so breaking this one felt shitty. My overachieving people pleasers know this feeling well. I beat myself up so much that I decided I had to make up for it somehow. Queue over-indexing on liking and commenting on everything that came across my feed to compensate for my lack of writing contribution. I even joked that this had now become a dog account to distract from the fact that I had a total writer’s block for my own niche. A completely normal and well-adjusted response to breaking an arbitrary agreement I made with myself, I know.

In all of the over-thinking and over-analyzing and beating myself up, I started thinking about why I’m here in the first place.

I started writing to bring awareness to the grim reality of the workplace and talk about how we can improve the place so many of us spend the majority of our time.

People were interested.

This article blew up, and through my Girl, Meet Corporate series, I started giving a little peek behind the curtain into who I am and why work became my niche in the first place.

Still, there was something about that milestone that had me reflecting on how I wanted to move forward.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value transaction and reciprocal energy of work, so I chose that topic and started writing like I always do. I thought maybe just starting to write was the thing I needed to get out of my head.

Even that didn’t feel right. (But I will fully be revisiting this draft in the near future.)

Now I think I know why.

You all know me to a certain extent, but there’s so much about what drives me to show up here that has been left unsaid. That’s not good or bad. It’s just a realization, and one that’s likely true for anyone who writes here. You can share your thoughts and opinions every week without ever really letting people into the life that shaped them.

It is incredibly humbling that what I write about work resonates and helps people feel seen. I still can’t believe I’ve been able to grow this little Substack to this level in six months by writing about a niche that isn’t Substack growth, monetization, or how to succeed in business without really trying.

What a gift to have people pay attention and engage in this important conversation.

Work is a giant part of our lives, and people are downright miserable. I know there’s the “that’s why I went into business for myself” crowd, but the fact of the matter is that being able to make that choice is a very privileged place to operate from. The stability of a job pays for food, housing, childcare, transportation, and the rest of a life. A lot of people simply can’t just walk away because their boss is driving them nuts.

That’s why I’m here.

I don’t even know what the point of this post is. Maybe I want you to know me more, and I want to know you more. That’s hard to do when I just pick topics and write about them. You can resonate deeply with something I publish and then move about your day without us ever really knowing much about each other.

I think I’m desiring a deeper conversation around this topic of work and how we as humans operate within it, regardless of what your chosen type of work is. I want a deeper connection and genuine interest in how we work together as a society to make it better.

In the meantime, maybe we should get to know each other more.

Which means I need to put my money where my mouth is, I guess.

So here’s what’s what about me:

We moved to Dallas last year, and I hate it. I want to move back to Los Angeles, and I dream of my triumphant return to Blue Heaven. IYKYK.

Go Dodgers! ⚾

Because we moved here, I had to leave a job and company I absolutely loved, and I’m still grieving it. I’m upset that they wouldn’t consider a longer-term remote work agreement, but I also get it. They were very generous in allowing me to transition until I decided what was next.

In the middle of all of that, I had a job experience that pushed me to launch my own company because I wanted to help people on a broader scale. I know I have the chops to do it, but I’ve also had to admit something to myself. And that this is…

I don’t love being an entrepreneur. Gasp! Thanks to HD & Me, I know why now. (I’m a 1/3 Generator for those of you into this sort of thing.)

Business development, sales, launches, funnels, cold DMs and marketing are simply things I don’t want to do. I thrive in behind-the-scenes work where people only know I exist if things are going wrong, so I pride myself on making sure things are going well enough that I don’t have to be front and center.

Guess what solopreneurs have to be?

Front and fucking center.

I started becoming a brand when all I really want to be is Brandi who helps people operate better at work so they don’t take it home at night or on the weekends. I want to be Brandi who helps business owners and executives build employee experiences that make their best people want to stay forever.

Then I want to sign off and not think about it.

I want to have a glass of wine and cook a nice dinner for my husband, who is on Substack incognito supporting me every step of the way.

Love of my life, undeniable source of my happiness.❤️

I want to hang out with him and our dogs. Preferably in Los Angeles.

Meet Penny & Poppy…the other loves of my life. They’re so cute I could cry.

Through all of this, I’ve had an epiphany and made a pretty big decision.

I really miss the structure, environment, and steadiness of a corporate job. So I’m currently in the middle of looking for a new job.

Maybe I’ll write about it one day soon. It’s a different ballgame out there, but grateful for the support of my friend Sylvia Correa who is a genius at getting people hired.

I fucking LOVE to work. I love how businesses operate and make decisions. I love figuring out how to vibe with the infinite personality pairings that come with working in People & Culture. I love being close enough to the business to understand what it needs and close enough to the people to understand what they need too.

I also have a very practical reason for thinking about all of this. Our goal is to fully retire at 55, and a corporate job will help make sure that’s still a possibility. Could I make that happen as an entrepreneur? Maybe, but please refer back to my aforementioned distaste for sales, marketing, and business development.

I am not abandoning what I’ve built. I’ll consult and coach as opportunities come up, and I’ll continue to be here on Substack. After all, acknowledging the uncomfortable truths of the workplace is half the battle and what better place to write about all of it than Substack?

I still don’t entirely know what this post is about. Maybe it’s about going deeper and letting each other in a little more, or maybe it’s about being honest when things aren’t really working out the way you expected them to and giving yourself permission to change your mind about what you want next.

I’m all in on figuring out where this goes.

And if you think I’m going to stop calling out the corporate absurdity and talking about how we can make work suck less…think again. I’m still fully invested in making work better for the people who have to exist inside of it, which is pretty much all of us. I just want to have more of the conversation with you instead of always showing up after I’ve already figured out what I want to say.

Maybe that’s what comes next?

More conversation, letting each other in, and more honesty about the fact that careers are complicated and sometimes the thing you thought you wanted turns out to teach you what you want instead. I guess we’re going to find out.

Thanks for hanging in here with me while I figure it out. My level of appreciation for each one of you is beyond measure.

Now that I’ve told you entirely too much about myself, I think it’s your turn. Tell me something about you. It can be unserious or important. I’d just love to know more about the people who keep hanging out with me every week.

Everyday there seems to be a new headline telling us that everyone’s quitting their jobs, going fractional, building a portfolio career, and escaping corporate life for good. Meanwhile, you’re still sitting in a traditional job wondering if you’re the one who didn’t get the memo.

We’ve started treating entrepreneurship like the inevitable next step for ambitious people. The data isn’t quite so cut and dry, and people’s motivations are a lot more complicated than that.

Don’t be mad at me, I’m just the messenger

15+ years at two major media companies taught me to read a lot more into headlines before I believe it on a surface level, and this particular narrative about the gig economy just isn’t holding up.

The number everyone’s repeating comes from Upwork’s 2017 Freelancing in America survey, a poll of 6,000 workers that found 57.3 million Americans were freelancing that year. The projection that broke off from it came from a single line in the press release, noting the freelance workforce was growing 3x faster than the traditional one, and someone ran that one year’s growth rate forward for a decade to land on 50.9% of the workforce by 2027.

That math would only make sense if nothing else in the economy changes, and well, I don’t think we need to rehash the last 6 years. Upwork’s own newer research found that skilled freelancers made up about 28% of knowledge workers in 2024. This represents solid growth, but nowhere near on pace for the number everyone still likes to quote.

The bigger number you’ve probably seen, 70 million freelancers, 36% of the workforce, doesn’t trace back to one specific study at all. It started on a content site that cited unspecified industry research, then perpetuated across a handful of similar posts until it was widely accepted as the truth. What none of those posts mention is what defines freelance. The 70 million is generally made up of anyone who did one paid freelance project in the past year, counted the exact same as someone who left a full-time job to go independent. Let’s be real for a second, one paid freelance gig does not a full-time income replace. So like I shared, you didn’t miss a memo. This type of data has a way of getting blended together until small correlations are shared as a matter of fact.

The real numbers tell a (somewhat) calmer story. Full time independent workers grew from 13.6 million people in 2020 to 27.7 million in 2024, 16.7% of the US workforce. That’s substantive growth, but growth from a small starting point, and still a minority by a wide margin. The government’s count is even smaller, 11.9 million independent contractors, 7.4% of total employment, the most recent figure the BLS has published.

Even the research tracking freelancers themselves isn’t projecting an overwhelming takeover. A 2026 workforce survey from iHire, the newest data on this, found that freelancing isn’t on track to replace full-time employment as the primary path skilled professionals will choose anytime soon. Employers haven’t stopped hiring either. Unemployment sat at 4.2% in June, with professional services and health care still adding jobs.

Let’s just blame the robots

So if traditional employment is still the norm, why does it feel like everyone wants out like yesterday?

This is where AI starts to become a character in our story, but not quite in the way you’d think. AI isn’t replacing traditional employment at any scale the data can prove just yet. What it’s doing is changing how people think about job security.

In tech specifically, over half of 2026’s layoff events cite AI or automation as a factor, and January had the highest layoff total for any month since 2009 across the broader economy. Is some of this attributed to real automation? Sure, maybe. Some of it is companies blaming AI for job eliminations that were mostly about overhiring or investor pressure, what analysts are starting to call “AI redundancy washing”. I’m not sure we know enough to be able to determine what’s true or not…yet.

At the same time, job openings fell to their lowest point since September 2020, layoffs are also down 40 % overall from last year, and hiring announcements are up 10%.

So the job marketing isn’t total collapse, but it also isn’t necessarily calm either.

Whether AI is the cause or the convenient excuse doesn’t really matter to all of the people watching it happen. Plenty of workers are watching companies point at AI while handing out pink slips, and that’s changing how an entire generation thinks about job security. Gen Z is watching this unfold at the very start of their careers, which is a different kind of exposure than watching it happen ten years into their careers.

Their exposure to this scenario is absolutely showing up in the data. Gen Z wants out more out of work than any generation before them. 43% plan to start a business this year, ahead of Millennials at 39% and Gen X at 21%. The appetite for something outside of a traditional job is growing quickly, up 94% from last year alone.

Now let’s look at what they’re up against. The entry level job market right now is the worst it’s been in 37 years. Gen Z grads expect to walk into a job paying around $101,500. The average offer is closer to $68,400. That’s quite a disconnect between expectation and reality. Close to half of Gen Z and Millennials are still living paycheck to paycheck, according to Deloitte’s most recent numbers. You can want independence all you want, but wanting it doesn’t cover rent.

People aren’t reconsidering traditional employment because gig work is easier. They’re questioning what job security even means while AI changes what companies say they need.

Ambition, choose your fighter

The people wanting a non-traditional path and being able to pull it off aren’t just quitting and hoping for the best. They continue working for the pay and benefits, test the idea on the side, and seeing if it works before they walk away. That ambition and work ethic can pay off big and done in a way so one bad month doesn’t wreck everything.

I bet you think this article is about how to successfully transition from corporate into the gig economy.

The internet treats ambition like it only has one form, but I believe humans are far too nuanced for that. There are people who quit and started something. There are people want to start a business and are working toward it while maintaining a traditional job. There are people testing an idea on the side of a job they fully intend to keep. There are others who like the idea enough to think about it and never act on it, and that’s a perfectly valid and respectable choice, not a failure to launch. And then there are people who don’t want to own a business at all, not now, not ever. They want to do good work and go home…and that’s okay!

The internet acts like only the first group of people are ambitious. The same surveys showing entrepreneurial appetite at record highs also show that only about a third of that appetite ever turns into an actual business, which means all of the others groups aren’t the exception. They’re the majority of the people who keep showing up to their traditional jobs.

So if you’re still in a traditional job, whether you’re starting something on the side, already running something on the side, or you just don’t want to at all, don’t let the internet or the headlines make you feel guilty for whichever path you’re on. No single path is right for everyone. Right now, traditional employment and everything outside it are both valid, both worth exploring, depending on what you want out of your life and your career.

If we haven’t met yet, hi, I’m Brandi 👋. I spent 15+ years in HR leadership at Disney and NBCUniversal doing everything I could to make sure the people on my watch didn’t have to survive WTF culture. Now I do that work from the outside, partnering with managers and companies who are serious about building a people strategy that actually holds up.

If you’re a next-generation leader trying to lead through all of this, let’s connect!

Sources

Upwork 2017 freelance workforce numbers and the 50.9% by 2027 projection: Upwork, “Freelancing in America 2017” press release, October 17, 2017.

28% of skilled knowledge workers freelanced in 2024: Upwork, Future Workforce Index, April 23, 2025.

70 million freelancers / 36% of the workforce: The Interview Guys, “The State of the Gig Economy in 2025.”

Full-time independent workers, 13.6 million (2020) to 27.7 million (2024), 16.7%: MBO Partners, 2024 State of Independence in America report.

11.9 million independent contractors, 7.4% of total employment: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements — July 2023,” released November 8, 2024.

Freelancing not on track to replace full-time employment: iHire, “The Freelance Revolution: Insights Into the 2026 U.S. Workforce,” 2026.

Unemployment at 4.2% in June: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation — June 2026,” July 2, 2026.

Over half of 2026 tech layoffs cite AI: SkillSyncer, Tech Layoffs Tracker (live-updating, tech sector only).

Highest January layoff total since 2009: Challenger, Gray & Christmas, job cuts report, February 5, 2026.

“AI redundancy washing”: Deutsche Bank analysts, reported by CNBC, January 21, 2026.

Job openings at their lowest since September 2020: KPMG, December 2025 JOLTS summary, February 5, 2026.

Layoffs down 40%, hiring announcements up 10%: Challenger, Gray & Christmas, H1 2026 report.

Gen Z 43%, Millennials 39%, Gen X 21% plan to start a business, up 94% year over year: Intuit QuickBooks, 2026 Entrepreneurship Trends survey, December 2025.

Entry-level job market worst in 37 years: Janelle Jones and Nia Law, Fortune, March 21, 2026.

$101,500 expected starting salary vs. $68,400 actual: ZipRecruiter survey of the Class of 2025, reported by CNBC, April 23, 2025.

47% of Gen Z and Millennials live paycheck to paycheck: Deloitte, Global 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.

Once again, I ran a super scientific experiment on Substack. I posted a Note that was meant in jest, and it ended up going Substack-viral. It’s sitting at over 11k impressions right now, and it’s still going strong, with hundreds of likes, comments, restacks, and shares. The note was supposed to be lighthearted, but I get why it struck a nerve.

