When Did Companies Stop Valuing Our Time?

Episode summary: Why Is Everything At Work So Urgent? Why is everything at work so urgent, even when most of us aren't dealing with life-or-death situations? From last-minute requests to unrealistic expectations at work, corporate life can feel like a constant emergency, even when the work itself isn't particularly time-sensitive. This episode of Track Changes On explores why a constant sense of urgency at work has become such a familiar part of corporate culture. Drawing on my experience moving from journalism into corporate communications, I look at the difference between genuine deadlines and the unnecessary pressure organisations create through poor planning, management behaviour and expectations around responsiveness. We also explore the research behind workplace telepressure and the mere-urgency effect, which helps explain why people sometimes prioritise less important tasks simply because they appear urgent. And we look at how bad managers and organisational hierarchies can contribute to unrealistic deadlines, even when nobody intended to create an emergency. Finally, we discuss practical ways to manage competing priorities, question unreasonable deadlines and improve time management without damaging workplace relationships. It's a useful perspective on why corporate culture can feel toxic, and what employees and leaders can do to reduce unnecessary pressure. In this episode * Why everything at work seems urgent, even when the consequences of delay are minor * What working in journalism taught me about genuine deadlines * Why corporate workplaces confuse responsiveness with commitment and performance * How workplace telepressure creates expectations of immediate availability * Why employees often overestimate how quickly managers expect email responses * How seniority and organisational hierarchy can turn routine requests into urgent priorities * Why poor planning and delayed management decisions create last-minute emergencies * What the mere-urgency effect tells us about how deadlines influence our priorities * How constant interruptions affect concentration and productivity * Why unrealistic expectations at work can make effective time management difficult * How to question deadlines and negotiate priorities without appearing uncooperative * What managers can do to reduce unnecessary urgency within their teams Research referenced in this episode Larissa K. Barber and Alecia M. Santuzzi, Please Respond ASAP: Workplace Telepressure and Employee Recovery (2015), Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Barber and Santuzzi examine workplace telepressure, the preoccupation with and urge to respond quickly to work-related messages. Their research helps explain why employees can feel compelled to remain available and respond immediately, even without an explicit instruction from their manager. Workplace telepressure is also associated with difficulty psychologically disconnecting from work. Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa K. Bohns, You Don't Need to Answer Right Away! Receivers Overestimate How Quickly Senders Expect Responses to Non-Urgent Work Emails (2021), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Across eight studies, the researchers found that recipients of non-urgent work emails sent outside working hours tended to overestimate how quickly senders expected a response. Their findings suggest that unspoken assumptions about availability can create unnecessary workplace pressure, while explicit communication about response expectations can help reduce it. Meng Zhu, Christopher K. Hsee and Yang Yang, The Mere Urgency Effect (2018), Journal of Consumer Research. This research examines how deadlines influence people's decisions about which tasks to prioritise. The experiments found that people sometimes chose less valuable tasks simply because they appeared more urgent. The findings offer a useful explanation for why employees may interrupt important work to deal with lower-value requests that carry an immediate d

Episode summary: Why the Worst Business Decisions All Fail This Simple Test Why do so many companies keep making decisions that seem to defy common sense? Some of the worst business decisions aren’t necessarily made by inexperienced or incompetent people. Often, there’s a perfectly rational explanation for how the company got there. This episode of Track Changes On looks at why business fails and corporate fails can happen even when the individual decisions behind them make sense. We look at the organisational research behind local rationality and goal displacement, and how breaking complex problems into smaller pieces can sometimes leave nobody looking at the whole picture. We also look at what these decisions tell us about corporate culture and leadership, using the Australian idea of the ‘pub test’ to ask a simple question: does this decision still make sense when you step outside the organisation and look at the whole picture? It’s a useful way to understand some of the contradictions that make corporate culture so frustrating for the people working inside it. In this episode * Why rational corporate decisions can produce outcomes that seem absurd * What the Australian ‘pub test’ can tell us about corporate decision-making * Famous business fails that made sense internally but failed the common sense test * Why Netflix’s Qwikster decision became such a high-profile corporate failure * What Vegemite iSnack 2.0 can teach us about internal corporate logic * Why companies break complex decisions into smaller pieces * How local rationality can make each piece of a decision seem reasonable while the overall outcome doesn’t * Why following the right corporate process doesn’t necessarily produce the right outcome * The role leadership teams play in stepping back and looking at the whole picture * Why social media has effectively become the modern version of the pub test Research referenced in this episode Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963). Cyert and March’s work helps explain the idea of local rationality. Large organisations manage complexity by dividing problems between different parts of the business, each working with its own goals, information and constraints. This can mean individual decisions make sense within a particular function while their combined effect is less rational