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A newsletter about the state of the product job market recently went viral in the design corner of the internet. It’s exposing a widespread debate about whether the role of the designer is narrowing in the age of AI. On March 24, Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product developer and author of the business Substack Lenny’s Newsletter, published an article featuring exclusive data on the state of tech hiring in early 2026. The data was collected by TrueUp, a tech job marketplace tracker. Overall, it paints a positive picture for the tech job market. But for designers it points to a moment of hiring uncertainty. TrueUp found that design roles have plateaued since early 2023, and ever since then, demand for product managers (PMs), the professionals who help guide a product from ideation to completion, has risen. These findings have ignited a debate online about how AI might be fundamentally changing the organizational chart at tech companies—and whether it’s making designers obsolete. Everyone from tech CEOs to designers at AI companies and Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, are weighing in. Here’s what you need to know about the data and the larger debate. Inside the data: Design roles are hitting a plateau TrueUp’s data is collected by tracking job openings at “the majority of tech companies and top startups,” which includes more than 9,000 companies (not including consultancies or non-tech companies). According to Rachitsky, who has analyzed that data for the past four years, 2026’s outlook is, “surprisingly, the most optimistic” so far. To start, open PM jobs are at the highest levels they’ve reached since 2022: around 7,300 roles globally. Software engineer jobs are also trending up since a recent low in 2023, with 67,000 jobs available globally and 26,000 in the U.S. alone. “We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more,” Rachitsky’s newsletter reads. And “AI jobs,” which include open roles at AI-driven companies as well as AI-specific roles at non-AI companies, are skyrocketing. There are currently 36,686 open AI jobs, compared to sub-10,000 numbers in early 2023. Amidst this general upturn, design jobs are having a less optimistic moment. Unlike PM and engineering, Rachitsky’s analysis notes that open design jobs have been relatively flat since early 2023. At the time of the newsletter’s release, TrueUp found just 5,700 roles available globally. From a macro perspective, the ratio of demand for PMs versus designers has flipped: In mid-2023, open PM roles overtook open designer roles, and the disparity has been increasing ever since. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but it does feel AI-related,” Rachitsky writes in his newsletter. “Unlike PM and eng, which started growing in 2024 (two years post-ChatGPT), design didn’t. If I had to venture a theory, I’d say that because AI is allowing engineers to move so quickly, there’s less opportunity—and less desire—to involve the traditional design process.” How the design community is responding In the week following Rachitsky’s post on X, his analysis has been reposted hundreds of times and attracted an influx of discourse from the online community of designers, PMs, and engineers. Some responders see this industry data as a signal that AI is fundamentally changing designers’ workflows, and those who fail to adapt to the times are getting left behind. “Designers have designed themselves out of the equation because of design systems,” Roger Wong, head of design at BuildOps, commented under Rachitsky’s original post. “But, IMHO, the secret sauce has never been the UI. It was the workflows and looking across the experience holistically.” Claire Vo, founder of the AI copilot ChatPRD, added, “Often design teams & designers are the most resistant to change org in the EPD triad, with highly vocal AI opponents, and little skill or interest in the art of campaigning for influence or resources.” Most teams, she continued, treat design “like a tax they don’t want to pay.” “If a PM or engineer can get 85% there with tailwind and a dream, you better come to the table with more than ‘I represent the user,’” she concluded. Others believe that, in the long run, a greater reliance on AI tools will make human designers more important as tastemakers. “Design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment,” wrote Jordan Singer, CEO of the computing company Mainframe. “But the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest.” On March 30, Rachitsky followed up on his newsletter through an interview with Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen likened the current atmosphere to a three-way standoff among product engineers, designers, and coders: each side of the triad believes that AI has given them enough tools to subsume the roles of the other two. “What’s so interesting about this Mexican stand-off is that they’re all kind of correct,” Andreessen said. “AI is actually now a really good coder, a really good designer, and a really good product manager.” While the future of this stand-off remains murky, it seems clear that the industry is currently in the middle of an organizational flux. New AI tools are constantly blurring the lines between these three roles, creating new positions that blend elements of each. In the future, there will almost definitely still be need for human coding, designing, and product managing skills—but we may not define each of those jobs the same way. In a recent interview for the Fast Company podcast By Design, Anthropic’s chief design officer, Joel Lewenstein, summed up this shift: “I think there’s a lot of role collapse at the very beginning, but there are still pretty clear swim lanes as things get into the later stages of product development.” PMs are still the best at figuring out a product’s business case; engineers are still the best at deploying those products; and designers are still the best at tackling bigger human-computer interaction questions, he said. “It’s like a Venn diagram that’s coming closer together.” View the full article

Recent double-pledging scandals in auto lending and the U.K. put U.S. mortgage lenders on alert. Here's what to watch and how MERS, e-notes and electronic vaults can help. View the full article

With last weekend’s opening of World of Frozen in the renamed Disney Adventure World park, Paris became the new leader in advanced technology among the company’s theme parks. It’s a title that shifts hands frequently, but with its robotic Olaf and a new nighttime show that blends airborne and water drones with fountains, fire, and water walls, Adventure World is a technological marvel. Disney tends to downplay the focus on technology in its park attractions. Workers and executives at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) see the technology as a way to evoke emotion, their primary goal. And with a growing arsenal of tools at their disposal, from AI to powerful game engines (along with plenty of homegrown methods), all of the parks have a lot of ways to summon feelings from guests. Disneyland Paris has an additional advantage up its sleeve: It sits just a few hours from Disney’s R&D hub in Zurich, where much of the company’s robotics work is happening. That proximity helped shape the new Olaf. The project began with StellaLou, a theme-park-exclusive character popular in Asia, whose ballerina persona led the team to build a robot capable of a full pirouette. But Imagineers decided she wouldn’t resonate as broadly as Olaf, so they shifted the work onto a more widely recognized character and kept pushing the technology forward. Homecoming The Olaf robot shares the same distinctive walk and mannerisms as he does in the Frozen films. He’s the latest advance from the division that was the birthplace of the BDX droids that debuted two years ago (and now are appearing at most of the company’s parks) and the real-world Herbie robot inspired by Fantastic Four. He represents more than a shift from the audio animatronics the company is famous for. He’s also emblematic of a new type of thinking at Disney Imagineering. That shift starts at the top. Bruce Vaughn was named president and chief creative officer of Walt Disney Imagineering three years ago. Before that, he spent 22 years as an Imagineer, taking a seven-year break between stints with the company to explore the entrepreneurial world. Once he was lured back to Disney, he says, he brought the startup culture with him. “We’ve actually culturally shifted Imagineering by . . . celebrating anybody who finds opportunities and creates opportunities,” he tells Fast Company. “Just because we’ve spent 74 years . . . doing things one way, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way, especially given [the] new tools.” And make no mistake, Disney is leaning into those tools heavily. AI and Imagineering AI critics might cringe at the thought of the technology being incorporated into the very heart of Disney’s experiential creativity unit. Vaughn says it has served as a tremendous asset for his team, but only as a supplement to the team’s inherent creativity. “We did a side-by-side test internally to see if AI could generate anything that we would build,” he says. “It sparked ideas. Then, when we went one step further and we put it in the hands of someone who can actually sketch and draw, they at first were like, ‘I don’t know if this would be useful.’ Very quickly, they were like, ‘Oh my god, what I can do now in days used to take me months.’” The tech industry is currently facing supply chain issues with RAM and tremendous demand for GPU chips, which is threatening to slow the progress of some AI companies. Vaughn, though, says Disney’s unique position in the entertainment and technology worlds minimizes those industry headaches. “We have a very tight relationship with Jensen [Huang, CEO of Nvidia], quite frankly,” Vaughn says. “I think it’s partly because of the competitive advantage that we have at Disney and Imagineering.” Reinforcement Learning For Olaf and other robotics, AI has been especially useful. To ensure Olaf doesn’t fall flat on his snowy face while ambling around, Imagineers relied on reinforcement learning, an AI-driven tool that lets robotic units make optimal decisions through trial and error. It’s a way for AI to learn without having to constantly tweak programming—and without it, Disney’s robotics unit wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is now. Over the long term, says Kyle Laughlin, SVP of Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, the advances you’re seeing with robotics will be incorporated into newer animatronics on rides. “Our robotic characters and our animatronic characters are going to begin to merge,” he says. Most animatronics are bolted to the ground, but there’s a growing interest at Disney in expanding their range of motion. For example, an animatronic of founder Walt Disney unveiled at Disneyland in California last year takes a few steps onstage in his show. And there are plenty of Star Wars droids that would be hard to re-create in a character costume. The future of Olaf Olaf, for now, appears only at World of Frozen in Paris and Hong Kong. And visitors might be upset to learn that at present, they’ll primarily see him at a show in the lagoon of both parks. Kids who want to give him a warm hug won’t get the opportunity. That’s not expected to be permanent, though. “He’s so popular that we have to ensure, both from a security perspective as well as an operational one, that we can ease him into the park,” Laughlin says. “You’ll absolutely see him roaming the park in the future.” Will there be meet and greets with Olaf? “Yes. I mean, absolutely yes,” he says. “The North Star goal that we have is to be able to have that huggable moment.” Olaf won’t remain geographically inconvenient for Americans, either. Just as it did with its BDX droids, which started at one park and spread, Imagineering plans to roll out Olaf robots to parks and cruise ships globally, though there’s no timeline for that just yet. “He’s one of our most popular characters, so domestically you’ll also see him as well,” says Laughlin. “That’s really kind of the important point: We really are building these now for operations, and to ensure that they’re everywhere.” Expect more robots as well. A Lion King area is currently under construction at Disney Adventure World—and putting people in a lion costume could be underwhelming. Laughlin also mused about the possibility of a robotic Sven, Kristof’s reindeer companion in Frozen. From their early days in the Tiki Room and the Carousel of Progress, robotics have been a critical part of Disney’s competitive advantage in the theme park space. With the rollout of these new robotic characters, the company is looking to stay at the head of the pack. “All of our innovation [follows] a planned, critical path where it goes into the product,” Vaughn says. “It isn’t just, ‘Hey, we’re an experiment. Maybe we’ll end up doing something.’ We literally commit to an early idea. And since we can move much more quickly now, based on our relationships with companies like Nvidia and Unreal Engine, we can move an order of magnitude faster.” View the full article

Last year, PepsiCo started printing real potatoes onto every bag of Lay’s. The reason? In a world where people are increasingly concerned about the provenance of their food, 42% of the population didn’t realize that the world’s most popular potato chip was made from potatoes. So they put a potato on the packaging. And now, the company is updating Tostitos bags—the most popular plain tortilla chip in the world—with a similar strategy. While Lay’s got a dose of potatoes, naturally, all Tostitos bags feature corn. “We started by being really honest with ourselves. The research was telling us that the old packaging wasn’t working—it was actually reinforcing a lot of the wrong perceptions,” writes Hernán Tantardini, CMO of PepsiCo Foods, over email. “People saw Tostitos as a party brand. The quality and craft story wasn’t coming through at all.” Technically speaking, Tostitos are classified as an ultra processed food, due to their use of refined seed oils. But they still feature a stupid simple and clear ingredient list: Corn, oil, and salt. 71% of consumers are reading labels more closely than before, and the front of the bag is a gateway to the back. The bags used to read “no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives” right up top. Now they promise “Masa made in the traditional way,” with these other notes sidelined. The result is repositioning Tostitos as a more authentic and culturally-born product, anchoring Tostitos in the old way of doing things—which aside from signaling quality and cachet, tends to be more natural. As for the actual corn, that’s presented in an entirely different way than Lay’s. For Lay’s, PepsiCo photographed countless real potatoes in different presentations. For Tostitos, it opted for illustration—to tie it back to that idea of masa production, a complex process known as nixtamalization in which corn is treated with lime to make it more digestible and nutritious for consumption in tortillas, sopes, and other Mexican delicacies. “We looked at photography, but the more we explored it, the more it felt like it belonged to a different brand,” says Tantardini. “Tostitos has this warmth to it—this sense of joy and togetherness that’s been a part of its DNA forever. Photography felt too polished, too literal. It would’ve flattened something that’s actually quite live.” The illustration has an imperfect, hand painted feel—and your eye reads a human touch beneath the perfectly machined Tostitos wordmark. I find myself wishing that PepsiCo went even further, and embraced xilografía (the woodblock printing out of Mexico) with elements like the window frame or even subheading labels. But the two tone kernels and cobs of corn on Scoops and Street Corn varieties really are quite pretty for a mass market snack chip. While many of the colors are technically the same on the old and new packages, the chosen hues are softer and intentionally read warmer, with a basis in earth tones, according to the company. That said, Tostitos doesn’t read like some half-apologetic Trader Joe’s snack brand, unsure if it’s there to party or to apologize for the indulgence. The bags still read like a celebration. In a final, playful twist, the front window—which reveals the actual chips through the bag—now dips itself right into a large bowl of salsa or guacamole sitting below. (The old version featured photorealistic jarred Tostitos salsa on the side, like an overzealous advertisement.) This entire approach to craft could help Tostitos—which has ceded a few percentage points in sales volume since raising prices in 2022/23—compete with smaller batch brands that have cut ever so slightly into its market share. PepsiCo did validate the approach in test stores, while consumers will see the new rollout over the coming months. “From a business perspective, this is really about changing perception where it matters most,” says Tantardini. “If we can use packaging to clearly signal craft, quality, and care, we can rebuild confidence in the brand and lower the barrier for people who’ve drifted away because they didn’t realize the craft and care that goes into our chips and dips. That’s the opportunity. And that’s what we designed for.” View the full article

“And a cascade of lace here, here, and here.” I thwacked my pen against the notepad to emphasize each word while my cousin nodded vigorously. At 8 and 10, we carefully reviewed our wedding dress designs as if our big days were just moments away. While our parents prepped dinner, we rehearsed our grand bridal entry in painstaking detail. I’m probably not the only person who had this fantasy when I was little, but what I didn’t realize was just how that role-play would translate into the career that I have right now. It all started with my own elopement in 2021, and the subsequent blow-out bash a year later. My husband and I juggled countless chaotic spreadsheets, email chains, invoices, journals, and Post-its. I felt overwhelmed by the lack of tools to orchestrate this complex logistical feat, and I realized that I could make a living by fixing this chaos. My unconventional career path What I loved about weddings were the systems and the operational aspect. But in addition to planning a wedding, it took me a few jobs to understand that. The summer after I graduated from college, I worked as a tutor for middle and high school kids while I looked for a full-time job. Just days in, it became clear that the tutoring company was in full operational shambles. I started mapping out a plan to transition the company to electronic records, using homework assignments and practice flashcards. My next job was at a boutique marketing firm. A few months on the job, I realized it was on the scrappier end of the spectrum than I initially expected. Soon, the quirky operational novelties I had loved at first were starting to make me itch. I started to scheme to make things more efficient again. My next role allowed my skills to find a true home. I was leading a team of operations specialists at the unicorn startup, Carta. This experience would end up being crucial to my wedding planning business that I’d later start. Doing my best work in chaos The refrain that continued in my mind over the many months of wedding planning was, ‘Why is this so hard?’ When about 2.5 million people get married in the United States every year, it felt like I (and every engaged person I knew) had to reinvent the wheel while undergoing a deeply frustrating and time-consuming exercise. And as my husband and I lived through the organizational chaos of our wedding planning journey, I began to think to myself, ‘someone should really fix this problem. Someone who is obsessed with the details, thinks like an operator and a consumer, and someone who loves bringing clarity to chaos.’ That was the moment I began to connect the dots together. Without any context, someone can look at my professional history and feel disconnected. But at that moment, I’d realized that all my personal and professional experiences up to this point had led me to this challenge, and that I was ready to meet it head-on. Your interests can provide career clues Before I knew what careers existed, the common threads of how I thought and how I solved problems were there right in front of me. I took the concept of loving systems and organization as a personal interest rather than a professional secret weapon. At times, I interpreted my drive to improve operational circumstances as a distraction to the job at hand. There were also instances where it felt like an inconvenience to my managers (who weren’t always receptive to it). My previous roles didn’t grant me authority or purview over the messy systems or inefficient processes, but I couldn’t stop engaging with it. I didn’t realize how unique my perspective was. Identifying inefficiency came naturally and easily to me, so I naturally assumed that it was the same for other people. Why it’s important to pay attention to what you think When deciding how to approach the professional world, people ask us, ‘What are you passionate about?’ or ‘What do you want to be?’ We build resumes and write cover letters, highlighting the projects we led and the metrics we moved. But in the process, we overlook what feels natural. We’ve placed ourselves in organizations and teams and roles, but never stopped to ask ourselves the critical question: How do I think? What challenges are my brain hard-wired to solve? What is the recurring thread in my life that I haven’t paused long enough to see? The throughline is usually there. We just don’t think to look for it. I close my crisp notebook with a satisfying snap. I’ve just finished explaining to my cousin that the processional music must begin exactly as Mr. Bear arrives at the steps, so that it will reach the perfect crescendo as he reaches the altar. The chairs are straight. The timing is perfect. The experience unfolds exactly as planned. In hindsight, I wasn’t pretending to be a bride. I was designing flow, sequencing emotion, and building structure around what is supposed to be a joyful and effortless moment. Long before I had the language for systems, operations, or user experience, I was already drawn to the architecture beneath the celebration. Maybe you had your version of playing wedding as a child, and it looks completely different from mine. Look closely and think about what it is about that scenario that interests you. Because if you look closely, you might just have been rehearsing what you’re meant to do all along. View the full article