In the comments, people started sharing just how ridiculous these moments get when you’re in a meeting, on camera, trying to hide what you’re really feeling. What it comes down to is these reactions are performative, and that performance is what makes work so draining.

Work has become a place where we’re constantly managing ourselves and regulating reactions that are completely human (and normal). We soften our language so we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. We say “no worries” when we have a shit ton of worries. We grit our teeth while we smile, even when we’re confused as hell. We absorb other people’s stress and replay conversations well into the evening, long after our workday is supposed to be over. It’s just too much. This pressure runs so much deeper than a lot of us realize.

I wrote about how we got here in part two of the Corporate WTF series. The pace of work is faster. Teams are smaller. Direct report loads are higher. Expectations are less clear. Technology has blurred the line between our work life and our home life. On top of all that, we’re expected to be adaptable, emotionally intelligent, collaborative, and resilient, basically perfect people, all day, every day. Talk about a drain on our energy. By the time we get home, the rest of our life is getting a shell of a person.

This is why it’s my firm belief that pretending you’re not frustrated is never going to be the answer. Because normal people are frustrated by this corporate theater…and you should be.

“What’s bothering you today?” is always a question I ask when people come into my office, no matter what they’re there for. I ask for a reason. I don’t want to belabor about why they’re frustrated, but I want two things. 1. I want them to have a space to get it out so we can move past it, and 2. I want them to know I’m a safe place for them to be honest about what’s driving them crazy.

I think that’s something we all need, myself included. I’ve called friends after work just to talk through something that irritated me, because we all need a place to vent. We all need the ability to say, yeah, this just sucks. If we don’t say it out loud, we start to internalize it, and that’s when things start to get worse.

Once people feel like someone hears them, they can start to create space in their brains to find solutions.

The thing about frustration is it’s easy to let it become a permanent part of your personality without ever noticing it happened. There’s a reason we have the popular phrase misery loves company. When work is irritating the hell out of us, and we find someone who agrees and commiserates with us, it feels good.

Being validated for feeling your frustrated feels and being understood means we’re not just imagining the craziness. But being validated and working to change what’s frustrating you, though, are going to require a change in your mindset (I kind of hate that word, but we’ll go with it for now). I think it’s worth deciding how you want to move forward. Are you going to keep being frustrated, or are you going to decide to do things differently? And if so, what are those things?

We’ve all heard the Serenity Prayer (or if you’re living under a rock, maybe you haven’t). It goes something like this. God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the acceptance to live with the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. We can use that at work every day, because we’re handed these choices constantly. A project that’s gone sideways. A manager whose style of managing (or not managing) that doesn’t work for you. The reorgs, the layoffs, the annoying coworkers. These are the things typically outside of our control.

There are other moments you do have direct influence over, though. You can get curious and ask questions instead of making assumptions. You can speak up instead of becoming resentful. You can offer an idea after your well-articulated complaint. You can decide not to take your stress out on the next person. These moments seem small, but they aren’t. They add up and shape what work feels like in your own environment. Your sphere of influence is shaped by you.

One of the biggest lessons I learned working in employee experience at Disney and NBCU for 15+ years is the people who make work better for other people aren’t the ones who never got frustrated. It would be absurd to think that. They 100% got frustrated (because humans are gonna human). What sets the best people apart, from my perspective, is how they handle it and what they do next.

Instead of getting stuck in the soul-sucking frustration, they get curious. They ask questions to understand what’s going on (and not sarcastic, rhetorical ones). What problem are we trying to solve? What would make this easier? What part of this can I influence? What are the conversations we’re not having?

Curiosity changes the game. Complaining, even when it’s well articulated, just means you’re reliving the problem over and over again. Curiosity helps us understand what’s happening and uncover the hard truths. That’s when solutions and change start to become possible, when we stop asking why work is like this and start asking what could make it a little better.

After my Note took off the way it did, I started doing some research while I was sorting through my own thoughts about what it would really take to get out of this performative mode at work. Curiosity is one of my three core pillars of my business (empathy and courage are the other two if you’re…curious – pun intended), and it’s something I talk about constantly. It’s also the anchor of (shameless plug incoming) my WTF, Corporate? podcast. So when I went looking, I wanted to know if there was a scientific reason why curiosity feels better than complaining, not just a hunch and my own observations.

Turns out there is. A 2026 paper in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology lays out a theory for what happens in your brain when you feel like you’re in control of a situation, instead of just stuck in it. The theory is called ADDS, but here’s the simple version. When you feel like your actions make a difference, like something you do can will change the outcome, your brain releases more dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical that makes you feel motivated and rewarded (i.e., it makes you feel reaaaally good). More of it means sharper focus and better decision making. So curiosity isn’t just a nicer way to handle a bad day. It’s giving your brain a chemical reason it needs to feel better.¹

Does this mean solving one annoying problem at work is going to fix everything? Sadly, no. But it does mean something changes in your brain the moment your thinking goes from “this is unfair and I hate everything about it” to “what can I do about this”. This isn’t a motivational pep talk. You’re just giving your brain exactly what it needs to feel like you’re getting somewhere.

One thing I never want to do is misrepresent this as turning every workplace into fairy tales and rainbows. After all, work is work and my guess is none of us would do it anymore if we hit the Powerball tomorrow. I will also never get on board with saying a toxic, unhealthy environment can be fixed if the people inside it don’t want it fixed. Some of those workplaces deserve to be left alone to die. There’s a very real distinction between saying there are things here I can work on because I know the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else, and knowing it’s time to pack it up and leave.

But before we convince ourselves the only answer is finding another job, it’s worth stopping and asking whether we’ve used the influence we already have. Of course, fixing your company isn’t your responsibility, but your experience of the work environment is shaped by more than your company. A large part of your experience can be improved by how you communicate, the conversations you’re willing to have, the boundaries you set, and the small choices you make every day. That’s where your influence lives.

I truly believe better workplaces take shape, and culture (good and bad) gets created, in these small, everyday moments. This starts at the individual level, because they come from ordinary conversations, moments of curiosity, and someone deciding to make work a little easier for the person sitting next to them. These small moments don’t fix everything, but they have the potential to fix enough that positive change starts to spread. That’s how a great culture is born. The more we do this, the less performative we have to be, and the less energy we spend managing our face in a meeting instead of just being in it.

Which brings me back to my Note. 11k impressions and counting didn’t happen because a joke just happened to land. It’s hundreds of people recognizing themselves in the exhaustion of corporate theater. The good news is you get to decide just how much of that performance you keep doing.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Figuring out what that looks like with your manager, your team, your coworker, or your company can be complicated and confusing.

That’s why the work I do isn’t about giving people generic advice. Work is incredibly situational and specific to the person living it. The right answer depends on the people involved, the culture you’re in, the relationships you’ve built, and a lot of unspoken feelings beneath the surface. Context changes everything.

Over the past few months, I’ve been building a growing library of practical resources around the workplace situations people find themselves in every day. They’re designed to help you think through what’s happening, find the right language, and move forward with more confidence instead of just reacting. I believe in providing very real and practical ways to work through complicated work situations and you deserve support.

Just click here to access. Subscribers will see the direct link. If you’re not already a Subscriber, once you subscribe, you’ll receive a link in your email and direct access in the link above (because Substack gave us a cool magic feature for Subscribers 😊).

Work is complicated enough, but figuring out what your next step in weird situations shouldn’t be. I’ve got you covered! 💜

Sources

¹ Sense of agency and decision-making

You know the moment because it usually arrives after someone has said all the right things.

A former leader tells you they would love to work with you again. A colleague encourages you to apply for an opening and offers to put in a good word. Someone who praised your work for years says they would be happy to make an introduction whenever you need one.

For a second, you let yourself believe the door is open.

Then an opportunity comes along, you reach out, and the silence on the other end tells you what the original conversation didn’t. The relationship may have been real, but the offer was less solid than it sounded.

Sometimes the person follows through exactly as promised. They answer, make the introduction, speak your name in the right room, and give someone a reason to take your call. Other times, the thread goes quiet and you’re left trying to determine whether you misread the relationship, asked for too much, or somehow became less impressive between the enthusiastic offer and the moment you took them up on it.

Nobody warns you which version you are going to get.

For years, the advice about networking has sounded almost identical everywhere. Grow your network, stay connected, nurture your relationships, and remember that your network is your net worth. Somewhere inside all of that advice was an implied promise that if you invested real time in people, they would show up when it counted.

That promise was always closer to a hope than a guarantee.

A warm relationship isn’t advocacy

Recent research helps explain why so many professional relationships feel more substantial than they turn out to be.

Research released earlier this month by Elena Doldor of Queen Mary University of London and Madeleine Wyatt of King’s Business School examined sponsorship relationships inside a global consulting firm. Sponsorship is more than advice, encouragement, or occasional career support. It requires someone to use their access, credibility, and reputation on another person’s behalf.

The researchers found that fewer than one in four sponsorship relationships included the mutual trust, candid feedback, and active advocacy that meaningfully advances a career. Many of the remaining relationships looked supportive from the outside, but they didn’t contain the level of investment that makes sponsorship valuable when a real opportunity appears.¹

That distinction is important because corporate life tends to measure several very different relationships under the same friendly criteria.

Someone can enjoy working with you without being invested in your future. They can respect your work without being willing to recommend you for a role. They can offer advice without wanting their name attached to your next move. They can sincerely hope things go well for you while having no intention of helping you make it happen.

These relationships aren’t necessarily fake. They’re simply more limited than the language around them suggested.

A pleasant conversation can feel like a promise when you are already hoping for an opening. A compliment can sound like commitment when it comes from someone with influence. An offer to help “anytime” can feel surprisingly specific until you discover that “anytime” was not meant literally.

Access to advocacy is uneven before anyone asks for it

The difference between having professional relationships and having genuine advocates is especially important for women because access to sponsorship isn’t distributed evenly.

McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that 31 percent of entry-level women reported having a sponsor, compared with 45 percent of entry-level men. Employees with sponsors were nearly twice as likely to have been promoted within the previous two years, which means the gap appears early and affects much more than whether someone has a senior person available for occasional career advice.

The same report found that 13 percent of participating companies had scaled back or discontinued formal sponsorship programs, even as the data continued to show how strongly sponsorship was connected to advancement.²

Getting into a program doesn’t guarantee equal access to its real value either.

Research from Coqual found that 71 percent of sponsors shared the same gender or race as their primary protégé. The organization described this as “mini-me syndrome,” which is the tendency for influential people to support those who feel familiar to them.³

The familiarity may come from gender or race, but it can also grow from similar schools, backgrounds, career paths, communication styles, or social circles. It doesn’t deliberately sort people according to talent. It favors the people whose talent is easiest for someone powerful to recognize because it’s familiar.

A sponsorship program can therefore exist on paper while its strongest advocacy still flows toward the people who were already best positioned to receive it.

The boundary reveals itself when helping you costs something

None of this means the person who encouraged you was lying, or a bad person, or even generally not willing to help you.

They may have meant every word when they said they would love to work with you again. They may genuinely believe you are talented. They may have enjoyed working with you, trusted your judgment, and felt proud of what you accomplished together.

The boundary becomes visible, however, when supporting you requires something from them.

An introduction asks them to connect their reputation to yours. A recommendation asks them to make a judgment they may later have to defend. Speaking up for you in a hiring conversation can require political capital, especially when another candidate already has support. Even replying thoughtfully takes time and attention, two things people guard with impressive intensity once they leave the meeting where they promised to help you.

This is where many professional relationships reveal their boundaries.

You can respect someone, trust them, enjoy their company, and still discover that the relationship never extended beyond the context where it was built. That discovery hurts because the boundary was never discussed. You only find it after you have reached it.

The relationships we form at work typically live only inside the structure of working together. You solve problems side by side, spend hours in the same meetings, complain about the same baffling decisions, and celebrate wins that required both of you to survive several unnecessary meetings.

Shared context creates real closeness, but it also does a lot of the relationship maintenance for you.

Once you’re no longer working together, the relationship has to survive without the project, the weekly meeting, the company directory, or the mutual need to get something done by the end of the week. Some relationships survive the transition, but far too many change once the shared context no longer exists.

There’s also quite likely a reason behind the lack of support. The person may be overwhelmed. They may forget. They may be protecting their standing with a hiring manager. They may feel uncomfortable recommending someone when they don’t know enough about the role. They may have made the offer to help casually and only later realized what following through would require. Helping you may simply be much lower on their priority list than you hoped.

Regardless the explanation, it doesn’t make the silence pleasant, but it can keep you from turning it into a verdict on your value.

A large network can still leave you waiting alone

Networking has also become increasingly focused on what can be counted.

Followers, connections, coffee chats…they all add up. Comments, direct messages, conference conversations, and cheerful promises to “stay in touch” all create the appearance of a strong professional community.

Very little of the volume tells you who would spend credibility on your behalf when there is nothing immediate in it for them.

That’s the difference between recognition and advocacy.

Recognition means someone knows who you are. Rapport means they like talking to you. Respect means they think you do good work. Advocacy means they are willing to make sure someone else knows it too.

You may have hundreds of professional contacts and only a few people who would make the call, send the email, challenge the assumption, or say your name after you leave the room. That doesn’t make the larger network useless. It does mean you should stop expecting everything from it.

A network can create possibilities, but it cannot promise courage, generosity, attention, or follow-through from every person inside it.

The most important thing to know

The absence of advocacy isn’t evidence that you are unworthy of it. Plenty of capable, generous, deserving people move through their careers without someone stepping forward in the way they should have on your behalf. Advocacy asks a person to take a position, spend credibility, risk being associated with the outcome, and sometimes challenge the comfort of the room. Many people enjoy being supportive right up until support requires courage. Their hesitation may tell you something important about their limits, but it doesn’t tell you the truth about your talent, your readiness, or what you deserved from the relationship.

Pay attention to behavior before you need the favor

You can’t perfectly predict who will show up, but you can stop treating every warm professional relationship as though it carries the same weight.

Notice who follows through when the stakes are low. Pay attention to the person who sends the article they mentioned, makes the small introduction without being reminded, or checks in after a difficult meeting. Watch who gives you useful feedback instead of vague praise, and notice who speaks well of colleagues when those colleagues are not present to benefit from it.

