How to Change the Performance of Your Performance Review Systems

Are performance review systems broken? According to one report, the answer is yes.

A 2025 Corporate Performance and Learning SurveyOpen in a new tab by Acorn, an HR technology company, found only 29% of surveyed workers trust how their organization evaluates performance. The survey included responses from 1,239 U.S.-based full-time workers, spanning executives, managers and individual contributors across HR, learning and development, and business teams. READ MORE

Banking CEO breaks from the pack on return to office. He goes in 4 days a week but leaves the rest up to the ‘adults’ he works with

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters is standing out in the global banking sector by maintaining a flexible, hybrid work policy and resisting the rigid office mandates now sweeping through much of Wall Street. As peers from companies like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs urge staff back to traditional office rhythms, Winters has doubled down on a philosophy of employee autonomy and trust, placing his bank in sharp contrast to its U.S. and U.K. peers. READ MORE

Why AI Is Making 1:1 Meetings Irrelevant

For decades, the one-on-one meeting has been a sacred ritual of managerial life. It’s the office equivalent of a treadmill session: repetitive, well-intentioned, and mostly endured out of guilt.

Conventional wisdom says every manager should have regular 1:1s with their direct reports to build trust, boost engagement, and drive performance. However, as work evolves—with a faster pace, flatter structures, hybrid and asynchronous communication, AI tools that manage tasks more efficiently than most humans ever will—it’s worth asking: Do we still need all these 1:1s? READ MORE

The rise of fractional executive leadership: What’s driving the interest?

The complexities that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the world of work—employees suddenly working from home, safety concerns, supply chain disruptions—prompted HR professionals to prioritize agility in their strategies like never before. Five years later, today’s complexities, experts say, are again driving a reimagining of long-held norms—including about leadership, giving rise to alternative models like fractional executive leadership.

A fractional leadership model enables veteran C-suite executives to contribute to an organization on a part-time basis. It’s a strategy employers often leverage to navigate a particular project or moment of change or complexity—while shortening the time and expense of an often months-long executive search and reducing the risks of long-term hiring. READ MORE

10 ways to tackle the growing problem of unauthorized AI at work

The rise of artificial intelligence has brought both opportunities and challenges to the workplace. However, a growing trend of employees using free or unauthorized AI tools poses significant risks, from security breaches to the loss of trade secrets. Recent reports indicate that some workers are engaging with AI in ways that are not authorized by the employer, highlighting the importance of establishing policies and protocols that will enable responsible and deliberate adoption and use of AI at work. READ MORE

US corporate bankruptcies hit 15-year H1 high: S&P

Finance leaders of the companies tracked by S&P have been increasingly turning to the courts for bankruptcy protection since 2022 when interest rates began to rise as the Federal Reserve sought to combat inflation. They’ve risen from 373 in 2022 to 634 in 2023, touching 688 last year. 

So far this year, the distress has been concentrated in industrial and so-called consumer discretionary companies which accounted for a combined 107 bankruptcies, followed by healthcare firms (27) and corporations in the consumer staples sector (19).  READ MORE

US manufacturing mired in weakness as tariffs bite

U.S. manufacturing remained sluggish in June, with new orders subdued and prices paid for inputs creeping higher, suggesting that the Trump administration's tariffs on imported goods continued to hamper businesses' ability to plan ahead.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said on Tuesday that its manufacturing PMI nudged up to 49.0 last month from a six-month low of 48.5 in May. It was the fourth straight month that the PMI was below the 50 mark, which indicates contraction in the sector that accounts for 10.2% of the economy. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PMI little changed at 48.8. READ MORE

Getting a Wharton MBA Was 'a Waste of Time,' According to a Global Bank CEO. Here's the Degree He Recommends Instead.

Bill Winters, the CEO of 160-year-old bank Standard Chartered, says that the MBA he earned from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business was a "waste of time" — but the humanities undergraduate degree he received from Colgate University was more worth it.

In an interview that aired earlier this week, Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua asked Winters, 63, what he would recommend for young people to study. Winters responded by saying that he studied international relations and history as an undergraduate, graduating in 1983. He recommended those fields, stating that majoring in those areas taught him "how to think."

But his MBA from Wharton in 1988 was unnecessary, he said. READ MORE

Tech Leaders Predict a Human Hiring Boom as Workers Gain AI Skills

In the wake of the pandemic, companies were pushed into rapid digital transformation—ushering in a flood of new tools designed to support remote and hybrid workforces. But this digital acceleration came at a cost: employee burnout. In response, HR leaders began partnering more closely with IT and tech providers to streamline communication, ease cognitive overload and help teams stay productive under growing pressure.

At the heart of the problem was the constant barrage of emails, pings and alerts, all compounded by the ubiquity of smartphones. In response, digital wellness apps and mental health campaigns gained traction. Yet many missed the mark. This struggle to tame digital overload paved the way for the rise of employee experience platforms (EXPs). Platforms like ServiceNow emerged as early pioneers, creating unified environments where employees could access communications, resources and tools in one seamless interface. READ MORE

How enterprise AI is reshaping EX

In the wake of the pandemic, companies were pushed into rapid digital transformation—ushering in a flood of new tools designed to support remote and hybrid workforces. But this digital acceleration came at a cost: employee burnout. In response, HR leaders began partnering more closely with IT and tech providers to streamline communication, ease cognitive overload and help teams stay productive under growing pressure.

At the heart of the problem was the constant barrage of emails, pings and alerts, all compounded by the ubiquity of smartphones. In response, digital wellness apps and mental health campaigns gained traction. Yet many missed the mark. This struggle to tame digital overload paved the way for the rise of employee experience platforms (EXPs). Platforms like ServiceNow emerged as early pioneers, creating unified environments where employees could access communications, resources and tools in one seamless interface. READ MORE

AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs

Every few weeks, the Earth cries out for an artificial intelligence scare on a frequency heard only by tech CEOs. And lo, like a rain cloud over a parched valley, here comes Amazon boss Andy Jassy to shower us with fresh fear and dread.

In a memo sent to employees titled “Some thoughts on Generative AI,” Jassy spent 1,200 words largely rattling off examples of Amazon’s AI progress. It is making Alexa, its personal assistant software, “meaningfully smarter,” and turning its customer service chatbot into “an even better experience.” (How, and by what measure? He didn’t say. But “you get the idea,” he wrote.) READ MORE