“Houston, we have a problem.” The misquoted phrase is so ingrained in popular culture that it has become the standard comeback to any unexpected mishap. It’s also the last phrase NASA’s Artemis II mission control wants to hear in the coming days because, unlike those of us on Earthly terrain, an astronaut midway to the moon won’t be muttering it after they accidentally burn their toast. A four-person crew took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1 for NASA’s first lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. The organization has done everything it can to ensure the safety of the astronauts, knowing that any harm to the courageous humans could set its lunar program back many years, or cancel it altogether. One part of its insurance policy is a new space suit that’s designed to sustain the Artemis II crew for six days—enough time to go to the moon and back—in case there’s a catastrophic event in their Orion spacecraft. Jeremy HansenChristina KochVictor GloverReid Wiseman A lifeboat in a space suit When Jack Swigert, command module pilot of Apollo 13, radioed “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” on April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank explosion had just severely damaged the spacecraft just 56 hours into its journey to the moon. The astronauts on board couldn’t simply pull a U-turn 200,000 miles away from Earth. And since they didn’t have enough oxygen, Swigert, along with commander Jim Lovell and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, abandoned their crippled spaceship and hunkered down inside the lunar lander, using it as a makeshift lifeboat for the harrowing trip home. But the Artemis II mission—a roughly 10-day loop around the moon—flies without a lunar lander. If the Orion capsule’s hull breaches for any reason and vents its breathable air into the void, the crew has nowhere else to go. NASA’s answer was to build a lifeboat of sorts directly into their suits. For this return to the moon, the space agency assumed such a leak could happen and they needed a last line of defense to keep the crew alive in a vacuum for a week. The suit gives astronauts a 144-hour survival window, the exact time required to abort a translunar flight, whip around the dark side, and coast back home. How it’s made The aptly named Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) serves as this wearable sanctuary. According to the agency’s Crew Systems branch, “the suits can keep astronauts alive for up to six days if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during its journey, with interfaces that supply air and remove carbon dioxide.” Dustin Gohmert Dustin Gohmert, a mechanical engineer who worked on Space Shuttle garments before taking over the OCSS program at the Johnson Space Center, notes that the gear operates as an independent vehicle. “They become your own personal-sized spacecraft that can last up to six days,” he told CBS News. Victor Glover A NASA lab tour details the concept: “In effect, the space suit is a body-shaped balloon that holds your personal atmosphere,” strictly for use inside the ship. The suit plugs directly into the Orion capsule’s Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) via a thick umbilical cord. This artificial artery keeps the astronaut from overheating by pumping chilled water through an undergarment. Simultaneously, the capsule acts as a mechanical lung that regulates humidity, scrubs out deadly carbon dioxide, and forces a breathable nitrogen and oxygen mix into the helmet. Christina Koch Astronauts eat and take medicine inside the sealed balloon using a pass-through port built into their rigid helmet dome. They snap pouches of liquid food and water right into this valve. If someone falls ill during the six-day ordeal, the ship’s medical kit includes a specific tool that shoves pills through the same helmet port without venting the suit’s precious pressure. Each suit is meticulously tailored to the individual wearer and paired with custom-molded, shock-absorbing seats for launch and reentry. The suit also features a pleated fabric design hidden in the shoulders that unfolds when pressurized, giving the arms enough clearance to move. The gloves are spun from rugged materials that interact flawlessly with Orion’s digital touchscreens, while internal microphones and speakers are embedded directly into the helmet so the crew can communicate. To prevent snagging in the tight cabin, the communication wires run down a protected channel on the right leg. Floating in zero gravity inside a cramped cockpit means a loose cord can easily snag a critical flight switch and trigger a disaster. To prevent this, designers built an asymmetrical storage system directly into the fabric instead of using cargo pockets. The right thigh features a custom compartment that swallows the temperature-control dial and the thick tubes pumping ice water to the undergarment, locking them flush against the astronaut’s leg. Meanwhile, hidden channels route the electronic brain that controls the suit and the plumbing for human waste safely out of the way. What if the ship dies? There is only one problem with the suits, and there’s no way around fixing this one: They depend on the spaceship’s ECLSS. If the life support system fails, the astronauts will not survive no matter how well-designed their space suits are. To avoid that extreme scenario, the Orion capsule prevents a catastrophic ECLSS failure by implementing overlapping safety nets. Lockheed Martin—the designers and manufacturers of the ship—created a life support architecture with duplicate secondary pumps and backup valves that automatically kick in if the primary hardware chokes. The ship’s digital brains also have redundancies: Four identical flight computers run the show simultaneously. If a software glitch wipes out all four, a completely isolated fifth computer (running entirely different code) takes the wheel. If every single spacecraft system fails and the umbilical stops flowing, the astronaut relies on something called the bailout bottle. This suit-integrated emergency oxygen tank holds a tiny amount of breathable air—just enough to do one last Hail Mary operation, like switching to a different ECLSS oxygen line or getting out of the capsule after crashing into the ocean. During an emergency ocean splashdown, the OCSS transforms into a heavy-duty maritime survival rig. It inherits its blazing pumpkin-orange hue from the old Space Shuttle Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES)—a color specifically chosen so pilots in rescue helicopters can easily spot a human bobbing in the open water. But where the old ACES gear only provided roughly 10 minutes of bailout air for low-Earth orbit emergencies, the OCSS packs an automatically inflating personal flotation device right into the architecture. Tethered to this life preserver is a meticulously packed emergency kit containing a personal locator beacon to ping rescue forces; a specialized rescue knife; and a comprehensive signaling stash equipped with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and chemical light sticks. But if the ECLSS collapses on the journey around the moon . . . that’s the end of the line for the crew. Which is why, when we’re reading or watching a report on how Artemis II is going, we need to pay close attention and think about the very real risks these four heroes are assuming, from the moment they strap themselves to a flying bomb full of 5.75 million pounds of explosive fuel all the way to the moment they blaze through the atmosphere and splash into the Pacific Ocean. View the full article

While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: “Why has it taken so long to return to the moon?” After all, NASA had the know-how and technology to send humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years ago as part of the Apollo program. And, as another tour guest reminded us, computers today can do so much more than they could back then, as evidenced by the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets. Shouldn’t it be easier to get to the moon than ever before? The truth is that sending humans into space safely continues to be difficult, especially as missions increase in complexity. New technologies require years of study, development, and testing before they can be certified for flight. And even then, systems and materials can behave in ways that surprise and worry engineers and mission planners; look no further than Boeing’s Starliner CFT mission or the performance of the Orion heat shield on Artemis I. Issues with Starliner’s thrusters led NASA to return the spacecraft from the International Space Station without its crew. Unanticipated chipping of the Orion heat shield resulted in years of research, culminating in NASA altering the atmospheric reentry plans for the Artemis II mission. NASA’s programs also require sustained political will and financial support across multiple presidential administrations, Congresses, and fiscal years. As a historian of human spaceflight, I have studied the space agency’s efforts to engage the broader public to convince American taxpayers that their programs hold value for the nation. NASA just launched its first crewed flight to the moon since the Apollo era: Artemis II. A crew of four will conduct a lunar flyby, laying the groundwork, the agency hopes, for a landing on the Artemis IV mission. The story of NASA’s effort to return humans to the moon is long and winding, demonstrating the complexities of turning grand ambitions into real missions. Post-Apollo In early 1970, with two successful moon landings on the books, President Richard Nixon sought to reduce NASA’s budget to better align with his administration’s priorities. This decision put the space agency in a difficult position, which ultimately led to the cancellation of three planned Apollo missions to conserve funding for its plans for long-term human activity in low-Earth orbit. NASA repurposed the third stage of a Saturn V rocket to create the first U.S. space station, Skylab, which operated from 1973 to 1974. The space agency used leftover Saturn IB rockets and Apollo command and service modules to send crews to the station. Over the next three decades, NASA developed and operated the space shuttle. The fleet of space shuttle orbiters supported satellite deployment and microgravity research on orbital missions of up to 17 days. This work was meant to enable