You can also ask smaller, clearer questions before relying on someone for something important, while giving them enough room to answer honestly.

Instead of asking, “Would you be willing to help?” you might say, “Would you feel comfortable introducing me to the hiring manager for this role? I completely understand if you don’t know them well enough or would rather not attach your name to it.”

Instead of assuming someone’s enthusiastic reaction means they will recommend you, you might ask, “Based on what you know about my work, would you feel confident referring me? Please feel free to say no if you don’t have enough context or if the role doesn’t feel like the right fit.”

When someone offers support without explaining what that support includes, you can respond with, “I really appreciate that. What would you realistically feel comfortable helping with? There is no pressure to offer more than you have the time or confidence to do.”

These questions may feel less graceful than accepting the vague promise, but they make honesty easier for both people. They also lower the chance that someone agrees in the moment, feels trapped by the request later, and disappears into the corporate witness protection program. A person who can’t credibly recommend you for a role may still be able to tell you about the team, review your resume, or introduce you to someone who understands the hiring process.

A specific answer is more useful than a generous-sounding maybe.

Become easier to count on

There’s another side to this conversation that’s important to address.

If you’ve ever felt disappointed by your own network, it’s prudent to remind yourself that you are also a part of someone else’s.

Keep that in mind the next time somebody reaches out to you while they are job hunting, considering a move, or trying to get into a room you already know how to enter.

When someone asks for help, respond soon enough that they aren’t wondering if you received their message. A brief, honest reply is kinder than an elaborate answer that never comes.

When you offer to make an introduction, send it before they have to ask again, and include them so they know it happened. When you can’t make the introduction, explain that plainly rather than leaving them attached to a possibility you’ve already decided against.

When someone sends you a resume, read it and give them one useful observation instead of replying with the professional equivalent of a thumbs-up emoji. When their name comes up in a decision-making room and you have something credible to contribute, say it while it can still affect the conversation.

When you don’t have the capacity, access, or confidence to help, it’s okay to tell them that too. And I’d put money on it that they would appreciate the openness and honesty.

A clear no may disappoint someone for the short term, but a vague yes can keep them waiting for months and threatens the relationship on the whole.

None of us owes every person in our network a job, a referral, an introduction, or a favor delivered at exactly the right moment. We have reputations to protect, limited time, complicated relationships, and our own work to manage. There will be requests we simply can’t support and people we don’t know well enough to recommend.

We still get to decide what kind of person we are in the smaller moment when someone is counting on us.

It doesn’t require a heroic gesture, only an answer, an honest boundary, a sent email, or a willingness to speak while speaking up can still have an impact.

Your network may never be the safety net the all the career advice you’ve ever heard has promised. Some people will surprise you with their generosity, while others will clarify the limits of a relationship you thought was stronger.

The useful part is learning the difference sooner, asking for what you need more clearly, and making sure that when someone else reaches toward you, you embody the network you want for yourself.

If you found yourself nodding along, cringing a little, of feeling a little less alone in the corporate networking chaos, here are a few ways to support my work:

1. Click the heart so I know this resonated. ❤️

2. Leave a comment and tell me which part hit hardest. 💬

3. Share it with a friend, coworker, former coworker, or group chat that needs it.📩

4. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. The cost is less than one cup of coffee per month and paid subscribers get access to the subscriber chat. Your support helps me keep writing, researching, recording the podcast, and building more honest resources around making work suck a little less. ✨

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being here. The workplace gets better when more people decide to do something about it.💜

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Sources

¹ Sponsorship is key to career progression but less than one in four relationships work

² Women in the Workplace 2025

³ The Sponsor Dividend

For most of my career, I assumed the confusion, pressure, and emotional weight were simply part of being ambitious at work.

I assumed everyone else understood something I didn’t.

They seemed to know how to navigate difficult managers, shifting priorities, vague feedback, and office politics while I was still trying to understand why doing good work wasn’t making any of it easier.

As my career took me through finance, recruiting, employee experience, manager enablement, and people and culture, I realized I had been solving the wrong problem.

Nobody had taught me how to work at work. I’d been taught how to do the work. But, let’s be real, those are different skills.

I could meet a deadline. I could learn quickly. I cared about doing a good job, and I was responsible enough to keep getting more work.

What I didn’t know was how to disagree with my boss without letting my frustration lead the conversation. I didn’t know how to read a room, manage up, or explain my thinking in a way that senior leaders could understand.

I had strong opinions and very little appreciation for the fact that delivery matters almost as much as the point you’re trying to make.

My first boss (and every subsequent boss) probably found me exhausting.

The problem wasn’t that I lacked potential. I was trying to navigate an environment with rules nobody had taught me.

A lot of capable corporate professionals are still doing the same thing.

We were taught how to earn the degree and get the job. We were told to work hard, be dependable, and produce good results. Very few people explained what happens after you get there.

Nobody taught us how to respond when a manager gives vague feedback. We didn’t learn how to handle a colleague who keeps stepping into our work or how to push back when priorities change again. We were expected to understand office politics without becoming political ourselves.

The work has always been only part of the job.

The rest of the job involves figuring out what people mean, deciding whose input matters, and communicating in environments where everyone has different priorities.

I wrote about this second layer in The WTF Corporate Series. It’s the unofficial job surrounding the one you were hired to do.

After years of designing employee experiences, I also realized this is where many companies leave people on their own.

Organizations often invest heavily in teaching people how to perform their roles. They spend far less time teaching them how to navigate ambiguity, difficult conversations, competing priorities, and the human side of work.

This is often where capable people start questioning themselves.

They assume work feels difficult because they’re missing something everyone else understands. They work harder to compensate. They make themselves useful, absorb more responsibility, and hope their output will speak clearly enough on their behalf.

I know that pattern well.

In Girl, Meet Corporate Part 1, I wrote about becoming so focused on proving my value through output that I made myself easy to keep and difficult to promote.

I knew how to work. I hadn’t yet learned how to communicate my judgment with the same confidence.

Working harder couldn’t teach me that.

The skills that make corporate life more manageable aren’t technical.

They shape how you interpret situations and how you respond when something feels uncomfortable. They also determine whether your competence becomes a source of influence or an invitation for everyone to put more on your plate.

You need to know how to assess what is happening before turning it into a personal crisis.

You need enough emotional steadiness to choose your response instead of letting your first reaction make the decision.

You need language for conversations that involve tension, power, and competing priorities.

You also need to understand the difference between taking ownership and carrying work that belongs to someone else.

As your career grows, you need to show judgment and build trust without turning yourself into a polished corporate character you barely recognize.

These are the skills I’ve spent years helping employees and leaders build through employee experience, manager development, organizational programs, and advisory work.

They can be learned.

I’ve watched people develop these skills at every level of an organization.

The people who looked calm, influential, and trusted were rarely born knowing how to navigate corporate life. They had learned a different way of operating.

That matters because a lot of workplace advice treats people as though they need more confidence.

Confidence can help, but it’s difficult to feel confident when you don’t understand the situation or know what to say next.

Practical skill gives confidence somewhere to stand.

You become steadier when you can separate what happened from the story forming in your head. You become more direct when you know how to ask for clearer priorities. You stop over-explaining when you trust that a concise answer can still be thoughtful and professional.

You also recover faster when you stop treating every difficult interaction as evidence that your entire career is in danger.

This doesn’t make corporate life reasonable.

Some workplaces are poorly managed, and some decisions deserve every bit of the confusion they create. Learning how to operate doesn’t mean accepting dysfunction or pretending that a better attitude will fix bad leadership.

It means the dysfunction gets less control over how you respond.

You can recognize that a situation is frustrating without reacting from panic. You can address a problem without volunteering to become responsible for everyone involved. You can care about your work without letting every strange meeting follow you home.

The goal isn’t to become unbothered.

The goal is to understand what is happening sooner and decide what you want to do with it.

The Corporate Unspiral Work Check

Think about the part of work that currently feels hardest.

When do you lose your footing?

• Is it when expectations are unclear?

• Is it when someone is disappointed with you?

• Is it when you need to push back or advocate for yourself?

• Is it when you’re asked to make a decision without enough information?

What do you usually do next?

• Do you agree before considering your capacity?

• Do you over-explain because you want to be understood?

• Do you replay the interaction until it becomes larger than it was?

• Do you take responsibility for fixing the entire situation?

What skill would make that moment easier to navigate?

• You may need a better read of the situation.

• You may need time to regulate before responding.

• You may need clearer language.

• You may need to leave part of the problem with the person who created it.

Being good at your job got you here.

Learning how to operate inside the workplace will help you decide what happens next.

In the next piece, we’re going to look at the stories our minds create at work and how to separate a real workplace problem from the meaning we attach to it before we have all the information.

Get the Corporate Unspiral Work Check

The Corporate Unspiral Work Check will help you identify where you tend to lose your footing, what you usually do next, and which skill would make the moment easier to navigate.

A meeting appears on your calendar without much context, and your mind starts working before you have any real information.

You wonder whether you did something wrong, so you replay the last few conversations and look for clues. Before long, you’re preparing for a difficult outcome that hasn’t happened.

By the time you learn what the meeting is actually about, you may have already spent hours reacting to a story instead of the situation itself.

This is one reason work can feel so emotionally expensive.

The event may be small or unclear, but the meaning you attach to it can take over the rest of the day. A short message from your manager can become evidence that something is wrong, while a delayed conversation can feel like proof that you’re being overlooked. A question in a meeting can start to feel like a judgment about your ability.

The story often feels true because it begins with something real.

Your manager may have sounded different. The decision may have changed. Someone may have left you out of a conversation that affected your work.

The goal isn’t to ignore your instincts or convince yourself that everything is fine.

The goal is to understand what you actually know before you decide what the situation means.

The same situation rarely looks the same to everyone

One of the biggest shifts in my career happened when I stopped looking at workplace situations from only one point of view.

As my work moved into employee experience and manager enablement, I started seeing how differently the same situation could be understood depending on where someone was sitting.

An employee might experience uncertainty because they don’t have enough information. A manager might be trying to communicate a decision they didn’t make. A senior leader might be balancing pressures the rest of the organization can’t yet see.

Everyone can leave the same meeting believing they understand what happened, even though each person is working with a different version of the situation.

Designing employee experiences for more than 10,000 employees taught me that workplace dynamics are almost never as simple as they first appear.

That doesn’t mean every interpretation is equally valid. It means there’s usually more information than any one person has access to.

Learning to account for that can change how quickly you react and how accurately you read the room.

Uncertainty leaves space for interpretation

Workplace communication is often incomplete.

People send vague messages because they’re rushed, and leaders sometimes change direction without explaining why. Managers may postpone conversations because something else has taken priority.

When information is missing, your mind tries to fill in the gap.

That response makes sense, especially when your income and reputation are connected to decisions you can’t control. The problem is that your mind will often fill the gap with the outcome you fear most.

A delayed response can start to feel like a sign that someone is unhappy with you. A difficult question may seem like proof that you looked unprepared. A change in direction can feel like evidence that your work wasn’t valued.

Your first interpretation may turn out to be accurate, but it may also be incomplete.

You need enough distance from the story to find out which one is true.

Step 1: Start with the event

When a workplace moment begins taking up too much space in your head, return to what actually happened.

Describe the event in a way another person could confirm.

Your manager asked to speak with you. A leader questioned the timeline. A colleague shared work without including you. A promotion conversation was postponed.

Then notice how quickly your mind adds meaning.

You may decide that your manager is disappointed, or that the leader thinks you’re incapable. You may assume your colleague is trying to undermine you, or that the postponed conversation means you’re never going to be promoted.

Any of those interpretations may be possible, but possibility isn’t certainty.

Until you have more information, treat your conclusion as something to test instead of something to believe.

Step 2: Examine your part without making yourself responsible for everything

Once you’ve separated the event from the story, you can look more honestly at the part that belongs to you.

You may realize that you avoided asking for clarity because you didn’t want to seem difficult. You may notice that you agreed to a timeline you already knew was unrealistic. You may recognize that you’ve heard similar feedback before and need to take it seriously.

You may also realize that the situation has very little to do with you.

Your manager may be distracted by a problem you know nothing about. A leader may be questioning the plan rather than your competence. A delayed decision may reflect a budget issue instead of a judgment about your potential.

Good workplace judgment requires self-awareness, but it also requires perspective.

You can examine your role without making yourself responsible for every part of the situation.

Better questions lead to better decisions

Overthinking often continues because you’re trying to answer a question only another person can answer.

Instead of replaying the situation, decide what needs clarification.

You may need to ask whether priorities have changed. You may need to understand whether the feedback was about your recommendation or the way it was presented. You may need to ask what is delaying a decision instead of assuming you already know.

A thoughtful question can give you more useful information than another hour of analysis.

It also gives the other person a chance to explain something your assumptions never could.

The Corporate Unspiral Situation Check

The next time you catch yourself creating a story about work, pause and work through these questions.

• What happened? Describe the event without adding motive.

• What story am I telling myself? Name the conclusion you’ve reached.

• What evidence supports that conclusion? Look for observable information instead of relying on tone alone.

• What else could be true? Leave room for another explanation that also fits what you know.

• What information do I need next? Decide whether you need to ask a question, watch for a pattern, or let the situation unfold.

This isn’t about forcing yourself to become more optimistic.

It’s about becoming more accurate.

Accuracy helps you decide whether a situation needs action. It also helps you stop giving every unclear message the power to become a workplace emergency.

You won’t always know what is happening right away, but you can still choose not to let your first interpretation make the decision for you.

In the next article, we’ll look at what happens after a workplace moment activates you and how to keep your first reaction from making the decision.

Get the Workplace Situation Map

The Workplace Situation Map will help you separate what happened from what you’re assuming so you can decide what actually deserves your attention.

One of the hardest parts of work is what happens inside you before you’ve decided how to respond.

A message lands badly, a conversation shifts, or someone questions your work in a way that catches you off guard. Before you’ve had time to understand what happened, your body has already reacted.

You may feel the urge to defend yourself, explain more than the situation requires, or agree quickly so the tension will end. You may begin rehearsing your response while the other person is still talking.

The reaction is real, and it usually makes sense in context. It still doesn’t need to make the decision for you.

One of the most useful workplace skills I’ve learned is how to create enough space between what happens and what I do next.