when viewed across the organisation as a whole. Robert K. Merton, Bureaucratic Structure and Personality (1940), Social Forces. Merton’s work on bureaucratic structures introduced the concept of goal displacement. Rules and processes created to achieve an objective can gradually become objectives in themselves, with adherence to the process taking precedence over whether it produces the intended outcome. Herbert A. Simon, A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955), Quarterly Journal of Economics. Simon’s work on bounded rationality explains why people and organisations rely on simplified models, procedures and ‘good enough’ solutions rather than considering every possible consequence of a decision. In large organisations, those structures help people manage complexity but can also narrow what individual decision-makers see and consider relevant. Supporting the show If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, here are a few things I’ve created: 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with me elsewhere 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Episode summary: How to tell if you're a victim of gaslighting at work Have you ever had something happen at work where the gap between what you remember and what your boss says happened is so big that you start questioning yourself? Gaslighting at work can be difficult to recognise, particularly when the same behaviours can also come from bad managers, dysfunctional systems or a corporate culture that’s toxic. This episode of Track Changes On looks at the research actually says about workplace gaslighting, how to recognise a pattern and why intent may matter less than the impact the behaviour is having on you. We also look at what gaslighting can tell us about corporate culture more broadly. If you’re interested in corporate culture explained, organisational culture explained or company culture explained through the behaviours people actually experience at work, this episode gets into what happens when an organisation allows reality to become something employees are expected to negotiate. In this episode * What gaslighting at work actually means * What gaslighting from a boss can look like * Why one strange interaction doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being gaslit * How repeated denial, contradiction and blame can develop into a pattern * Why intent isn’t necessarily required for workplace gaslighting * How bad managers and a toxic corporate culture can contribute to the problem * How to recognise when you’re starting to doubt your own judgement * Why documenting behaviour can be more useful than trying to prove someone’s intent * What to do if you think you’re experiencing gaslighting at work Research referenced in this episode Kukreja and Pandey, Workplace Gaslighting: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of a Scale (2023), Frontiers in Psychology. This study developed a workplace-specific measure of gaslighting based on supervisor-employee relationships. The researchers identified behaviours including denying previous promises, misrepresenting what an employee has said, undermining complaints and telling someone they’re imagining things. The study identified two dimensions of workplace gaslighting: trivialisation and affliction. Kincaid and Stalion, An Interdisciplinary Review of the Gaslighting Literature and Future Research Agenda (2026), Journal of Organizational Behavior. This review describes gaslighting as a pattern of repeated manipulative interactions that accumulates over time and destabilises someone’s confidence in their own interpretation or perception of reality. Importantly, the authors don’t treat deliberate intent as a requirement, recognising that these patterns can also emerge through routine, defensive or institutionally reinforced behaviour. The review also examines the potential harm associated with gaslighting, including increasing self-doubt, reduced self-trust and internalised blame. Workplace consequences discussed in the literature include withdrawal, silence, absenteeism and turnover intentions. Paige L. Sweet, The Sociology of Gaslighting (2019), American Sociological Review. Sweet examines gaslighting through the lens of social relationships and power, arguing that it needs to be understood in the context of structural and institutional inequalities rather than solely as an individual psychological behaviour. The paper focuses on intimate relationships rather than workplaces but provides an important foundation for understanding the role of power in gaslighting. Supporting the show If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, here are a few things I’ve created: 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with me elsewhere 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn

Episode summary: The weird psychology behind corporate meeting culture Corporate culture has a strange relationship with meetings. We complain about having too many of them, joke that they could have been an email and block out hours of our working week to attend them. Yet meetings remain deeply embedded in how companies communicate, make decisions and manage work. So why do companies have so many meetings? There’s some fascinating psychology behind meeting culture. Meetings make work highly visible, can create a sense that progress is being made and can change how responsibility for decisions feels when those decisions are made collectively. They’re also influenced by organisational hierarchy, including who gets invited, who gets heard and whose opinion carries the most weight. This episode of Track Changes On looks at corporate culture through the psychology of meetings and asks why something so many employees complain about remains such a dominant part of working life. It also explores the relationship between meetings and workplace productivity. In knowledge work, some of our most valuable work can be difficult to observe. Thinking, writing, analysing information or solving a difficult problem may look like very little from the outside. A meeting, by comparison, is highly visible: calendars are full, people are talking and everyone appears busy. That raises an interesting question about productivity culture. Are meetings always helping us do the work, or can talking about the work sometimes become a substitute for doing it? Of course, meetings have