future long-duration human missions and provide benefits to people on Earth. For example, data from protein crystal growth experiments have informed the development of medicines. The space shuttle program facilitated the construction, maintenance, and staffing of a continuously inhabited research platform in orbit, the International Space Station. The first modules launched in late 1998. Where to next? As the new millennium approached, the Clinton administration tasked NASA to think beyond the space station. What could robots and humans do next in space? And where could they do it? Notably, the White House expressed an interest in locations beyond low-Earth orbit. NASA, it turned out, was well-positioned to meet the administration’s request. Daniel Goldin, NASA administrator, was already thinking about preparing proposals for the next presidential administration and had recently sponsored a human lunar return study. In 1999, he established a team to investigate new technologies, missions and destinations for the 21st century. This work took on new significance following the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia crew in February 2003. Many people, including those in the new George W. Bush White House, wondered whether the human spaceflight program should continue—and if so, how. Administration discussions culminated in Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004, which directed NASA to retire the space shuttle after the completion of the space station. It called for returning humans to the moon on a crew exploration vehicle designed for destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. It also called for continuing robotic exploration of Mars and engaging companies and international partners in space. Fifteen years earlier, President George H. W. Bush had also announced a moon and Mars exploration program, but congressional concerns about cost kept space travelers close to home. The Constellation program’s legacy In December 2004, NASA began the process of finding a manufacturer for the crew exploration vehicle. By August 2006, the space agency awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to build the capsule, which it had named Orion—the same Orion planned to carry Artemis astronauts to the moon. Years of research, development, and testing followed for Orion as well as the Ares I crew and Ares V cargo launch vehicles. Together, these technologies made up the Constellation program. Constellation had two primary objectives: in the near term, to help transport crew to and from the space station after the space shuttle program ended; in the long term, to enable human lunar exploration. Building systems that could work in both Earth orbit and around the moon was supposed to save the time and cost of developing two vehicles. Similarly, adapting space shuttle program hardware could supposedly cut costs. During the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009, the administration initiated an independent review of NASA’s human spaceflight plans. The Augustine Committee, chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, found that the agency’s ambitions outstripped its limited budget, leading to significant delays. The first Orion spacecraft was likely to arrive after the space station ceased operations. The committee proposed several paths forward at the current funding level, which prioritized space shuttle and space station programs. An additional annual investment of $3 billion would allow for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. Ultimately, the Obama administration canceled Constellation, but two of its technologies lived on, thanks to U.S. senators from states that would have been affected by cuts. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 funded Orion’s continued development, shifting responsibility for space station crew transportation to commercial vehicles. It also directed NASA to develop the space launch system, a redesigned Ares V heavy booster, to send Orion to the moon. The technical strategy had political benefits, too, preserving jobs in numerous congressional districts by providing continuity for aerospace contractors. In December 2014, a Delta IV heavy rocket launched the first Orion capsule on a test flight, providing engineers with data on spacecraft systems and the heat shield. By October 2015, the space launch system had completed a critical design review, the last step before manufacturing could begin. Introducing Artemis In December 2017, the new The President administration issued a policy directive shifting the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight program back to the moon. The space agency would use Orion and the space launch system in a race to meet an ambitious 2024 landing date. NASA officially named the program Artemis in May 2019. The 25-day Artemis I mission, launched in November 2022, was a major milestone for the program. This uncrewed flight was the first flight of the space launch system and the first to integrate SLS and Orion. It laid the groundwork for Artemis II, the first crewed flight of the SLS. Over more than 50 years, each new presidential administration has reassessed the place of spaceflight among its priorities, either encouraging or curtailing NASA’s efforts to return humans to the lunar surface. Each crewed flight requires the alignment of technical expertise, political will, and financial support over years if not decades. For the space fans who watched the Artemis II launch, the wait for countdown may have felt long. But was just a blink in NASA’s long journey back to the moon. Emily A. Margolis is a curator of contemporary spaceflight at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

I’ve been using Claude Cowork extensively over the past month and a half. And not coincidentally, I’ve been more productive than I ever have in that same period. The shift to working agentically is something so profound, you really can’t understand it until you experience it for yourself. Just one example: As the operator of a business selling AI training courses online, email marketing is an important component of getting the word out about them. But much of the work is rote: segmenting my email list, creating templates, writing largely similar drafts, and scheduling them in my email provider—a piece of software I look forward to using about as much as a visit to the dentist. Now I hardly ever touch that software; Claude Cowork does it for me. When you have access to agents, you can loop them in on any computer task with three beautiful words: “You do it.” Now AI doesn’t just draft emails for me—it puts them in the campaign builder, targets the right audience, gets all the settings right, and then taps me on the shoulder (via a notification) so I can approve the work before it schedules the emails to go out. Once you start working with agents, you quickly start crossing things off your to-do list faster than ever before. From doing to directing This is not just faster work. It is different work. It shifts the focus from slogging through individual tasks to focusing on outcomes, assigning the actual execution to an army of digital workers, then reviewing what they’ve done. You essentially become the CEO of your job. So what happens to a newsroom when everyone starts working agentically? Over the past 30 years, reporters and editors have needed to become skilled at many different systems: project-management software for tracking stories, content management systems for publishing them, SEO plug-ins, social media management platforms—the list goes on. Working alongside agents, journalists can theoretically assign agents to deal with all of that while they go and do the important, human-centered work of reporting and editing. Where this gets uncomfortable is when this paradigm is applied to the writing itself. This came to a head recently with the uproar over what The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s primary newspaper, is doing: leveraging an AI writing agent so reporters can simply feed notes and context to create stories. To be clear, all the stories are then edited, and the reporter has final say over the copy. But applying agents this way brings up hard questions about jobs, skill-building, and career paths. But even putting aside that specific use case, it seems inevitable that agents will eventually take on much of the production and distribution work around content and storytelling. Whether it’s social media management, SEO (and GEO), or getting all the little drop-down menus, boxes, and tag fields in your CMS just right—those are all jobs for agents. More importantly, roles that are centered around optimizing those tasks will gradually go away. If you think about it, that inherently devalues certain kinds of content. When search and social platforms drove audiences, newsrooms set up workflows around those patterns. Many roles emerged that were simply writing to a trend, publishing undifferentiated “quick hits” around trending topics to maximize clicks. Those roles were effectively hyper-optimizing production of formulaic stories, writing for algorithms and chasing virality through pattern recognition. That has very little value in a world where a robot can do all of that much faster than a human ever could. And this is the mechanism by which AI can actually be healthy for journalism, something I predicted in my first column. Agents are a crucible for knowledge work, burning away anything and everything that can be automated, leaving only the parts of the job that can’t be easily repeated—the work that requires either creating new information or judgment, context, and taste. The new shape of the newsroom If you were building an AI-first newsroom today with this idea at its core, virtually all roles would be centered on the parts of the job that are exclusively human: building trust with sources through access and relationships, doing original reporting and finding information that’s exclusive to your brand, determining what stories matter most to your audiences and what angles to take, and applying the art of storytelling to all of it. While that sounds idyllic in some ways, the reality is that with agents handling most of the execution, there will probably be less work to go around. In almost all cases, organizations will be smaller, with different career paths, even if the work is richer. A constraint, for now, is access. Tools like Claude Cowork and Claude Code become truly powerful only when they can move beyond drafting and into systems (email, CMS, analytics, internal documents). That is where most organizations get uneasy. Granting an agent permission to act inside those environments raises questions about security and accountability. Most teams are still feeling their way through this, limiting agents to narrow tasks or read-only access. But that tension is temporary. As guardrails improve and familiarity grows, those permissions will expand, and with them, the scope of what agents can do. Once that happens, journalism does not lose its purpose. It comes into sharper focus. An AI-first newsroom doesn’t mean a less human one. In fact, it means the opposite. When the repeatable work is handled by machines, what remains is the work that defines the craft: earning trust, finding new information, and making sense of it for an audience. The uncomfortable part is that there may be fewer people doing that work. The hopeful part is that the work itself becomes more meaningful. View the full article