That space may be a pause before answering, a question that gives you more information, or a decision to return to the conversation after you’ve had time to think.

The goal isn’t to become unaffected by work. The goal is to keep one difficult moment from creating another problem you now need to manage.

I learned this through experience

Years ago, I had a full emotional collapse underneath my desk and then walked into four meetings as though everything was normal.

I recently wrote about this particularly haunting experience because it captured something many people experience but would never say out loud.

Work can keep asking things from you even when you’re barely holding yourself together.

That experience taught me that being affected by work isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens when you either pretend the emotion isn’t there or let it control what you do next.

Both responses remove your ability to choose.

As my career moved further into employee experience and manager enablement, I saw the same pattern play out across roles and levels. Pressure changed how people communicated. It made capable employees second-guess themselves, and it made managers respond more quickly than the situation required.

The people who seemed steady under pressure weren’t emotionless. They had learned how to slow the moment down before deciding what it meant or what to do with it.

Pressure changes how you communicate

Most people don’t communicate at their best when they feel exposed, rushed, or uncertain.

You may become more defensive than you intended. You may start over-explaining because you want to prevent misunderstanding. You may agree to something before you’ve considered the impact because saying no feels harder in the moment.

You may also avoid a conversation that needs to happen because uncertainty feels easier than conflict.

These reactions often protect something important.

You may be protecting your credibility, your sense of control, or your relationship with the other person. You may be trying to avoid another experience that felt similar and didn’t go well.

Understanding what the reaction is protecting can help you decide whether it’s useful.

Sometimes the reaction is warning you about a real problem. Other times, it’s responding to an old pattern that doesn’t fully fit the current situation.

You need enough space to tell the difference.

Decide what outcome matters

When something activates you at work, it’s easy to ask what you should say before you know what you want the conversation to accomplish.

A better question is what outcome you’re trying to create.

You may need clearer information. You may need more time. You may need to correct a misunderstanding or explain the impact of a decision.

The outcome should shape the response.

If you need clarity, a question may be more useful than an explanation. If you need time, you can say when you’ll return with an answer. If you need to address behavior, you can focus on the impact and what needs to change.

This is where general workplace advice often becomes too simple.

Telling someone to speak up doesn’t help them decide what the conversation needs to accomplish. Telling someone to set a boundary doesn’t explain what the boundary is meant to protect.

A useful response begins with a clear outcome.

Create space without avoiding the issue

Taking time to respond doesn’t make you indecisive.

You can say that you want to review the priorities before committing. You can ask to think about the feedback and return with questions. You can let someone know that you want to continue the conversation when you can give it proper attention.

A pause isn’t the same as avoidance.

Avoidance leaves the issue untouched. A pause gives you time to approach it with better judgment.

You don’t need to answer every question immediately to prove that you’re capable. You need to respond in a way that supports the work and protects your credibility.

The Corporate Unspiral Response Check

When a workplace moment activates you, pause before deciding what to do next.

• What am I feeling right now? Name the reaction without judging it.

• What am I tempted to do? Notice whether you want to defend yourself, agree quickly, withdraw, or explain more than the situation requires.

• What outcome do I want? Decide what needs to become clearer or different.

• What response supports that outcome? Choose whether you need a question, more time, a conversation, or a direct answer.

• What can wait? Separate what needs attention now from what can be handled after you have more information.

This process doesn’t remove the emotion from the situation, but it does keep the emotion from making a decision that may not serve you.

You can be frustrated and still respond thoughtfully. You can feel disappointed and still ask a clear question. You can need more time without losing your credibility.

The goal isn’t to find the perfect response. The goal is to choose one you won’t need to repair later.

In the next article, we’ll look at how better language can help you handle difficult conversations without over-explaining or abandoning what you need.

Get the Before You Respond Checklist

The Before You Respond Checklist will help you slow the moment down, clarify what outcome matters, and choose your next move with more intention.

One of the questions I’ve been asked most throughout my career is, “What should I say?”

It usually comes after someone receives difficult feedback, needs to push back on a request, or is preparing for a conversation they can’t stop replaying. They aren’t only looking for better wording. They’re looking for reassurance that they understand the situation well enough to say the right thing.

For a long time, I thought communication worked the same way. I believed that if I could find the perfect sentence, I could control how the conversation unfolded.

Experience taught me that the words matter, but the judgment behind them matters more.

Good communication starts before the conversation

Over the years, I’ve designed employee experiences, supported managers, and built programs for thousands of employees across large organizations. That work showed me that the conversations that went well rarely succeeded because someone found a flawless script.

They worked because the person understood what the moment required.

Some conversations needed clarity because people were working from different assumptions. Others needed accountability because an expectation had not been met. Some required curiosity because the person speaking did not yet have enough information to decide what was happening.

The language changed with the situation, but the judgment behind it stayed consistent.

That is why generic communication advice often falls short. The same sentence can build trust in one setting and create defensiveness in another. The difference is not usually the wording. It is whether the response fits the relationship, the history, and the outcome the person is trying to create.

Most communication problems begin earlier

When someone tells me they are struggling with a conversation at work, I rarely start by asking what they plan to say.

I start by trying to understand what is happening.

What outcome are they trying to create? What assumptions are shaping the situation? What pressure may the other person be responding to? What power dynamics need to be considered?

Once those pieces are clearer, the language usually becomes easier.

This is one of the biggest lessons I learned from working across employee experience and manager enablement. Employees and managers can walk into the same conversation believing they are addressing the same issue when they are actually trying to solve different problems.

The employee may be asking for clarity while the manager is trying to manage risk. The manager may be addressing performance while the employee believes the issue is trust. Neither person necessarily intends to create confusion, but the conversation becomes harder when they are responding to different concerns.

Better communication begins by identifying what the conversation is really about.

Clear language helps the conversation move

Once you understand the purpose of the conversation, you do not need to say everything.

You do not need to defend yourself before anyone has accused you of something. You do not need to apologize for asking a reasonable question, and you do not need to explain every detail before making a request.

You need enough language to help the conversation move forward.

If a new request affects your current priorities, you may need to name the tradeoff and ask which item should move. If feedback is unclear, you may need to ask what a stronger response would have looked like. If you need more time, you can say when you will return with an answer instead of agreeing before you understand the impact.

The goal is not to sound impressive. The goal is to make the next decision easier.

Communication is contextual

This is also why I am careful about handing out scripts without context.

A conversation with a trusted manager is different from a conversation with a new executive. Addressing a concern with a peer is different from pushing back on someone who controls your performance review.

The relationship matters, and the history matters. The business context matters too.

Thoughtful communication requires more than confidence. It requires enough judgment to understand what the situation can hold and what the other person is likely to hear.

You are not trying to memorize the right answer for every workplace moment. You are learning how to read the situation well enough to choose a response that fits.

The Corporate Unspiral Conversation Check

Before a difficult conversation, pause and work through these questions.

• What outcome am I trying to create? Decide what you want to be clearer or different by the end of the conversation.

• What does the other person need to understand? Choose the information that matters most.

• What assumptions might be shaping the situation? Consider what you may be assuming and what the other person may believe.

• What is the clearest way to move the conversation forward? Use language that supports the outcome instead of language that only relieves the immediate discomfort.

These questions will not remove every difficult dynamic, but they will help you spend less energy trying to perform the conversation and more energy understanding what it needs.

Over the last four articles, we have looked at why work can feel unnecessarily complicated than it should, how incomplete information turns into stressful stories, and why your first reaction does not need to make the decision.

The next question is what happens when the problem is larger than one conversation.

In the final article, we will look at the patterns that keep making work heavier and the support available when you are ready to stop navigating them alone.

Get the Hard Conversation Prep Sheet

The Hard Conversation Prep Sheet will help you clarify the outcome, identify the dynamics shaping the conversation, and organize your thinking before you decide what to say.

Subscribe to get the free resource and access the growing Corporate Unspiral resource library.

Over the last four articles, we’ve talked about the invisible parts of work.

We’ve talked about the stories we tell ourselves before we have enough information. We’ve talked about reacting before we’ve decided what the moment actually requires. We’ve talked about communication, judgment, and the difference between being responsible for your work and becoming responsible for everyone else’s.

If you’ve recognized yourself throughout this series, I want to ask you one question.

How much longer do you want to keep operating this way?

Operating in this way is emotionally expensive. It costs your attention before work even begins.

It follows you into dinner, into weekends, and into conversations with people who have nothing to do with your job. It steals time from your family, your relationships, your health, and the parts of your life that deserve the same care you give your career.

• You replay meetings that are already over.

• You prepare for conversations that never happen.

• You carry responsibility that belongs to other people.

• You work harder because it feels easier than sitting with the uncertainty.

• You become so good at holding everything together that people stop noticing how much you’re carrying.

Eventually, you stop noticing too. You just assume this is what success feels like.

It is not.

I know because I’ve lived it from both sides

Early in my career, I believed hard work would eventually solve everything.

If I became more capable, more prepared, and more reliable, I assumed work would become easier.

It did not.

As my 20+ year career took me through finance, recruiting, employee experience, manager enablement, and people and culture, I realized something I wish someone had taught me much earlier.

The people who looked steady weren’t carrying less because they cared less.

They were carrying less because they had learned how to work differently.

Later, when I was designing employee experiences for thousands of employees and supporting managers through difficult workplace situations, I saw the same trends across all levels and generational cohorts.

The people struggling weren’t less intelligent. They weren’t less ambitious. Most of them were exceptionally capable. They simply hadn’t been taught how to navigate the parts of work that no job description explains.

The Corporate Unspiral is designed to help you do well at work, handle the hard parts with more confidence, and still have a life and personality when the laptop closes.

Advice has limits

Everything I’ve shared in this series is real. It works, but it also has limits.

A checklist can help you pause before reacting. An article can help you recognize unsavory behaviors. A framework can help you ask better questions.

What it can’t do is understand your manager. It can’t account for the politics on your team. It can’t weigh the history behind a conversation, the personalities involved, the organizational pressures, or the risks you’re trying to balance.

That’s where judgment and discernment will make all the difference in the world.

It’s also where personalized support changes everything.

Because the right answer depends on your workplace, your role, your goals, and the people sitting across from you.

If you’ve found yourself nodding along, cringing a little bit, or feeling seen throughout this series, this next part is for you.

You don’t have to figure your job and the job within your job out alone. I’ll be all up in it with you, helping you make sense of what’s happening, deciding what to do next, and how to move forward with more confidence, peace, and a plan you feel amazing about.

Here’s how we can work together:

The Workday Reset Session is for you if you keep circling the same work problem, spiraling over the next move, and need a clear outside perspective.

You may be dealing with a difficult manager, unclear expectations, promotion uncertainty, workload concerns, or a communication challenge that keeps taking up more space in your head than it deserves.

You may also be noticing a broader pattern. You keep overthinking conversations, absorbing other people’s urgency, struggling to set expectations, or leaving work with too much of it still following you home.

In this 90-minute private advisory session, we’ll work through your unique situation together. We’ll identify what’s actually happening, separate the noise from what matters, and build a practical path forward that fits your role, your workplace, and your goals.

If you’ve been wishing someone could simply help you think through what’s happening, this session is for you.

Book a Workday Reset

The Next-Level Leader Intensive is for you if you’ve realized the issue isn’t one difficult conversation. It’s the way you’ve been operating at work.

Whether you’re already leading people, projects, or important work, or preparing to step into more responsibility, you’ve become the person everyone relies on. You’re capable, trusted, and carrying too much.

You replay conversations, absorb other people’s urgency, and keep taking work home in your head long after the day is over.

This personalized advisory experience helps you change that.

Together, we’ll strengthen how you read workplace dynamics, communicate under pressure, protect your capacity, and lead with more clarity and better judgment.

The goal is simple. You should be able to be exceptional at work without sacrificing the rest of your life.

Find out if the Next-Level Leader Intensive is for you!

Book a Discovery Call

Coming Soon: The Corporate Unspiral Cohort is the community experience of the Next-Level Leader Intensive.

You’ll build the same core skills around workplace judgment, communication, leadership, and protecting your capacity, but you’ll do it alongside other professionals who understand how exhausting it is to be capable, relied on, and carrying too much.

The transformation is simple. You’ll stop second-guessing every conversation, absorbing everyone else’s urgency, and taking work home in your head. You’ll learn how to read situations more clearly, communicate with more confidence, lead without over-functioning, and leave more of yourself for the life you have outside of work.

You won’t have to figure it all out alone.

Join the Waitlist

One final thought

One day, you’ll leave your current job. You’ll leave every job you’ve ever had.

The question isn’t whether work will end. The question is how much of your life you’ll spend carrying it after you’ve already closed your laptop.

You don’t get those evenings back.

You don’t get those weekends back.

You don’t get back the moments when the people you love were sitting next to you while your mind was still in a meeting that ended three hours ago.

Your career deserves your effort. It does not deserve your evenings, your relationships, your sense of self, or the rest of your life.

That’s what I’m here to help you protect.💛

You can probably imagine how that landed.

The event was supposed to build connection and improve morale, but employees were dreading it before it even began. We look at how leaders should respond when the circumstances change and the original plan stops making sense, using empathy, courage, and accountability.

Sometimes making work suck a little less comes down to using good judgment and being willing to change the plan.

Have a WTF at Work story?

Submit it anonymously here: WTF, Corporate? Topic Submission – Fill out form

Your story may be featured in a future episode, with names and companies kept confidential because we’re a little snarky, but we’re not reckless.

A few days ago, I asked people on a Substack note and on Threads a very important workplace research question.

“What’s the work phrase that instantly makes you brace yourself?”

Mine is “Do you have a minute?” Because we all know it’s never a minute.

It becomes a meeting, a problem, or an unexpected task that was not previously discussed. It can also be your manager standing beside your desk while you quickly review every decision you have made since your start date.

The question received multiple comments on both platforms, which is a lot of conversation for a small, mildly unhinged question about office language.

People had answers ready. The most popular responses were:

“Can we jump on a quick call?”

“May I see you in my office?”

“Close the door.”

“Let’s circle back.”

“I have a great opportunity for you.”

“Can I pick your brain?”

“We’re building the plane as we fly it.”

“We’re a family.”

One person said an email beginning with “Just FYI” immediately made them suspicious because it’s never just information. There’s usually a small unpaid assignment hiding somewhere inside it.