a legitimate role in company culture. Synchronous conversations can help people work through complex problems, respond to each other in real time and make use of social cues that are harder to reproduce asynchronously. The problem comes when meetings become the default rather than a deliberate choice. So how can you tell when a meeting is doing useful work? And what might our reliance on meetings tell us about organisational culture more broadly? In this episode * Why meetings are so deeply embedded in corporate culture * The psychology behind why meetings can feel productive * How meetings make work and employee activity more visible * Why collective decision-making can change how responsibility feels * How hierarchy and status influence what happens inside meetings * Why meeting culture can reduce the time available for focused work * What synchronous conversations genuinely do well * How to decide whether something actually needs a meeting Research referenced in this episode Rogelberg, Kreamer and Gray, Thirty Years of Meeting Science: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead (2026), Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. A review of decades of meeting research examining what makes meetings effective, how people behave within them and the role of factors including hierarchy and status in meeting participation. Research on shared responsibility in collective decision-making (2019). Research examining how responsibility changes when people make decisions collectively rather than individually. The literature suggests that sharing a decision with others can reduce some of the psychological burden associated with personal responsibility and affect feelings such as regret following a decision. Otter.ai and Steven Rogelberg, meeting research (2022). A study of 632 employees examining meeting attendance and the financial cost associated with meeting time. The research estimated substantial organisational expenditure on meetings, including meetings employees believed they could skip if they were kept informed about what happened. These figures are estimates based on survey responses and salary assumptions rather than direct measures of financial loss. Research on synchronous communication and social presence. Research into synchronous communication examines the value of immediate interaction and access to social and paralinguistic cues, including tone, facia

Toxic Workplace Culture: Why “We’re Like a Family Here” Is a Red Flag “We’re like a family here.” It’s a phrase that appears in job ads, interviews and conversations about corporate culture, and for some people it’s an immediate red flag. There are plenty of familiar signs of a toxic work environment, from micromanagement and excessive approval processes to workplace rules built around the assumption that employees can’t be trusted. Yet some of these toxic workplace behaviours point to a broader dynamic that gets far less attention: companies hiring capable adults, giving them significant responsibilities and then treating them as though they still need permission, supervision or verification to make ordinary decisions. There’s a term for this: workplace infantilisation. It overlaps with micromanagement and paternalistic management, but it can also be embedded in corporate culture rather than coming from one toxic or micromanaging boss. Research into workplace paternalism has even examined the familiar “we’re like a family here” metaphor, including the way it can position managers as parental figures and employees as the children. This episode of Track Changes On looks at the strange amount of permission-seeking we accept as a normal part of corporate life, from asking another adult for permission to take leave to needing approval for decisions that sit comfortably within our professional expertise. It also explores the contradiction between companies telling employees to take ownership while creating environments where asking permission is safer than exercising independent judgement. Research on autonomy at work suggests this distinction matters: autonomy-supportive leadership is associated with stronger motivation, engagement, job satisfaction and wellbeing. So what happens when a workplace says it trusts its employees, while its management practices communicate something very different? And could some of the behaviour managers complain about, including employees constantly seeking approval or refusing to make decisions, actually be behaviour the workplace has taught them? In this episode * What workplace infantilisation means and how it differs from micromanagement * Why “we’re like a family here” can create an uncomfortable parent-child dynamic at work * How excessive approval and permission-seeking can become part of corporate culture * Why employees may stop taking ownership when independent decisions repeatedly get questioned * What research tells us about employee autonomy, motivation and workplace wellbeing * How to distinguish legitimate workplace accountability from unnecessary control * Why toxic workplace behaviours don’t always come from a toxic boss Research referenced in this episode Slemp et al., Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review (2018), Motivation and Emotion. A meta-analysis of 72 studies examining autonomy-supportive leadership. The research found positive associations with autonomous motivation, job satisfaction, engagement and wellbeing, alongside negative associations with workplace distress. Alakavuklar, “We Are a Family” – A Critical Organizational Discourse Analysis (2009). Examines the use of family language within organisations and its relationship with paternalistic management. The paper discusses how the family metaphor can position managers as parental figures who direct and supervise employees while creating expectations around loyalty and obedience. Casey, “Come, Join Our Family”: Discipline and Integration in Corporate Organizational Culture (1999). Research examining the use of “family” and “team” metaphors in corporate culture and their relationship with organisational discipline and control. Rather than assuming family-oriented cultures necessarily empower employees, Casey examines how these cultural practices can regulate employee behaviour. Oravec, research on employee infantilisation and workplace monitoring (2024). Uses “employee infantilization” to descri