Decision is boost for Big Four firm seeking to repair reputation after series of scandalsView the full article

For nearly four years now, the conversation about generative AI has revolved almost exclusively around productivity, threatened jobs, automatable tasks, efficiency, and competitiveness. But there is a largely underestimated dimension to this revolution: its cultural effects. AI is not just transforming how we work; it is transforming how we are together, how we trust each other, how we communicate, and how we organize ourselves. To measure this, it helps to borrow a framework from Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD whose book The Culture Map identifies eight dimensions along which the cultures of the world differ. Applied to artificial intelligence, Meyer’s eight dimensions reveal a series of cultural shifts that are more profound than we know. 1. How We Communicate: AI Is Training Us to Say What We Mean Generative AI demands clarity. An effective prompt is an explicit one. There’s no room for body language. This constraint is gradually reshaping how we communicate with each other, too. Cultures that have traditionally relied on what is left unsaid—where reading between the lines or sensing the mood in the room is a valued skill—are being pushed toward greater explicitness. As AI mediates more exchanges, the richness of implicit communication erodes. And there is the curious rehabilitation of the typo. For decades, a spelling mistake in a professional message was a sign of carelessness, even disrespect. Not anymore. A typo is increasingly read as proof that you wrote it yourself—that you took the time, that you cared enough to type it out without outsourcing the task. Imperfection has become a signal of authenticity. 2. How We Give Feedback: AI as a Cultural Mediator and Sugar-Coater Large language models are not built to be brutal. They begin by finding something to praise, soften their critiques, and close on a constructive note. After thousands of interactions with tools that say “great question” before correcting your mistake, even cultures accustomed to blunt, direct feedback begin absorbing a more diplomatic register. But AI also has a more positive effect on collective evaluation: It excels at finding the common denominator. In a multicultural team where some members practice direct feedback and others avoid confrontation entirely, AI can serve as a neutral translator—reformulating, synthesizing, and smoothing out cultural friction. 3. How We Persuade: It’s No Longer About the Argument. It’s About the Person Making It AI produces inductive responses: examples, bullet points, concrete cases. This results-first logic is gradually permeating cultures that traditionally valued deductive reasoning, like in France, for example, where the art of the dissertation (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) was a deep cultural marker. Presentations are getting shorter and more pragmatic. But the real shift goes beyond a simple victory of American-style storytelling over European-style argumentation. What is actually happening is that human embodiment is becoming the primary source of persuasion. When anyone can produce a well-structured argument in 10 seconds, formal argumentative quality stops being differentiating. What convinces people is presence, authenticity, and the personal commitment of the person speaking. 4. How We Lead: From the Lone Expert to the Collective Orchestrator The flattening of knowledge access generated by AI undermines leadership models built on the hoarding of expertise. The manager whose authority derived from mastery of a technical domain sees that competitive advantage eroding. Also, as AI becomes more pervasive, the very source of leadership becomes structurally more collective. AI models are trained on aggregated human work. They are, in a sense, the distillation of millions of anonymous contributions. To use AI is to mobilize a collective intelligence that no single person authored. This should dismantle the myth of the lone brilliant leader. Hence, the leadership of tomorrow may be more about collective discernment and knowing what to do with the output. 5. How We Decide: When the Algorithm Recommends, Do We Still Really Choose? AI compresses decision-making time. In seconds, it produces an analysis, a comparison, a recommendation. And increasingly, we rely on algorithmic recommendations, like HR scoring systems, sales prioritization tools, and project management assistants. Many decisions are made on our behalf. Often, we endorse them without examining them. In cultures that value collective consensus-building before any decision is made, this delegation can feel like a welcome relief. In cultures where strong unilateral decision-making is a mark of leadership, it produces a strange dispossession: The decisive executive finds himself rubber-stamping a recommendation he did not construct. Are we actually still deciding? 6. How We Trust: When All Outputs Look the Same, Relationships Become Everything Here is perhaps the most paradoxical reversal. One might have expected AI to strengthen trust based on the quality of work, since now anyone can produce polished, well-structured deliverables. Instead, the opposite is happening. When all outputs look alike, they lose their power to distinguish. Cognitive trust erodes precisely because AI has made it commonplace. What becomes valuable is the affective, the personal relationship, the two-hour lunch, the intimate conversation. Receiving a proposal that is manifestly generated without human effort sends a signal: You were not worth my real attention. As AI takes over routine interactions, what remains—genuine attention, real presence—acquires extraordinary value. We all crave sincere human contact. The affective dimension of trust is likely to become more precious than ever. 7. How We Disagree: The Risk of a World Where Everyone Agrees AI models avoid confrontation by design. They don’t flatly contradict. They “offer a complementary perspective.” They “acknowledge the nuance.” This algorithmically engineered softness, repeated at a massive scale, may be reshaping the norms of disagreement. In cultures already inclined to avoid open conflict, AI reinforces the tendency to sidestep. In cultures where direct disagreement is seen as healthy and productive, AI introduces a veneer of diplomatic language that can mask real tensions. The danger is organizations where everyone appears to agree—the humans out of politeness, the AIs out of design—and where real problems never surface. A world of frictionless AI-mediated communication will do away with the friction that makes organizations resilient. 8. How We Relate to Time: When a Two-Hour Response Feels Slow AI responds in seconds. That standard of immediacy, internalized across thousands of interactions, is reshaping our tolerance for human response time. A colleague who takes two hours to reply to an email now seems sluggish. A meeting that “takes time” to build consensus feels inefficient. The AI’s instantaneousness has become the invisible benchmark against which all human pace is judged. Cultures that already organize work sequentially and value strict scheduling are accelerating further. Cultures with a more fluid, relational relationship to time—where adaptability matters more than the clock—face growing pressure to conform to responsiveness standards that are foreign to them. The AI has, in effect, exported one particular cultural relationship to time and made it feel universal. The Overlooked Dimension: Gender and the Digital Matilda Effect The numbers are striking. Women are between 20% and 25% less likely than men to use generative AI tools, according to a Harvard Business School meta-analysis. Women are hesitating because they are calculating the risk of being seen using AI. A study found that when engineers submitted identical AI-assisted code for review, women received competence ratings 13% lower; men, only 6% lower. It’s a sort of digital Matilda effect. The historical Matilda effect is the phenomenon by which women’s intellectual contributions are attributed to their male colleagues. When a woman uses AI, observers tend to assume the tool did the thinking. When a man uses the same tool, he is credited with the strategic intelligence to deploy it well. Women who have spent careers navigating this double standard know how to read the room correctly. In thinking with machines, we are changing our codes, our expectations, our relationships, and our hierarchies. Perhaps it’s still too early to fully comprehend the cultural revolution induced by generative AI. But somewhere between the typos we now leave on purpose and the feedback we no longer dare to give, a deeper transformation is already underway—and we have barely begun to notice it. View the full article

The constant race on the work treadmill doesn’t just steal your time. It systematically decays every relationship you have. During a recent keynote, I asked leaders in the room a simple question: “How many of you have cancelled plans with someone you care about, family, friends, a partner, because something came up at work?” Nearly every hand went up. Then I asked: “How many of you have done it more than once this month?” Most hands stayed up. There were a few nervous laughs. Recognition ripples through the room. These aren’t disengaged leaders. They’re high performers who genuinely believe they’ll make it up later. They won’t. And here’s what most don’t realize: the same pattern playing out at home is playing out at work too. The same leader who cancels on their partner because “something came up” is also skipping the coffee with a new peer, postponing the visit to a colleague’s office, replacing a real conversation with another email. The difference? At home, the people and relationships you’re neglecting will eventually let you know. At work, your colleagues will simply stop collaborating. And by the time you notice, the damage is done. We tell ourselves busyness is the price of high performance. But what if it’s actually undermining it? New structures don’t fix relationship gaps We’ve all seen the pattern. A new organizational structure is announced. New leadership is brought in. New software is implemented. New office layouts are unveiled. And yet, months later, the same dysfunction persists, because the humans tasked with making it all work were overlooked. It’s the corporate equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The structure looks different, but the relationships driving (or undermining) performance haven’t changed at all. A recent Bain & Company article puts a number on