Someone else said the phrase “Let me take some time to wrap my head around this” translates to “I hate this idea, and I’m going to disappear now.”

Then there was the person whose colleague says “Heeeey Em” in a sing-song voice whenever she wants her to stay late.

Between the nickname and the voice, she already knows overtime is imminent.

The comments were funny and the commiseration about a common work experience proves that misery loves company. But the engagement told me something more interesting.

People weren’t reacting to the literal meaning of these phrases. They were reacting to what their work environments had taught those phrases to mean.

That’s why “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” is incomplete advice.

Sometimes it’s exactly what you say.

Sometimes it’s when you say it, where you say it, what you leave out, what happened the last six times you said it, and whether the person receiving it has any reason to trust you.

People aren’t reacting to words and words alone

Taken literally, “Do you have five minutes?” is a harmless question.

Maybe you really do only need five minutes. Maybe you want to ask where someone ordered lunch or tell them they did a great job.

But nobody hears workplace language in isolation.

They hear “quick call” after previous quick calls became surprise assignments. They see “Quick Update” after the last mysterious calendar invitation preceded layoffs. They hear “great opportunity” and remember the extra work, vague exposure, and complete absence of additional compensation.

“We’re a family” may sound warm until someone has watched it get used to make reasonable boundaries sound like betrayal.

People carry those experiences into the next conversation. We all do.

Research on threat learning and uncertainty supports the basic pattern¹. People learn which cues tend to predict unpleasant outcomes, and uncertainty about a possible negative event can increase anxious anticipation. In far less clinical terms, when a phrase has repeatedly been followed by bad news, extra work, embarrassment, or an uncomfortable surprise, people start bracing before they know what the current message means.

You send “Can we talk?” They hear “Something is wrong.”

You say “Let’s circle back.” They hear “This remains unresolved, and I’ll be thinking about it during dinner.”

You write “FYI.” They hear “Please figure out what I expect from you without making me state it directly.”

Your tone could be perfectly pleasant. You could add a smiley face or use your friendliest corporate exclamation point. The uncertainty would still be there.

Tone is only one piece of the message

Tone matters, and I will never argue that point. Nobody enjoys being spoken to like they’re already in trouble.

But communication is more complicated than choosing a warm tone and hoping everyone receives your message exactly as intended.

People interpret communication through context. Your relationship with them matters. So does the amount of power you have, whether the message is unusual, what happened last time, and whether they’re about to be asked for something, blamed for something, or surprised by something.

A manager sending “Do you have a minute?” lands differently than a close teammate sending it.

A calendar invitation from your work friend lands differently than an unexpected meeting with your manager and someone from HR.

“Let’s talk tomorrow” feels different at 10 a.m. than it does at 5 p.m. before a three-day weekend.

The words don’t arrive alone. They arrive with the context of your relationship and your most recent interactions.

This is why telling someone to “watch their tone” often doesn’t solve much. The problem may be that they’re vague, habitually create urgency, avoid direct conversations until the last possible moment, or use soft language to hide hard requests. Maybe they refuse to state expectations and then become frustrated when people fail to meet them.

Their voice might sound lovely while all of this is happening.

Vague language makes other people do the work

One reason these phrases bother people so much is that they create interpretive labor.

The receiver has to figure out what the message means, how urgent it is, what emotional state you’re in, whether they’re in trouble, what preparation is required, and how much of their afternoon is about to disappear.

That’s a lot to ask from a simple “Hey.”

We tend to focus on the effort required to send a message. We don’t think enough about the effort required to receive it.

“Do you have a minute?” is easy to send.

The other person now has to ask themselves several questions. What is this about? Did I miss something? Should I stop what I’m doing? Is this private? Am I about to get more work? Can this wait? Did my boss just find the spreadsheet error from last month?

A more complete message takes the sender ten additional seconds and saves the receiver ten minutes, maybe more, of speculation.

That’s a good trade.

Trust is built in those tiny exchanges. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I believe trust is the most underrated employee experience strategy.

People learn that when you contact them, you’ll give them enough information to respond well. They don’t have to decode you, prepare for every possible scenario, or treat each Teams or Slack notification like a small emergency.

You become easier to work with because people know what’s happening, and that’s far more useful than simply sounding nice.

Your teammates have probably discussed your favorite phrase

Nobody wants to discover that their normal communication style is someone else’s nervous system event.

We’ve all done it, though.

I’ve absolutely said “Do you have a minute?” I’ve sent the mysterious “Hey” and then gotten distracted before typing the rest. I’ve called something “quick” because I wanted it to be quick, even though I had no evidence to support my optimism.

Corporate jargon spreads because we hear it all day. Eventually, we stop noticing what it sounds like, but never what it feels like.

Then someone posts a question online, and 30 people arrive with the same emotional support phrase.

“Can we hop on a quick call?”

Apparently, “quick” has lost the trust of the people.

Nobody believes the call will be quick. They also know the word is sometimes used to make a request sound too small to decline.

You’re not requesting a meeting. You’re requesting a tiny, harmless little call. It’s barely a miniature call, if you can even call it a call at all. (If only Dr. Seuss were still alive to write his next banger about corporate jargon.)

Forty-five minutes later, someone is being assigned a project.

Before your favorite corporate phrase becomes the topic of an annoyed group chat, my best piece of advice is to give people more information.

Try these instead

You don’t need to write a full project brief every time you message a teammate. You can still be casual and ask for five minutes, just tell them what the five minutes are about.

Instead of “Do you have a minute?” 👉 Try “I have a question about the client timeline. It’s not urgent. Do you have ten minutes this afternoon?”

Instead of “Can we jump on a quick call?” 👉 Try “I’m stuck on the budget numbers and think talking may be easier than messaging. Could we spend 15 minutes on it before 3?”

Instead of sending “Hey” and disappearing into the corporate wilderness 👉 Try “Hey, could you send me the final deck when it’s ready? I don’t need it until tomorrow morning.”

Instead of “Let’s circle back.” 👉 Try “We’re not ready to decide today. I’ll confirm the missing numbers, and we’ll make the decision in Thursday’s meeting.”

Instead of “Just FYI” 👉 Try “Sharing this for awareness only. There’s nothing you need to do.” Or, when there is something they need to do, lose the “FYI” and say that. “Sharing this because I need you to update the tracker by Friday.”

Instead of “I have a great opportunity for you” 👉 Try “I’d like to ask you to lead the client presentation. It will require about three additional hours this week. You’ll present directly to the VP, and I’ll help you prepare.”

Now the person can decide whether the opportunity is, in fact, great.

Instead of “Let me wrap my head around this” 👉 Try “I’m concerned about the timeline and staffing. I want to review both before I respond. I’ll come back to you by noon tomorrow.”

Instead of “Can I pick your brain?” 👉 Try “Could I ask you three questions about your experience launching the program? I think 20 minutes would be enough.”

Instead of “We’re building the plane as we fly it” 👉 Try “The plan is still changing. Here’s what has been decided, what remains open, and what I need from you this week.”

Instead of “May I see you in my office?” 👉 Try “Could you come by at 2? I want to discuss the vendor issue. You’re not in trouble, but I’d rather talk privately.”

That last sentence may prevent someone from mentally drafting a resignation letter during the walk down the hall.

Clear communication is considerate communication

Being direct doesn’t mean being cold. It means giving people enough information to understand what’s happening.

You can be kind and specific while communicating urgency without manufacturing panic. You can ask for help without pretending the request is smaller than it is.

This is especially important when you’re a manager!

Your words carry more weight than you may realize. A vague message from a peer can be annoying. A vague message from someone who controls your workload, performance rating, opportunities, and employment can take over your entire day.

You may know the conversation is harmless or that “quick chat” means you want their opinion on a slide. They don’t.

They’re reviewing every recent interaction and wondering whether they’re about to be placed on a performance plan.

You don’t need to manage every feeling another person might have. You couldn’t do that even if you tried. But you can stop creating unnecessary uncertainty.

That’s part of being trustworthy.

It’s what you say, how you say it, AND how easy you make it to understand

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” sounds wise because it reminds people that delivery is important, but it also lets vague communicators off the hook.

They can believe the problem is merely tone when the real issue is that nobody knows what they mean.

Good workplace communication asks more of us.

It asks us to consider what the other person needs in order to receive the message without guessing. It asks us to name the purpose, the urgency, the expectation, and the next step. It asks us to notice when a harmless phrase has developed a long and suspicious corporate history.

Your coworkers shouldn’t need a translation guide every time you open Teams.

Tell them what’s happening, what you need, when you need it, and when there truly is no emergency.

Their nervous systems, and your reputation in the team group chat, will thank you.

If you found yourself nodding along, cringing a little, of feeling a little less alone in the corporate chaos, here are a few ways to support my work:

1. Click the heart so I know this resonated. ❤️

2. Leave a comment and tell me which part hit hardest. 💬

3. Share it with a friend, coworker, former coworker, or group chat that needs it.📩

4. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. The cost is less than one cup of coffee per month and paid subscribers get access to the subscriber chat. Your support helps me keep writing, researching, recording the podcast, and building more honest resources around making work suck a little less. ✨

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being here. The workplace gets better when more people decide to do something about it.💜

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Sources

¹National Library of Medicine

Last time I left you, I was under my desk crying, on the phone with my husband for an hour, before I cleaned myself up and walked into four back-to-back meetings like nothing happened.

I’m happy to tell you that isn’t how the story ends. But it took me a long time to get somewhere better, and what got me there is something I wish I’d learned years earlier.

I grew up as a first-generation college graduate. I scrapped my way into titled roles at Fortune 100 companies, the kind of jobs that looked like proof I’d made it. The LinkedIn version was very tidy. The internal version was slightly more feral. (for those of you who are new here, there’s a backstory – check it out: Girl, Meet Corporate)

Once I got there, I still felt like a fraud. Like someone was going to figure out I didn’t belong there. Like there was a secret corporate manual everyone else received during orientation, and I had somehow missed the session between benefits enrollment and “here is how to pretend you understand everything happening in the corporate abyss.” (and to be fair, corporate can be very confusing, as discussed in The WTF Culture at Work We've Somehow Accepted as Normal)

For a long time, I thought the fix was to work harder and be more impressive.

Answer faster, know more, anticipate everything. Never let anyone see the effort behind the output. Never be caught processing. Never need a minute. Never look like the job was asking anything from me, even when it was actively chewing through my nervous system.

That’s the conditioning nobody tells you about. Environments reward people who look unshakeable, so you start holding yourself to a standard no human can actually sustain unless they are a robot or a sociopath.

And because I was ambitious, and responsible, and very committed to being seen as capable, I kept trying to become the version of myself I thought the job wanted.

More polished. More prepared. More available. More impressive.

Queue more exhausted.

What finally got me off that path wasn’t a promotion or a new title. It wasn’t someone pulling me aside and saying, “Brandi, you’ve officially earned the right to unclench your jaw.” Tragically, there is no corporate award for that.

It was realizing I didn’t need to be impressive.

I needed to show up, do my job well, and treat the people around me with respect. The reward was getting to go home to my husband and my dogs, which is the whole point of any of this.

I had to ask myself what I was even performing for. A slightly better reputation with people who were also just trying to get through the day, probably feeling just as fraudulent as I was? The approval of someone who forgot the meeting five minutes after it ended? The imaginary panel of corporate judges in my head scoring me on executive presence and emotional containment?

Once I stopped trying to impress everyone, I had more room to just be a person at work.

It turns out, I was still a capable, responsible person, who could still care about the work without treating every interaction like a referendum on her entire future.

And after that whole under-the-desk situation, I kept thinking about a piece of advice someone gave me very early in my finance career.

I had presented to a senior executive, and, from my vantage point, it didn’t go very well. I was pretty upset, and bless my manager, he looked at me square in the face and said, “she [senior executive] puts her pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.”

While I remember this moment like it happened yesterday, it didn’t sink in then and I wish it would have. I immediately went back to acting like every senior leader was a mythical creature who I wanted needed to impress.

I understand it differently now.

Underneath the titles, decks, calendar invites, and confident meeting voices, most people are just trying to get through the day without looking like they’re trying to get through the day.

They’re managing pressure, making judgment calls with incomplete information, wondering if they said the wrong thing in that meeting, checking the clock, trying to get home, and hoping nobody asks one more “quick question” at 4:57 p.m. And believe me, there is nothing quick happening at 4:57 p.m. except the deterioration of morale.

Once I started seeing people as people, something in me changed.

I stopped walking into meetings trying to impress everyone.

I started walking in trying to be present with them, understand what we were solving, and figure shit out together.

I never stopped caring, not even for a minute. But I did stop turning every interaction into an audition. (Isn’t it amazingly magical that we have it within ourselves to make a difference in our own world? I talk a little more about that here.)

And that’s where the question came from, the one that’s saving me from my next meltdown.

Before I walk into any interaction now, I ask myself, “who am I performing for?”

The right answer in the past was everyone and myself. Now, it’s nobody, because I see them as people. As human beings also just trying to live their lives.

The day I was under my desk, my team wasn’t going to fall apart if I took twenty minutes. My boss wasn’t keeping score the way I thought she was. Nobody was sitting in a conference room whispering, “Interesting. She needed water before the strategy meeting. Concerning.”

I was the only one there treating a normal day like a test I had to pass.

And I know I’m not the only one doing this.

So many of us are walking into ordinary work moments with our bodies acting like we are about to defend a dissertation, argue before the Supreme Court, and disappoint our ancestors at the same time.

It’s a meeting, feedback, a vague message that could have used three more words and one fewer “thoughts?” It’s corporate life doing what corporate life does, which is make everything feel urgent, ambiguous, and somehow personally your fault.

To be fair, asking my grounding question doesn’t fix all of that nonsense.

It just tells me, in real time, whether I’m actually in a crisis or whether I’m afraid of what people will think if I’m not okay.

Because the question helps, but the question alone is not the whole thing.

I also had to learn how to operate differently after I asked it. I had to learn how to set boundaries without turning them into a full apology tour. I had to learn how to use language that sounded human instead of professional in the way that makes everyone sound like corporate stooges. I had to learn how to stop treating every meeting like an audition and every senior leader like they were about to fire me on the spot.

I had to learn how to care about my work without handing it the keys to my entire sense of self.