this disconnect: 88% of senior leaders believe their new organizational structure will deliver results. Only 36% of the people actually working in that structure agree. Bain recommends clarifying workflows, decision rights, and communication, all sensible steps. But they stop short of the deeper issue. No structure delivers results if the people in it haven’t invested in actually knowing one another, beyond the job title, beyond the deliverable, enough to build the trust that allows candor, creativity, and real collaboration to take root. Effective workplace relationships are the WD-40 and duct tape of organizational health. They keep things moving and reduce friction on the good days, and hold everything together in the tough ones. And the single biggest barrier to cultivating winning relationships isn’t poor design or lack of training. It’s constant busyness. When leaders operate in permanent hustle mode, back-to-back meetings, no margin, always proving their value through output, something subtle but corrosive happens to every relationship around them. Interactions become purely transactional. Conversations narrow to deliverables. Colleagues become means to an end. In my book Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships, I describe four relationship dynamics at play in every workplace: Ally, Supporter, Rival, and Adversary. What distinguishes them isn’t personality or chemistry, it’s conditionality: the willingness to do something without strings attached An Ally says: “I do this.” No conditions attached. It’s an unconditional investment in mutual success. A Supporter says: “I’ll do this when you do that.” A Rival says: “I’ll do this because you did that.” An Adversary says: “I’ll do this so that you’ll do that.” You can’t reach the unconditional “I do this” without slowing down long enough to get to know your colleagues, the human behind the name badge and job title. And so every relationship defaults to conditional. Eighteen months on an island I coached a leader who had been brought in to modernize outdated processes and technology across a business unit spread over multiple locations. They did everything expected of them. They created a new organizational structure. They made changes to their team. They were empowered to acquire new software. Smart, capable, driven, and from day one, they put their head down and got to work. Eighteen months later, their team was stronger and the new systems were in place. But progress had stalled, and the reason had nothing to do with structure, talent, or technology. This leader had few meaningful relationships with peers across the organization. They’d been so consumed with “getting their house in order” that they’d neglected the horizontal relationships on which their success depended. The decisions they’d made had improved their own team, but they’d neglected to think about cross-departmental dependencies. Processes no longer aligned, bottlenecks multiplied. Resistance grew from the outside in. Peers delayed responding to requests for information. Cross-functional teams started to work around their unit rather than with or through it. In meetings, there were nods of agreement, but outside the room a whispering campaign was building. Even members of their own team were starting to pick sides, back-channeling with colleagues in other locations. They’d seen this pattern before, a new leader arrives, full of new ideas and plans, but disconnected from the people who impact whether those plans succeed. They know how the story ends. But this story has a different ending, as we explored what was missing, the answer wasn’t a new strategy or another restructure. It was surprisingly simple; to get out from behind their desk, and go meet the people whose support they needed. When our conversation turned to their peers based in other locations their response was genuine surprise: “You mean I should get in the car and go see them?” Yes. Exactly that. The turnaround required intentional relationship-building, curiosity-led conversations with peers they should have known months earlier, candid discussions about shared priorities, and a willingness to show up without an agenda. Within a few months of that shift, collaboration improved, bottlenecks that had plagued the broader organization began clearing, and their team’s results started lifting outcomes well beyond their own unit. Could this have been achieved sooner? Yes. Three moves that protect relationships from the busyness trap Recognizing the problem isn’t enough. Busyness will always consume whatever time you have available (and more!) unless you make deliberate choices to protect the relationships that drive your results, at work and at home. 1. Make the implicit explicit. Identify your critical stakeholders (personal and professional). Those relationships that your success depends on. Then decide how and when you will nurture that relationship. Then, and this is crucial, put that time and relationship ritual on the calendar. At home, that might be committing to a weekly date night or phone-free movie nights with your kids. At work, it means scheduling time to meet with peers every month. The key is to not wait for white space to magically appear in your calendar, because it won’t. The act of scheduling sends a message to yourself and to others: that your relationships matter. 2. Lead with curiosity, not capability. When you do make time for colleagues, resist the urge to lead with your agenda. Connection before content – ask what they’re working toward, what pressures they’re navigating, and what they need. Share what you’ve been tasked with and where you see potential overlap. At home, the equivalent is asking your partner or family what they need during a demanding work period, not assuming they’ll adapt. These conversations build the foundation for unconditional partnership because they signal: I’m interested in your world, not just what you can do for mine. 3. Take a Relationship Pulse Check. This is the move that prevents busyness from creeping back in after the initial investment. It’s three questions that work at the conference table and the kitchen table: What’s working? What’s not? What’s one thing we can do to ensure mutual success? Asking these questions regularly, monthly with key peers, weekly with your closest relationships, does more than surface problems early. It sends a continuous signal: you matter to me, and I’m not just invested in business outcomes. I’m invested in human ones. Stop being busy. Start being present. The leaders I work with don’t lack ambition or capability. Most of them are drowning in both. What they lack is permission, from themselves, to slow down long enough to invest in the relationships that make everything else work. The next time you’re about to cancel dinner, skip the visit to a colleague’s office, or default to “I’m fine” when someone asks how you’re doing, pause. Ask yourself: what is this busyness actually costing me? And who is paying the price? The busiest leaders aren’t the most productive. They’re often the most isolated. And isolation, no matter how efficient it feels, is never a strategy for sustained success. View the full article

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. How do I change a company’s culture as the owner’s son? My father owns a production company with roughly 200 employees, multiple factories, and a strong international client base. We are based in a country with limited workers’ rights, but are trying to adopt American labor standards to attract higher-profile clients. I work here part-time with largely undefined responsibilities, but usually end up handling emails, editing product photos, interviewing potential interns, and arranging internal events. My position alone raises red flags, as I make more than my work would merit any other employee. My father has asked for my perspective regarding the company’s growth and sustainability, and while I have a few ideas, I just don’t know where to start! We don’t have an HR division, our core staff’s responsibilities keep expanding, our prices are falling short of competitive, and boundaries are blurred relatively often. When I was a child, company truckers would pick me up from school on my father’s behalf, and no one seems to think it’s weird that employees are tasked with washing his car or photocopying his children’s medical documents. Even if it’s normalized in the local culture, something tells me a greater separation between work life and personal life would do wonders. I would appreciate some pointers on what to focus on first. Do I tell my father to talk to a consultant? Do I convince him to hire trained HR personnel? Do I document all the cases of blurred boundaries and tell him companies in the U.S. would never let them happen? I don’t intend on working here for much longer, but I care about this company. I just don’t know what I can do when I majored in something other than business and am just working here until I get admitted to a postgraduate program. I don’t think you’re well-positioned to change such fundamental things about the company’s culture, so you should take the pressure of yourself to somehow find a way to! You can certainly point out the things you’ve described here, but unless your father really has a quite deep respect for your opinion on this stuff, I’m skeptical it’s going to make much of a difference. There’s also a really wide range of issues here: boundaries, job descriptions, workloads, pricing … those are all each their own areas and there’s no one person equipped to fix all of them unless they’re very high-level in the company and your father places a huge amount of trust in them (and even then I’d expect an uphill battle). You could suggest he bring in outside consultants and/or hire someone to work on professionalizing their operations, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to fix this stuff from where you’re standing. That said, you didn’t actually write that your dad is asking you to fix this stuff; he just asked for your perspective. Go ahead and share your perspective on as much of this as you’d like! If your sense is that he’ll be more responsive to some pieces than others, focus on those. But know that even an experienced consultant coming in wouldn’t be able to fix these things without significant buy-in and commitment from your dad. 2. Are some employees just not motivated by anything? My company is a small design agency. For the last 10+ years, I’ve managed Jim. He’s quiet and does okay work most of the time — nothing stellar or particularly creative. I’ve coached him to get out of his comfort zone, showed examples of what I (and our clients) are looking for, and things improve for a hot minute before he reverts right back to uninspired work. What stumps me is that nothing seems to excite him or motivate him to grow or progress in his career. I’ve talked to him many times about what I’d like to see in terms of progress in the quality of his work, offered him professional development opportunities, asked what kinds of assignments he most enjoys so I could steer them his way, and included him in client meetings so he could be involved in some projects right from the start. None of that has made any difference in his level of engagement or work quality. He frequently overlooks tasks he’s solely responsible for (like scheduling our social media posts) and just apologizes when asked why something wasn’t done. Annual reviews seem like we’re having the exact same conversation every year. He hasn’t qualified for a raise in the last four year and has never asked why or what he could do better. Is it possible that some employees simply aren’t motivated by anything? Yes. It’s also possible he just doesn’t have the skills or aptitude for what you need — or the interest in putting in the work on an ongoing basis (since he does occasionally improve for a short time but doesn’t sustain it). You say he does okay most of the time, but it doesn’t really sound like it if he’s not producing what clients want and regularly misses tasks he’s in charge of. If I’m wrong about that and his work is truly fine and the issue is only that he’s not improving over time — but his current level of skill is perfectly acceptable for the job and will remain perfectly acceptable even if he never grows — then your best move is to accept that this is Jim and he’s probably not going to change, and he doesn’t need to be constantly improving if his base level is acceptable. But what you described sounds more like someone who isn’t well-suited for the job he’s in — a performance problem, not a motivation problem — and at this point I’d move to what you want to do about that. Personally, I’d want to replace him with someone who’s better at the work. Related: how do I motivate someone who doesn’t bother to do his work 3. Can I ask for a demotion out of management? I’ve worked for the same large institution for about 16 years. A few years ago, I made a move from one closely-related department to another to take on a junior managerial role. I’m proud of a lot of the work I’ve done here, but it hasn’t been easy, and after several years of managing, training new staff, designing new procedures, being the point person for questions, and collaborating with my boss, I am so deeply burned out on management. I want out. The only parts of the work that I still find enjoyable are the bits where I’m basically doing the same tasks as all the other team members (I have the same daily and weekly rotational tasks that they have, plus my management responsibilities). The management parts just feel draining. It probably doesn’t help that I have chronic health conditions that have negatively impacted my work in the past and have the potential to do so again. I found out recently that one of our team members is leaving, and I caught myself daydreaming about what it would be like if I could be gloriously demoted to that job (an independent contributor role) instead — no more exempt status that only ever benefits my employer and never me, no more giving negative feedback and coaching, no more being solely responsible for all training and logistics… If it would even be possible, it would mean a pay cut, but I could make do with that. What I’m not sure is how I would explain the desire to take that step down. How do you say “Give me less responsibility and money, please”? And how would I explain that change on my resume when applying for other roles in the future? I don’t want to leave because I’m awful at my job, I want to leave because the job is eating my life and I’m miserable. I want to go back to a nice non-exempt role with clearly delineated boundaries. Even if it’s not this role, I badly want to move to something that’s not management, and it will likely involve a step down the hierarchy and possibly a pay cut. How do I explain to prospective managers that my interest in these kinds of roles is serious and that I genuinely want to make that move out of management? This is a thing people do! Anyone with any amount of thoughtfulness who has managed people knows it’s not easy and should be able to imagine just not wanting to do it anymore. As long as you make it clear you’re not expecting to stay at a management-level pay rate, this is a reasonable thing to raise. Say this to your boss: “I’m interested in being considered for Jane’s role when she leaves. I’d really like to return to being an independent contributor; I understand it would mean a pay cut. Is that something we could talk about?” For applying for non-management jobs outside your company, you can be open about targeting non-management roles specifically (as opposed to just being willing to take one if that’s all that’s available): “I’m looking for an independent contributor role where I can focus on XYZ” / “I’ve realized what what I most enjoy is XYZ and am deliberately seeking roles that don’t include management” / “I worked as a manager for the last two years, which helped me realize that what I really want to focus on is XYZ — management took me away from that, and I’m excited to get back to it.” Related: how to explain why I want a lower-level, lower-responsibility job 4. Rejecting applicants who don’t include a cover letter I used to manage the recruiting process here at my small (12 people) social housing organization, but luckily we now have a staff member who is half finance and half HR (and she actually has gone to school for HR, unlike me). I’m very happy to be out of the HR tasks, since I’ve never had any HR education; it was just a gap that I helped fill. We currently have two positions we are recruiting for, both at the level where we ask for a resume and cover letter. Many applicants don’t include a cover letter and they are usually sent right to the “no” file. What are your thoughts on an email as cover letter? Most of the applications come into our general email, which I manage – though I gave access to the HR staff member so, during the recruiting process, she can grab all the applications – so I see many of them. When an applicant types a short “intro” or note in their email, and only attaches a resume, should she count that email as the cover letter? Any thoughts on her practice of not considering applicants who don’t follow the instructions in the posting to include a cover letter? If it’s something like “I’m applying for the llama wrangler position; attached please find my resume,” that’s not a cover letter. If it’s at least a few paragraphs with actual substance in them, that a cover letter even though it’s just in the body of an email. Cover letters don’t need to be a separate attachment; it’s about length and substance, not where the words are. And I’m in favor of your coworker’s practice of not considering applicants who don’t include a cover letter when they were specifically told that’s part of your application process, doubly so if the job involves any form of written communication skills. (That said, if you’re accepting applications through sites that make it difficult to include a personalized cover letter, you should factor that in. In those cases, you might respond to otherwise strong looking candidates and ask them to complete their application by submitting one.) 5. Dealing with tremors in an interview I will have my first in-person job interview since 2019 soon. I have been remote since 2022. In the intervening years, I have developed a visible, left-dominant tremor down my arm, into my hand when I am walking or sitting. It also appears in my jaw at times. This either (1) leads my jaw to chatter or (2) leads me to clamp my jaw shut, which does not look too friendly. These can look like anxiety even when they are not and are constants regardless of emotion, but worsen during high stakes settings. I can hide them well on Zoom, but less so in-person. It takes a great deal of effort to keep them hidden, and when I get distracted they pop out. My interview will be with a team very familiar with my work but less so with my tremors. My hand also likes to curl up, which can look like fidgeting or discomfort. Doctors don’t know why this happens, but so far it seems benign. Any advice for dealing with these visible sumptoms it in an interview where they may be misinterpreted? As a younger woman, I have learned anxiety is always everyone’s first assumption even if it’s rarely the case. At the start of the meeting, say this cheerfully and matter-of-factly: “Since we don’t normally see each other in person, I should mention I sometimes have tremors in my hand and jaw — it’s just a medical thing and nothing to worry about!” That way they’ll know what’s going on and won’t draw the wrong conclusions and they won’t worry about what might be happening. By taking a matter-of-fact tone, you’ll demonstrate that it’s no big deal, and most people will follow your cues. The post changing a company as the owner’s son, are some people just not motivated by anything, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

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As an HR professional, knowing key laws and regulations is critical for maintaining compliance and promoting fairness in the workplace. You’ll encounter laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, which addresses wage and hour issues, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects individuals with disabilities. Furthermore, comprehending workplace discrimination laws is imperative. Familiarizing yourself with these regulations can prevent legal issues and create a more equitable environment. What other important laws should you be aware of? Key Takeaways Understand the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to ensure compliance with wage and hour regulations. Familiarize yourself with Title VII to prevent race, gender, and religious discrimination in the workplace. Learn the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to support employees with disabilities and provide reasonable accommodations. Be aware of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to protect employees aged 40 and older from discrimination. Stay updated on the Equal Pay Act to ensure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. Importance of Legal Knowledge for HR Professionals Grasping HR laws and regulations is vital for anyone in the human resources field, as it directly impacts your ability to manage workplace practices effectively. A solid comprehension of HR law helps you guarantee compliance and minimize legal risks associated with employment practices. For instance, recognizing wage and hour laws, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), enables you to enforce fair compensation and manage overtime regulations. Furthermore, familiarity with employee benefits laws like ERISA and COBRA is important, as it guarantees equitable access to health and retirement benefits for all employees. Workplace Discrimination Laws Comprehending workplace discrimination laws is vital for nurturing an inclusive work environment. You’ll need to recognize the types of discrimination claims, implement effective harassment prevention strategies, and guarantee your team undergoes legal compliance