That took time. Too much time, honestly. I would have loved a shortcut that didn’t require crying under office furniture first.

If you’re looking for that shortcut too, that’s what I’ll keep unpacking here. How to set the boundary, find the words, stay ambitious, and stop treating every normal workday like a test you have to pass.

Because a lot of us were taught how to work hard.

Very few of us were taught how to work without disappearing into the performance of being fine.

If you found yourself nodding along, cringing a little, of feeling a little less alone in the corporate chaos, here are a few ways to support my work:

1. Click the heart so I know this resonated. ❤️

2. Leave a comment and tell me which part hit hardest. 💬

3. Share it with a friend, coworker, former coworker, or group chat that needs it.📩

4. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Right now, paid subscribers get access to the subscriber chat, and your support helps me keep writing, researching, recording the podcast, and building more honest resources around making work suck a little less. ✨

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being here. The workplace gets better when more people decide to do something about it.💜

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Which is…a choice.

This episode breaks down why that’s not employee engagement. It’s reputation management. And when employees are already leaving detailed feedback about leadership, trust, and the actual experience of working there, trying to bury that feedback with happier reviews is how you make the trust problem worse.

We look at what leadership should have done instead through three lenses: empathy, courage, and accountability.

A low Glassdoor rating is not great. But trying to manufacture better reviews is a masterclass in how you turn an employee experience issue into a trust issue.

Have a WTF at Work story?

Submit it anonymously here: WTF, Corporate? Topic Submission – Fill out form

Your story may be featured in a future episode, with names and companies kept confidential because we’re a little snarky, but we’re not reckless.

It wasn’t long ago that I found myself under my desk in full on tearful meltdown on the phone with my husband for over an hour. We have a very strict rule that phone calls during the work day are reserved for emergencies only so we know we have to pick up no matter what. We’ve only used this rule about five or six times in our fifteen-year marriage. That’s how serious it must be to make the call.

I was on the verge of quitting my job and, get this, I LOVED my job. I got to build employee experiences from start to finish at NBCU and it was fun. When I hosted orientations and planned first week events, I got to invite Kevin the minion to make a guest appearance. I got to invite hundreds of employees to preview screenings of newly released movies, and I got to take those same employees behind the scenes of rides and shows at the Universal them parks.

And that’s what people saw on the surface. Their days were made easy and perfect and dreamy because my team and I were behind the scenes going over every detail, every word in a piece of communication, stalking technology deliveries like FedEx didn’t know how to get it right, teaching managers how to treat people like human beings, and staying on top of every state, federal, and local employment law that seemed to update on a whim.

I was a duck on water. Busy, exhausted, overwhelmed, and tired doesn’t even begin to cover it when you’re responsible for over a thousand new employees and their managers annually.

When I say I LOVED that job, obsessed might be a better word. I considered it a reflection on me if someone under my purview didn’t have an excellent experience. Even our 98% satisfaction rate still left room for improvement and I made sure to say so in my performance review every year.

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Back to being under my desk. It’s funny how I can’t remember exactly what triggered it. In fact, I’m sure it was something really stupid. But it was important enough for me to call my husband in the middle of the work day. But this isn’t the point of the story.

The point of the story is what happened next. After my husband lovingly talked me down from the proverbial ledge, I quickly went to the bathroom without drawing suspicion, splashed my face with water, got some water and went right into four back-to-back meetings with a smile on my face and ready to solve anyone’s problem.

Sometimes that’s the cost of being in a highly visible role with a ton of responsibility. You have to show up with the brave face and take care of business. But here I was having a deeply human response, but feeling like I had to hide under a desk to have it.

While I’m not sure I would ever advise someone to have a full-on meltdown in public, I found it interesting that I was aware enough to a) hide, b) be incognito in the aftermath before I could get myself to the ladies room to make myself presentable again, and c) go into those next meetings as if I didn’t just have the ultimate career crisis.

As I reflect on it now, I realized that I had been conditioned by all of my years in the corporate environment that the first rule of corporate fight club was don’t talk about corporate fight club keep it professional at all times, lest you be branded…EMOTIONAL!

In the moment, I didn’t give a second thought. I didn’t stop and think, “okay, what’s my next move here?” No, I simply went into auto-pilot mode to self-preserve in my corporate environment.

I wish I would have done things a little differently that day to protect my own spirit. Did I have hundreds of people relying on me that day? Yes. Would the company have imploded if I took a few hours to regain some semblance of self that day? Absolutely not.

I could have cancelled the meetings or asked for a reschedule. I could have taken more time to regroup. Even a quick walk outside probably would have helped. Why did I not even think in that moment to take a break?

That’s the corporate conditioning that’s real. Show up, be available, don’t ask for anything you need as a human, smile, deliver, be consistent, and deliver more. That behavior is rewarded, you are praised for it, promoted for it. So we just keep doing it and it becomes our default.

The problem with the default professionalism is that it often leads to a moment akin to crying under your desk, on the phone with your husband who you’ve sworn to only call for emergencies.

The real emergency is when you stop being the human you are and operate solely in optimization-mode.

I don’t think the fix is complicated. I think the fix is permission. Permission to say the meeting can wait ten minutes. Permission to say you need air before you need an answer. Permission to be a person before you’re a professional.

But permission is hard to give yourself when you’ve spent years being rewarded for the opposite. So here’s what I’ve started doing instead, and it’s smaller than you’d expect. Before I walk into anything that matters, I ask myself one question. Not “can I handle this,” because I can always handle it. The question is different, and it’s the one I’ll get into next time, because it’s the one that finally got me out from under that desk for good.

If you found yourself nodding along, cringing a little, of feeling a little less alone in the corporate chaos, here are a few ways to support my work:

1. Click the heart so I know this resonated. ❤️

2. Leave a comment and tell me which part hit hardest. 💬

3. Share it with a friend, coworker, former coworker, or group chat that needs it.📩

4. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Right now, paid subscribers get access to the subscriber chat, and your support helps me keep writing, researching, recording the podcast, and building more honest resources around making work suck a little less. ✨

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being here. 💜

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Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this series and it’s time to bring it home.

Part 1 was the punch in the gut. The ghosted candidates, the badge swipe tracking, the relocations, the promotions that are always “coming soon.” The WTF moments we’ve somehow decided are just part of the deal.

Part 2 was the autopsy of how a 400-year handshake between companies and workers got replaced by a spreadsheet. How pensions disappeared, wages flatlined, and layoffs became a stock price strategy rather than a last resort.

So now we’re here at part 3. This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you whether any of this can actually be fixed.

Well, my honest answer is it can and it can’t.

There are some deep systemic issues woven throughout the corporate work environment that we may never fully solve. Some of this has been baked in for so long that we might genuinely be too far gone to reverse it entirely. I think we have to be honest about that instead of pretending a three-part Substack series would ever be able to present a magical fix for 40+ years of broken trust.

What I do believe, however, is there is a way to make real progress. Things we can do that would make this imperfect, often maddening place more tolerable. Things that might even start to reenergize a workforce that is, by every available measure, running on fumes right now.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first

There will always be companies that treat people like shit a line item. There will always be leaders who mistake authority for intelligence. There will always be someone in a conference room somewhere deciding that a Zoom layoff is an acceptable way to end a decade-long relationship with another human being.

We’re not going to fix all of that. Some people are just committed to being terrible at this, and no amount of data or discussion will ever change their minds. I will say proudly and out loud that these people suck.

So no, the corporate workplace will never be perfect. If you came here for such a promise, I don’t have it for you. Sorry to disappoint.

Something is happening, though, and I’ve felt it for a while now. I wasn’t quite sure how to put into words the shiftiness (not sure if this is word, but I’m going with it) I was feeling.

Something I stumbled across something that blew my mind

A few months ago I came across an account talking about a concept in human design called the 2027 shift. Full transparency, I’m still learning about human design and I’m not here to sell you on it. What I will share is that when I read about this, something clicked.

The idea, in very simplified terms, is that we’ve been living in a 400-year cycle called the Cross of Planning, an era defined by deference to institutions. Governments, corporations, schools, systems. We showed up, followed the rules, trusted the structure, and expected the structure to take care of us in return.

In February 2027, according to human design, that cycle ends. What replaces it is an era of individual sovereignty, where people stop outsourcing their decisions to institutions and start trusting their own judgment, their own values, their own sense of what’s right.

Whether you believe in human design or not, I invite you to look around.

Trust in institutions is at historic lows. People are leaving companies not just for more money but because the culture doesn’t match their values. Gen Z is negotiating job offers in ways that would have been unthinkable 10-15 years ago. Employees are talking openly about things that used to be whispered. Things like pay, mental health, burnout, bad managers. The workforce is not nearly as compliant as it used to be, and companies seem to be a bit rattled by this.

I’m not saying human design predicted all of this. I am saying that once I started studying this idea more, the more it made a whole lotta sense. I’ve been saying for a few years now that we are on the precipice of change. The work environment feels like the slow simmer just before the rolling boil. The people coming into the workforce and moving into leadership right now are not going to accept the same deal their predecessors did. And that’s a good thing. That’s exactly what needs to happen.

If you want to learn more about the 2027 shift, Human Design 2027 / HD&Me goes deep on this idea.

What can drive the change we need?

What I’m about to say may be unpopular. It’s very easy to put all of this on companies. Look at the stories from Part 1 and Part 2 and say companies need to do better, and leave it there.

Companies do need to do better. I’m not letting them off the hook.

I also think we have to be honest about the reality companies are operating in. They have bottom lines. They have shareholders and board members. The idea that a company can simply prioritize making employees happy above all else isn’t realistic, and the sooner we accept that as a workforce, the sooner we can stop waiting for companies to save us and start asking what we’re willing to do ourselves. Not to mention, how would they ever be able to satisfy every single employee’s unique wants and needs? I used to run pulse surveys for my employee population three times a year. When I received overwhelmingly great feedback on our employee programs from hundreds, there would still be a handful that I could never please. But, I digress.

Here’s the good news. The part we, as individuals, have control over isn’t the company. It’s us.

So when I talk about what drives change, I’m talking about individuals. People deciding to do this differently, one role, one team, one conversation at a time. It’s like the old saying, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Throughout my career and work with thousands of employees, there are three common themes in the best of them. Courage, empathy, and accountability with communication sitting atop all 3. Some people hear those words and think you’re either born with them or you’re not. I grew up without anyone modeling any of these for me. I learned them inside Fortune 100 companies, through trial and error, through watching what made people trust me and what made them shut down. I learned what it felt like to get it right and exactly what it felt like to get it wrong.

My belief, backed by everything I’ve experienced and watched play out over 20+ years in the corporate environment, is these behaviors can be taught and practiced.

Each of these deserves more than a paragraph, and I’ll be getting into all of it in much more depth soon. For now, here’s what I’ll say. Every single WTF moment from Part 1 of this series has at least one of those three things missing from it. Sometimes all three. The absence of courage is why hard conversations don’t happen. The absence of empathy is why decisions get made without any acknowledgment of their human cost. The absence of accountability is why the same problems keep showing up year after year and day after day.

None of this is complicated to understand. Doing it consistently, inside organizations with real politics and real pressure and real bottom lines, is a different story.

So where does that leave us

Could I wrap this up in a nice tidy bow here? Sure. I could tell you awareness is the first step, acknowledging the problem is half the battle, and reading this far makes you part of the solution.

That’s not true and I’m not going to pretend it is.

Awareness without action is just a more articulate way of complaining. We’ve gotten very good at that. We post the screenshots, vent in the group chat, nod along to every article confirming what we already suspected, and then go right back to absorbing the next WTF moment because that’s “just how it is”.

So I have to ask the question nobody really wants to answer out loud. Are we going to do something about this, or are we just going to keep being very good at describing (and complaining about) the problem?

Every single person reading this that’s a part of the workforce has a choice sitting in front of them right now. Right now, in whatever role you currently hold, you get to decide whether you’re going to be one more person who perpetuates this culture or one of the people who starts breaking the cycle. The decision shows up in your next one-on-one, your next hard conversation, your next moment where it would be so much easier to stay quiet.

Millennials and Gen Z, this part is for you

Here’s what I know about the generation holding the largest share of the workforce right now. You have a heart for this. You genuinely want to do better. You want workplaces that make sense, treat people like adults, and don’t produce the kind of absurdity discussed in Part 1.

You didn’t ask to inherit a workplace built on a forty-year bait and switch. You inherited it anyway. You’re the ones standing closest to the controls right now, whether you feel ready for that or not.

Do you realize how incredibly special it is to know that you have it within yourself to make a difference in your own world? Because that’s what this is really about.

If every individual independently chooses courage, empathy, and accountability within their own role, something starts to happen. You have a generation writing new rules and setting new standards. When you model what’s right, it’s contagious, the same way bad behavior has always been. It starts to rub off on the people around you, the people above you, the people who come after you.

It takes everybody. We can’t rely on one person to change everything. We can’t wait on companies to figure this out on their own. We can’t keep hoping that the people in leadership positions who are still doing things the old way will suddenly have a change of heart.

What we can do is have agency over our own work. We can show up with courage. We can exercise empathy. We can take accountability so things don’t fall through the cracks. That part belongs to each of us, regardless of title, level, or how long we’ve been putting up with the WTF culture around us.

When enough people do that, the WTF moments don’t disappear entirely. Let’s be real, some a lot of them are probably here to stay. They do get fewer and further between, though. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is making your own environment suck a little less. Then a little less after that.

One more thing

My human design chart says I drive change by being willing to acknowledge and speak about uncomfortable truths. When I read that, I thought, yeah that tracks.

I spent 20+ in the corporate workforce, 15+ of those in HR. I’ve seen everything that can go wrong, go wrong. I’ve had to take ownership of fixing it, or at least lessening the damage, for the people caught in the crossfire. That’s my zone of genius. My former team used to joke that I was a non-violent Ray Donovan — I can fix anything. I can’t prevent every WTF moment from happening, because some of them are above my pay grade. But, I’m particularly skilled in reducing the impact on the people within my reach, though. Making the unavoidable a little more survivable.

It’s still what I’m trying to do, just from the outside now so I can help more people thrive in their daily work.

This series started because I kept watching things that were genuinely absurd get treated as normal, and I needed to say that out loud. A Substack series can only go so far, though. There’s so much more to talk about. More stories, more data, more examples of both the dysfunction and the people doing it differently. More on what courage, empathy, and accountability look like when someone puts them into practice inside a real organization with real politics and a real bottom line.

So I’m taking this conversation somewhere it can keep going.

The WTF, Corporate? podcast is coming on July 7th! Same energy as this series. More room to go deeper, get specific, and discuss how courage, empathy, and accountability can show up in very specific situations.

If you’re already subscribed, you’ll be the first to know when episode 1 goes live.

If this series made you laugh, nod, cringe, or feel a little less alone in the corporate chaos, here are a few ways to support my work:

1. Click the heart so I know this resonated. ❤️

2. Leave a comment and tell me which part hit hardest. 💬

3. Share it with a friend, coworker, former coworker, or group chat that needs it.📩

4. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Right now, paid subscribers get access to the subscriber chat, and your support helps me keep writing, researching, recording the podcast, and building more honest resources around making work suck a little less. ✨

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being here. 💜

Leave a comment

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If we haven’t met yet, hi, I’m Brandi 👋. I spent 15+ years in HR leadership doing everything I could to make sure the people on my watch didn’t have to survive WTF corporate culture.

If you’re a next-generation manager or emerging leader trying to lead through all of this, I work with corporate professionals one-on-one to help you learn the skills you need to cut through the corporate chaos, get you grounded in what matters, and work on making your day to day a whole lot less WTF. Reach out anytime.

📧 brandi@theemployeeexperienceedit.com

“Wait…are we all just pretending this is normal?”

Each week, I’ll unpack one real WTF work moment and ask what leadership could have done instead through empathy, courage, and accountability.

Because making work suck a little less does not always start with a massive culture transformation.

Sometimes it starts with a clearer decision, a better conversation, a manager who has someone’s back, or a leader willing to say, “This doesn’t need to keep happening this way.”

Episode one launches July 7th.

Follow along and subscribe on Substack so you don’t miss it, and if you have your own WTF work moment, you can submit it anonymously through the link I’ll be including in the show notes.

Not everything worth reading teaches you how to make more money.

Some of the best things I’ve read this month had nothing to do with growing a business, building a personal brand, or becoming more productive.

They were about cracking walnuts, craftsmanship, people doing beautiful work, and ideas that made me stop, think, and look at the world a little differently.

One of the unexpected gifts of spending more time on Substack has been discovering the people behind those stories. Since getting serious about writing here in March, I’ve had conversations that have completely changed the way I think. I’ve joined live events, jumped on Zoom calls with fascinating people, and even met someone in person who has quickly become a dear friend.

This platform has reminded me that the internet can still be a place where curious, thoughtful people gather simply because they enjoy learning from one another.

So I’ve decided to start something new.

On the last Friday of every month, I’ll share a handful of pieces I’ve enjoyed that aren’t about growing your Substack, or productivity hacks, or business & branding advice.

I’m just sharing writing that made life feel a little richer.

If sharing someone else’s work helps one more person discover an incredible writer, that’s reason enough for me to keep doing it.

I’ll be curating each edition around five themes that I think are at the heart of a life well lived:

Simplicity
Stories that remind us life doesn’t always need to be faster, bigger, or more efficient to be meaningful.

Curiosity
Ideas, discoveries, and questions that make us see the world a little differently.

Craft
People who care deeply about making something well, whether it’s writing, cooking, designing, building, or creating.

Delight
Things that simply made me smile, sparked a little joy, or reminded me that life is meant to be enjoyed.

Connection
Stories that celebrate our shared humanity and the relationships, communities, and small moments that bring us closer together.

With that, here’s this month’s collection, organized around five ideas that I think are at the heart of a life well lived.

Simplicity🌿

Julie Vincent

Crack A Walnut

You know, it’s easy to assume everyone wants the easy option nowadays, but what if the easy option is actually creating disengagement, unfulfillment, and a lack of empathy…

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2 months ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Julie Vincent

A simple question, “Why don’t you just buy shelled walnuts?”, turns into a thoughtful reflection on why the easiest path isn’t always the most fulfilling. I loved this piece because it reminded me that slowing down, embracing a little effort, and choosing to be fully present can make even the most ordinary moments feel meaningful.

Curiosity💡

A story about a disastrous surprise date turns into a surprisingly honest reflection on ambition, contentment, and our relentless pull toward “what’s next.” I found myself thinking about this one long after I finished reading because it asks a question most of us may not stop to fully consider. Are we chasing the summit so hard that we’re missing the view along the way?

Craft🔨

Your Hometown Too

The Danelectro Story

One of the permanent galleries at the new Springsteen Center at Monmouth University is “America’s Instrument: The Evolution of the Electric Guitar,” and it put me in mind of a story I once wrote for the Asbury Park Press about the role a Jersey Shore company played in that evolution, and also in the evolution of some Jersey Shore musicians. I also post…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Kevin Coyne

I have a soft spot for stories about people who change an industry without most of us ever knowing their names. This piece isn’t just about guitars. It’s about ingenuity, craftsmanship, and one person’s determination to make exceptional design accessible to everyday people.

Delight✨

Food Friends

10 Recipes For Your Summer Farmers' Market Haul

Before we dive in: thank you for being here, and for each of your comments, likes, and messages…

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3 months ago · 17 likes · 4 comments · Food Friends

Reading this made me want to grab my reusable bags and head to the nearest farmers market. It's less about the recipes and more about celebrating the simple joy of cooking with whatever happens to be in season.

Connection🫶

Uncompliant

Human Systems Stewardship: Care & Belonging

*If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read the first piece in this series, titled “The End of Human Resources” (← click here), as it lays the groundwork for what’s to come over the next few months. You can find Part 2 of the series here ←…

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3 months ago · 30 likes · 3 comments · Jennifer Houle

This piece challenged the way I think about belonging at work. It's a thoughtful reminder that care isn't created through perks or policies, but through the everyday systems that determine whether people feel safe enough to show up as fully human.

Here’s to filling our feeds with a little more curiosity, delight, craftsmanship, connection, simplicity, and, hopefully, a life that feels just a little richer because of it.

If you’ve discovered something this month that belongs on next month’s list, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Leave a comment

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If you read Part 1, you know the feeling. That split second where your brain and your body collide and you think, “what in the actual hell is happening right now.”

What I didn’t answer last week is why. Why does corporate America keep producing the same handful of WTF moments over and over, no matter the industry, the company size, or the decade?

The short answer is it didn’t always. Something changed, and that something had a start date.

The handshake deal that used to exist

For a big chunk of the twentieth century, the relationship between a company and its employees ran on something close to a handshake. You showed up, did your job, stayed loyal, and in exchange the company gave you something back. Steady pay, a pension that would realistically fund your retirement, and the expectation that if you weren’t doing anything wrong, you’d probably still have your job next year.

That deal wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t universal. Plenty of workers, especially women and people of color, were locked out of it entirely. But for a huge swath of the American workforce, work functioned less like a transaction and more like a relationship with some actual permanence to it.

Then the 1980s happened.

The decade that changed the deal

Until the 1980s, large-scale layoffs in corporate America mostly meant something temporary. A company hit a rough patch, paused operations, laid people off with the expectation of bringing them back once business improved. It was disruptive, but it wasn’t a permanent severing of the relationship.

That changed fast. Companies began using layoffs not as a last resort during downturns but as a routine tool to boost stock price, regardless of whether the business was actually struggling. The bond between employer and employee has never really recovered.

General Electric’s Jack Welch became the face of the new approach, earning the nickname “Neutron Jack” for how aggressively he cut. Under his leadership, GE’s workforce fell from 411,000 employees in 1980 to 299,000 by 1985. That’s 112,000 jobs eliminated in five years, during a period when the company wasn’t even struggling. Welch also popularized “rank and yank,” the practice of culling the bottom 10 percent of a workforce every single year regardless of how the company was performing.

Wall Street loved it. Research on layoff announcements at major firms found that cutting jobs actually pushed stock prices up, and the gains were even bigger for companies with a track record of doing it before. Layoffs stopped being a sign that something had gone wrong. They became a sign that leadership was being decisive.

This is the part that really grinds my gears. Once the market started rewarding job cuts, the incentive to protect people became secondary to the incentive to protect the stock price. Once that shift happened, it never really reversed.

Where the pensions went

While layoffs were becoming routine, the other half of the old deal was also disappearing on the down-low.

In 1980, 38% of private-sector workers had a traditional pension, the kind that guaranteed you income for the rest of your life based on your salary and years of service. By 2008, that number had fallen to 20%. Today it’s closer to 18%.

What replaced it was the 401(k). On paper, this looked like more flexibility and more control for workers. In practice, it meant the company stopped taking on the risk of funding someone’s retirement and handed that risk entirely to the employee. If the market tanks the year before you retire, that’s now your problem, not your employer’s.

So in the span of about 25 years, two of the biggest pillars of the old employment deal eroded at the same time. Job security stopped being something companies tried to protect. Retirement security stopped being something companies were on the hook for. The relationship that used to define a career started looking a lot more transactional, and a lot less like something either side was actually invested in long term.

The math that never balanced back out

Here’s the interesting part. While job security and retirement security were disappearing, pay was supposed to be the thing that made up for it. It didn’t.

Since 1979, worker productivity in the U.S. has grown by about 90%. Pay for the typical worker grew by 33% over that same stretch. If wages had simply kept pace with how much more productive workers became, the typical worker would be earning over $16 more per hour right now!

So the deal didn’t just lose its security. It lost its math. Workers were producing more, generating more value, and getting a smaller and smaller share of what that value was worth. Meanwhile the things that used to sweeten the deal, the pension, the assumption of a long-term relationship, the implicit promise that loyalty meant something, were gone.

It’s no wonder we don’t feel loyal to our employers anymore. The companies stopped acting like the relationship deserved it decades ago.

Then tech happened, and the goal posts moved again

If the 1980s and 90s rewired how companies thought about layoffs, the last few years have rewired how fast and how openly they’re willing to do it.

In the first half of 2026 alone, tech layoffs surpassed 100,000 workers. Companies aren’t even being subtle about why anymore. Block’s CEO told employees directly that the cuts weren’t about financial trouble, they were about AI tools now being capable of doing the work. Amazon cut 14,000 corporate roles while reporting record revenue and called it reducing bureaucracy. Oracle cut up to 30,000 employees in a single day, with some people reportedly receiving termination emails before the sun came up.

What’s different this time is the blatant honesty of it all, if you can call it that. For decades companies hid behind words like “restructuring” and “right-sizing” to avoid admitting a layoff was a choice rather than a necessity. Now some of them are saying it out loud without a care in the world. We don’t need you anymore because the technology can do enough of what you did.

And the people still employed aren’t exactly thriving either. The average manager now oversees about 12 direct reports, up from under 11 just a year earlier, as companies eliminate management layers to cut costs. Middle managers have absorbed a disproportionate share of the layoffs themselves, going from a fifth of total cuts in 2019 to nearly a third by 2023. The managers who survive are left managing more people with less support, while leadership teams pat themselves on the back and call it efficiency.

Employee engagement is reflecting all of this. U.S. engagement hit a ten-year low at the end of 2024. Globally it’s at its lowest point since 2020. That number is not coincidental. People are watching their employers treat headcount like a line item to optimize, and they’re responding exactly the way you’d expect a person to respond when they realize the relationship was never really mutual.

So why does this keep happening

Because every incentive in the system still rewards it.

Cutting jobs still moves stock prices in the right direction more often than not. Shifting risk onto employees still saves money in the short term. And there’s no real cost to a company for treating its people as disposable, because the labor market has rarely had enough leverage to make that expensive.

We didn’t end up here by accident. We ended up here because forty years of decisions, each one individually defensible on a spreadsheet, added up to a collective workplace where the relationship between a company and the people who work there stopped looking like a relationship at all.

That’s the why. Part 3 is about whether any of it can actually be fixed, and what it will take for next-gen leaders to build something different instead of just inheriting whatever it is this is.

If we haven’t met yet, I’m Brandi Copeland. I spent 15+ years in HR leadership at Disney and NBCUniversal doing everything I could to make sure the people on my watch didn’t have to survive WTF culture. Now I do that work from the outside, partnering with managers and companies who are serious about building a people strategy that actually holds up.

If you’re a next-generation leader trying to lead through all of this, I work with managers one on one. We cut through the chaos, get you grounded in what actually matters, and work on making your day to day a whole lot less WTF. Reach out anytime.

If you’re a millennial woman who’s tired of figuring this out alone, the Millennial Manager Method was created for you. Six weeks, live and virtual, built for managers who were never set up to lead and are ready to change that. The founding cohort kicks off July 14th and applications close July 2nd. Reply or click here to learn more.

📧brandi@theemployeeexperienceedit.com

Sources

Economic Policy Institute. “The Productivity–Pay Gap.”

Economic Policy Institute. “Growing inequalities, reflecting growing employer power, have generated a productivity–pay gap since 1979.”

Economic Policy Institute. “CEO Pay.”

National Institute on Retirement Security. “Debunking the Job-Hopping Myth: A Data-Driven Look at Worker Tenure.” September 2025.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employee Tenure Summary.

Randstad. “Gen Z Workplace Blueprint: Future Focused, Fast Moving.” 2025.

Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). Pension coverage data, private sector 1980–2025.

Equiliem. “Job Tenure Trends: Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably found yourself sitting at your desk at work, completely frozen in time, because you’re witnessing something so random, so absurd, so diabolical that surely you must be hallucinating.

You might briefly contemplate deleting everything on your laptop, shutting it down, and walking out the door never to return.

But alas, you need the paycheck. And you’d rather cover yourself in honey and roll around in an ant pile than willingly enter the black hole of a job market we’re currently experiencing.

So you snap out of the absurdity-induced trance, give yourself a little “that’s just how it is” pep talk, and move about your day. Nerves fully shot, but functional.

This feeling isn’t unique to one person or just a few people here and there. If you ask almost anyone sitting in a corporate role, they’ll know exactly the feeling you’re talking about, even if they’ve never quite had the words for it.

Allow me to give this feeling a name: WTF.

It’s that split second where your brain and your body collide and produce the same reaction: What in the actual f*** is happening right now?

I’ve had plenty of these moments myself. I’ve also heard hundreds of stories from managers, employees, executives, recruiters, HR professionals, and job seekers over the years. And I wonder, “How did we decide this was okay?”