training. Each of these areas plays an important role in protecting both employees and employers from potential legal issues. Types of Discrimination Claims When you’re maneuvering through the intricacies of workplace discrimination claims, it’s essential to recognize the various types that can arise under federal laws. Here are four key types you should be aware of: Race, Color, Religion, Sex, and National Origin: Under Title VII, discrimination in these areas is prohibited for organizations with 15 or more employees. Disability: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects qualified individuals and requires reasonable accommodations. Age: The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) safeguards employees aged 40 and older from age-related discrimination. Equal Pay: The Equal Pay Act (EPA) mandates equal pay for equal work, prohibiting wage discrimination based on sex. Understanding these claims can help you navigate workplace policies effectively. Harassment Prevention Strategies Harassment in the workplace can create a toxic environment, which is why implementing effective prevention strategies is essential for any organization. First, grasping harassment definitions under workplace discrimination laws, like Title VII, helps you address incidents properly. You should likewise develop thorough training programs that inform employees about their rights, responsibilities, and the consequences of harassment. Regularly reviewing and updating harassment policies guarantees compliance with federal and state laws. Establishing clear reporting procedures enables employees to voice concerns without fear of retaliation, promoting a respectful workplace culture. Finally, conducting regular assessments of workplace culture and gathering employee feedback can help identify potential harassment issues early, allowing you to take a proactive approach to prevention. Legal Compliance Training Effective legal compliance training is crucial for any organization aiming to uphold workplace discrimination laws. These laws, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, protect employees from discrimination. Here are key components of compliance training you should consider: Harassment Training: Guarantee employees understand what constitutes harassment and how to report it. Policy Development: Create clear policies addressing discrimination, outlining procedures for complaints. Reasonable Accommodations: Educate staff on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, emphasizing accommodations for pregnant employees. Reporting Mechanisms: Train HR professionals on how to recognize and report discriminatory behavior effectively. Regular training nurtures a culture of compliance and promotes a fair workplace environment for all. Wage and Hour Laws Wage and hour laws play an essential role in guaranteeing fair compensation for workers, as they establish the framework for minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor regulations. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets a federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, with some states opting for higher rates. If you’re a non-exempt employee, you’re entitled to overtime pay at 1.5 times your regular hourly wage for hours worked over 40 in a workweek. Furthermore, child labor laws defined by the FLSA limit the work hours and types of jobs minors can undertake, protecting their education and health. Employers must likewise keep accurate records of hours worked and wages paid. Failing to comply with these regulations can lead to legal penalties and disputes. Comprehending these laws is imperative for both employers and employees to guarantee fair treatment in the workplace. Employee Benefits Laws When it pertains to employee benefits laws, grasping your rights and the responsibilities of your employer is crucial for traversing the workplace environment. Comprehending these laws can help you protect your interests and guarantee that you receive what you’re entitled to. Here are key employee benefits laws you should know: Affordable Care Act (ACA): Employers with 50+ full-time equivalents must provide health insurance or face penalties. Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA): Sets minimum standards for pension plans, safeguarding your retirement assets. Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA): Requires continued health insurance coverage for a limited time after employment ends. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Protects the privacy of your medical records and imposes confidentiality requirements on employers. Being aware of these laws empowers you to advocate for your rights in the workplace effectively. Immigration and Workplace Safety Laws Grasping immigration and workplace safety laws is vital for both employees and employers, as these regulations guarantee a fair and secure working environment. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) requires you to complete Form I-9 for new hires, confirming they’re eligible to work in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforces safety standards and conducts inspections to prevent workplace hazards. You must provide necessary safety equipment and training as mandated by OSHA. Furthermore, workers’ compensation laws protect employees who suffer job-related injuries or illnesses, offering benefits for medical expenses and lost wages. Compliance with both federal and state-specific laws is important to avoid legal penalties and secure a safe workplace. Law/Regulation Key Requirement Immigration Reform and Control Act Complete Form I-9 for new hires OSHA Adhere to workplace safety standards Workers’ Compensation Provide insurance for job-related injuries Safety Equipment Maintain and train on safety protocols Compliance Follow federal and state laws How to Stay Compliant With HR Laws To stay compliant with HR laws, you need to regularly update your policies to reflect the latest federal, state, and local regulations. Continuous employee training is additionally essential, as it helps your staff recognize and report any discriminatory practices or harassment in the workplace. Regular Policy Updates Staying compliant with HR laws requires a proactive approach to regularly updating your policies, as legal environments can shift frequently owing to new regulations and legislative changes. To guarantee you stay compliant, consider these steps: Review and update HR policies at least annually to align with federal, state, and local laws. Establish a schedule for incorporating new legal requirements, like pay transparency and expanded non-discrimination laws. Train HR staff and management on updated policies to promote comprehension and adherence. Maintain detailed documentation of all policy changes and training sessions to demonstrate compliance during audits. Additionally, consider consulting legal counsel or HR compliance specialists to navigate complex legal changes and implement best practices. Continuous Employee Training Regular policy updates play a significant role in maintaining compliance with HR laws, but they’re only part of the equation. Continuous employee training is crucial for guaranteeing your workforce stays informed about key legislation, like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Implementing mandatory training sessions on workplace discrimination laws, including Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) guidelines, helps prevent discriminatory practices. Moreover, training on employee benefits regulations, such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and COBRA, guarantees employees know their rights. Regular compliance training should likewise cover updates from OSHA regarding safety standards. Utilizing e-learning platforms can improve ongoing education about privacy laws, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), guaranteeing compliance and protection of personal health information. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 7 Main Principles of HR? The seven main principles of HR are vital for effective management. You’ll find compliance with employment laws, promotion of diversity and inclusion, and improvement of employee engagement and satisfaction among them. Furthermore, supporting employee development and training, ensuring fair compensation and benefits, nurturing effective communication, and upholding ethical standards are fundamental. Each principle plays a significant role in creating a positive workplace environment, ultimately benefiting both employees and the organization. What Are the 5 P’s in HR? The 5 P’s in HR are essential for effective management. First, “People” refers to the workforce’s skills and the need for effective recruitment and retention. Second, “Process” involves structured methods for HR functions like onboarding and evaluations. Third, “Policy” includes guidelines that govern workplace behavior. Fourth, “Productivity” focuses on measuring employee output, whereas fifth, “Performance” assesses contributions in relation to business goals. Comprehending these elements helps you improve your organization’s overall efficiency and effectiveness. What Are the 7 HR Basics? To grasp the seven HR basics, you need to focus on recruitment, training, performance management, employee relations, compensation and benefits, compliance, and workplace safety. Recruitment involves attracting talent, whereas training develops skills. Performance management assesses employee contributions. Employee relations cultivate a positive work culture. Compensation and benefits guarantee fair pay and perks. Compliance keeps you aligned with laws. Finally, workplace safety maintains a secure environment, protecting employees from hazards. Comprehending these areas is crucial. What Are the 7 Pillars of HR? The seven pillars of HR are fundamental for effective management in any organization. These pillars include recruitment and selection, where you attract qualified candidates; performance management, focusing on setting objectives and providing feedback; employee relations, which cultivate a positive culture; compensation and benefits, ensuring fair pay; training and development, enhancing skills; compliance with employment laws, safeguarding rights; and organizational development, promoting growth and efficiency. Mastery of these areas is vital for HR success. Conclusion In conclusion, grasping key HR laws and regulations is essential for your role as an HR professional. Familiarizing yourself with workplace discrimination laws, wage and hour regulations, employee benefits, and immigration and safety laws guarantees compliance and promotes a fair work environment. Staying informed about these laws not just protects your organization but additionally supports a culture of respect and equity among employees. Regular training and updates can help you navigate these complex regulations effectively. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Key HR Laws and Regulations You Should Know" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article