At some point, we stopped questioning things at work that would sound completely absurd anywhere else.

These things barely even surprise us anymore. Sure, we still feel the WTF wash over us. We still text our friends and vent to our spouses. We still stare at our screens wondering if anyone else is seeing what we’re seeing.

Then we collect ourselves and get back to work, because “that’s just how it is.”

To me, that’s probably the weirdest part of all. We’ve become so accustomed to workplace dysfunction that we’ve stopped treating it like dysfunction and now we just treat it like plain ole regular work.

Now, before someone emails me a 64-page PDF of additional workplace nonsense, I know this article doesn’t even scratch the surface of covering it all. There are millions of ways WTF culture shows up. Some are funny. Some are frustrating. Some completely change the trajectory of a person’s career and life.

So let’s do something radical for a few minutes and acknowledge how bizarre some of this really is.

Here is a small sampling. *Companies unnamed to protect the guilty.

Let’s start before someone even gets the job.

WTF culture can appear before someone is ever hired.

Now, I know there are incredible recruiters out there. I’ve worked with many of them. They care deeply about candidate experience, communicate well, and genuinely want to make the process feel human.

Unfortunately, there are also plenty of organizations that seem to view candidates as an unlimited natural resource. Need another interview, panel, assessment? Just schedule it. Need someone to create a presentation, analyze data, build a strategy, and present their recommendations? Sure. The candidate will do it.

I’ve spoken with people who completed six, seven, even eight rounds of interviews only to be ghosted entirely. No update, no feedback, no closure, not even a disposition email. Just silence.

Or what about a colleague I know that had eleven interviews total, was flown to the location for an on-site, completed references and background check (all clear, of course)...only to lose out to an internal candidate.

Then there’s the rise of project work in interview processes. I understand the desire to see how someone thinks, but there’s a difference between evaluating someone’s approach and asking them to perform free labor. I’ve watched candidates spend entire weekends building presentations and generating ideas for organizations that ultimately never hired them. The company walks away with a fresh perspective and the candidate walks away wondering why they spent the majority of their weekend working for free.

Imagine hiring a contractor to remodel your kitchen and saying: “Before we decide whether to hire you, we’d like you to remodel half the kitchen at no charge.”

It sounds ridiculous because it is. In corporate, though? No big deal.

The irony is that organizations spend so much time evaluating candidates and putting them through complicated interview processes that they forget candidates are evaluating them too. Every delayed response, ghosted email, and unnecessarily complicated step sends a clear message. Spoiler alert. The message isn’t “we have high standards”. It’s “we don’t value your time nearly as much as we value our own”.

It’s a pretty strange way to begin a relationship.

On the off chance you get the job

Let’s pretend you make it through the interview process. You weren’t ghosted. The role wasn’t eliminated for unknown reasons. An internal candidate didn’t suddenly appear after ten rounds. The company decides it would, in fact, like to hire you.

Congratulations, you’re now part of the 1%.

Unfortunately, getting the job is just the beginning of the mayhem that’s set to ensue.

For all the attention organizations put into recruiting, it never ceases to amaze me how many seem completely unprepared for the possibility that someone might do something truly unheard of and...accept their offer.

I’ve seen new hires arrive on day one with no computer, no system access, no schedule, and no real understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing. I’ve seen managers schedule their new hire to start on a week they’ll be on vacation (even though they’ve told me the hire is “urgent”). I’ve seen managers forget someone was starting altogether.

New hires aren’t a surprise. Nobody accidentally hired this person. There was an interview process, an offer, a background check, a start date, multiple approvals. Everyone knew they were coming, but then the employee arrives and feels like they caught the organization off guard.

A lot of organizations also confuse orientation with onboarding. Not the same. Sitting through several hours of presentations about company history, the c-suite directory, values, and compliance training doesn’t automatically help someone become successful in their role. By the end of most orientation sessions, people can barely remember half of it.

They’re still wondering who to contact when they need help, what success looks like, and whether they made the right choice accepting the role.

Starting a new job is one of the most vulnerable experiences a person can have. You’re walking into an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by people you don’t know, trying to prove yourself while simultaneously learning how everything works. All the while, everyone is looking at you like you have seven heads, you’re brand new to the world, and you’re the only person in the world who has ever started a new job.

We’ve normalized onboarding experiences that leave people confused and disconnected before they’ve even had a chance to contribute. Then we’re surprised when someone starts looking for their next job six months later. Sometimes the first signs of dysfunction were there on day one.

The manager lottery

Once you’ve survived the interview process and made it through onboarding, you eventually run into the single biggest predictor of your experience at work. Your manager.

Unfortunately, getting a great manager can feel less like a business strategy and more like winning the lottery.

We’ve known for years that managers have an enormous impact on engagement, performance, retention, and overall employee experience. Despite all of this, we continue to promote people into management roles every single day with little to no preparation for what the job requires.

Think about how wild that is. We’d never hand someone responsibility for financial statements and hope they figure out GAAP along the way. We wouldn’t promote someone into software engineering and tell them to learn coding through trial and error. When it comes to leading people, though, we seem pretty comfortable saying: “Congratulations on the promotion. Good luck with those humans.”

Being great at doing the work and being great at leading the people doing the work are two entirely different skill sets. One requires individual expertise. The other requires communication, coaching, delegation, feedback, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and the ability to help other people succeed. Many new managers never receive tactical training in any of those areas. They’re expected to learn through trial and error, and unfortunately, the error part is absorbed by real life human beings.

In my experience, managers aren’t intentionally creating bad experiences. In many cases, they’re struggling too. They’re navigating competing priorities, unrealistic workloads, and leadership expectations they may not fully understand themselves. They’re trying to lead without ever being taught how.

So why TF when a manager is struggling, do most organizations treat it as an individual problem rather than asking the more important question: how exactly did we set this person up for success?

Because we’ve normalized this entire cycle, many employees assume that’s just what management looks like and end up perpetuating the same model once they’re promoted themselves.

The job within the job

Most jobs now come with a second, unofficial job nobody told you about.

The first job is the one listed in your job description (maybe, hopefully). The second job is managing everything surrounding the work. Managing personalities, expectations, office politics, leadership sensitivities, and the fact that one leader said one thing, another leader said something completely different, and now you’re expected to figure out which direction everyone is supposed to be heading.

You learn whose feedback matters, whose doesn’t, who wants the truth, and who will only tolerate the truth delivered in a very specific way. You carefully word emails so nobody misinterprets them. You spend time figuring out who needs to be informed before a decision gets made. You become fluent in diplomatic gymnastics.

I’ve watched incredibly talented people spend more energy navigating personalities than solving real business problems. I’ve watched teams spend weeks preparing presentations they knew would never change a decision. I’ve watched employees become so focused on avoiding conflict that important conversations never happened at all. Meanwhile, the necessary work sits patiently in the corner waiting for everyone’s feelings to calm down.

This part doesn’t show up in a job description. Nobody posts a role that says, “must be comfortable spending fifty percent of your week figuring out what people really mean.” These are the skills that have become essential in a lot of workplaces anyway. WTF culture at its core.

Most of the people I’ve come across in my career want some version of the same thing. They want to do good work, contribute, get their paycheck, and go home and live their real life. Instead, they’re spending a baffling amount of time trying to survive the ecosystem surrounding the work itself.

The promotion that never comes

Another highlight in WTF culture is getting stuck in promotion limbo.

You know the place. You’re doing good work. Your performance reviews are positive. Your workload has increased. You’ve taken on more responsibility. People keep telling you how valuable you are.

Naturally, you start wondering what comes next.

What doesn’t feel reasonable is how nonsensical these conversations start to become. One person I’m currently working with has been discussing the same promotion for the better part of a year. Every conversation ends with positive feedback and some version of “we see your contributions.” Every conversation also somehow ends without a decision. The promotion is dangled and always being discussed by someone else. The timeline is always moving. The answer is always coming later.

To be clear, not everyone deserves a promotion simply because they want one. Sometimes the role doesn’t exist, the timing isn’t right, or someone genuinely needs more development first. All valid. What I find difficult to understand is why we’ve become so uncomfortable just saying those things out loud. (Well if I go back to the manager section, there’s my answer.)

People can handle difficult information, even if it’s hard to accept. What people struggle more with is spending months trying to figure out whether they’re being developed, delayed, or simply managed. They’re left sitting in the unknown, not sure if they should keep waiting or start looking for somewhere that values what they bring.

This is how employees lose trust in their leadership. And it has nothing to do with the promotion itself.

Hi, I’m <insert company name here> and I’m about to blow up your entire life. NBD.

Some of the more egregious examples in WTF culture happen when organizations make decisions that fundamentally alter people’s lives and then communicate them as though they simply changed the brand of coffee in the break room.

One such example involves a company that announced a major relocation. Employees were told about a shiny new office, a new vision, and a new future. Many made enormous life decisions based on that information. They sold homes, left communities, pulled their children out of school. Some families had spouses who couldn’t relocate and had to make difficult career decisions of their own.

Then, just a short time later, the company decided it didn’t want to build that shiny new office after all. The future people had been promised vanished. The best part? Communication was handled by leaders who were not responsible for the change in plans.

Businesses change direction all that time. It happens. What gets me is how little accountability existed for the impact on the individual lives involved. People couldn’t undo the move. They couldn’t buy back the home they sold. Spouses couldn’t recover the opportunities they gave up. They couldn’t get back the time that disrupted their children’s lives.

This isn’t isolated either. In another case, employees relocated based on the office location listed in their offer letter, bought homes nearby, built routines around the commute, and just a few months later found out the company was moving the office far enough away to significantly impact a large percentage of the workforce. The worst part wasn’t the office move itself. It was the complete unwillingness to acknowledge what it meant for the people affected by it.

Is it really that hard to just say “we know this is a lot and here’s how we’re thinking about it”? Instead, we get silence. Or worse, a company-wide email with a subject line like “Exciting News.”

We’re better together. Until we’re not.

If WTF culture had a popularity contest, return-to-office would be hard to beat.

The reason this one stands out isn’t that people were asked to come back. Organizations have every right to decide how they want work done. What makes this situation so wild is the timeline.

We’re not talking about a temporary arrangement that lasted a few weeks. For many employees, Covid drove remote work that lasted years. People moved closer to family, bought homes, changed childcare, and built entirely new routines around a way of working that companies themselves spent years reinforcing. Productivity data backed it up. Flexibility was celebrated and, in many cases, promised to continue.

Then the narrative shifted from “thank you for making this work so well” to “this was never the way work was meant to be done.” Almost overnight.

I witnessed teams that voluntarily chose to spend time together in the office become very frustrated the moment attendance became mandated. To them, a mandate no longer represented flexibility.

And if I may say so, there’s a difference between flexibility and a schedule. If you’re telling people which days to come in, which hours to work, and then tracking whether they did or not, that’s not flexibility. That’s a schedule with better marketing.

Which brings me to my WTF honorable mention: badge swipe tracking.

Some employees now commute to an office, sit down at a desk, spend most of the day on Teams or Zoom calls, and have their physical presence measured as an indicator of engagement. And if you don’t swipe that badge, sir? On the naughty list you go.

Can you believe there are companies convening their HR teams and executives to analyze and discuss this? What a ridiculous use of everyone’s time and resources.

Many of these same organizations are simultaneously promoting sustainability initiatives and employee wellbeing programs while requiring employees to spend hours each week commuting to do work they could perform elsewhere.

And the people who truly have no choice but to be on site (nurses, teachers, retail workers, sanitation workers) end up absorbing even longer commutes as a result.

If someone is getting their work done, serving customers, and meeting expectations, at some point you have to ask what exactly we’re measuring. Productivity? Collaboration? Or just proximity? And somewhere in all of this, we also decided that clocking in meant forfeiting your right to be treated like an adult.

Maybe we should stop calling this normal

If you’ve made it this far and are currently replaying your own greatest hits of workplace WTF moments, you’re not alone. The examples here aren’t exhaustive. If they were, this would be a three-volume series and we’d all be here for another week.

They’re simply the ones that surface repeatedly in conversations with employees, managers, leaders, job seekers, friends, former colleagues, and occasionally complete strangers who somehow find themselves telling me the most unhinged workplace stories I’ve ever heard.

What gives me hope

I know there are organizations doing incredible things for their people. There are leaders creating healthy environments, managers having honest conversations, and companies making difficult decisions and communicating them with empathy and accountability. Those places exist, and in many ways they’re proof that the examples throughout this article aren’t inevitable. They’re choices.

Most of these situations are far more preventable than we’ve convinced ourselves they are.

What if we stopped accepting ghosting as part of the hiring process? What if managers were taught how to lead before being handed responsibility for other humans? What if organizations communicated difficult decisions honestly instead of wrapping them in corporate language and hoping nobody noticed?

I don’t have all the answers. What I do know is that we’ve become remarkably comfortable normalizing things that should make us wildly uncomfortable.

Maybe the first step isn’t fixing any of it. Maybe the first step is just acknowledging how absurd some of it has become.

The stories in this article may be absurd, but the people living them are very real. Sometimes you’re the employee trying to navigate a situation that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes you’re the manager trying to do right by your team. Sometimes you’re the leader genuinely trying to build something better and avoid creating these moments in the first place.

If you’re living in a WTF culture right now and need an objective sounding board, feel free to reach out. I may not be able to eliminate the absurdity entirely, but I can help you make a little more sense of it and start minimizing your own WTF moments.

For now, tell me: what’s the most unhinged WTF culture moment you’ve ever experienced?

If we haven’t met yet, hi, I’m Brandi. I spent 15+ years in HR leadership working to make sure the people on my watch didn’t have to live in WTF culture. Now I do that work for companies who care about their people and are ready to build a people strategy that actually supports their business.

If you’re a next-generation leader trying to navigate all of this, I work with managers one on one to help them lead with more confidence, less chaos, and a lot fewer WTF moments. Feel free to reach out.

And if you’re a millennial woman ready to stop figuring this out alone, the Millennial Manager Method™ was created for you. It’s a six-week live virtual program for managers who were never properly set up to lead and are ready to change that. The founding cohort kicks off July 14th and applications close July 2nd. Click here to learn more.

📧 brandi@theemployeeexperienceedit.com