Hiii guys,

It’s finally starting to feel like fall, and I’m here for it!

Best believe I’ll be enjoying pumpkin spice [broadly gestures at everything] 🎃

You know who else is embracing a new season??

Gen Z, because more than half of them plan to find a new job before the year ends.

Today, we'll cover what they’re looking for, how AI might help us clear away enough corporate nonsense to enjoy our jobs again, and a wild stat about fatigue that proves your whole workforce might need a nap.

Lemme know what you think!

🗞️ Here's the Tea:Copy anchor linkCopied

👋 More than half of young workers want to switch jobs soon for better pay, benefits

The TL;DR: Gen Z is out job hunting again, and this time they brought a benefits checklist. More than half plan to search for a new role before year-end, with better pay, stronger benefits, flexibility, and actual career growth leading the wishlist.

My POV: Half of a generation is responding to rising healthcare costs and compensation that no longer stretches far enough, all while constantly being told how “entitled” they are. Which we HAVE TO stop doing.

If your retention strategy is a 3% raise or a vague development convo, please prepare to meet some resignation letters.

HR needs to make clearer career paths while making the value of benefits painfully clear, or another employer will!

🎙️Mic Drop Moment:Copy anchor linkCopied

“Why recreate the wheel when you can learn it from someone else that’s just built it next to you?”Copy anchor linkCopied

On the mic this week: Lauren Gregor is the founder of Lauren Gregor Advising, where she works inside companies as a generalist executive to diagnose what’s stuck and restructure how teams operate. She has operated businesses across industries, working with everyone from seed-stage startups to legacy orgs trying to modernize. Her approach to AI is refreshingly practical: forget the hype and figure out what employees can actually do with it on a random Tuesday morning.

Pin this:

• Annual training plans simply can’t keep up with tech that evolves weekly.
• Give employees protected time and permission to experiment to their heart’s content.
• AI development should be personalized by role instead of one mandatory tool shoved across the entire company.
• Automate the administrative BS so people can spend more time solving actual problems.

My H*ly Sh*t Moment: I think AI will eventually clear away enough corporate nonsense for us to become curious humans again. Keeping a glass-half-full attitude today!

▶️ Press Play

📊 Data Is My Love Language:Copy anchor linkCopied

Stat: About 71.5% of adults in the U.S. say they experienced fatigue on multiple days over the past three months

My spiral: Your workforce is exhausted, and there’s really no other way to put it!

This isn’t the kind of tired that disappears after one good night of sleep, either. 😴

Fatigue can show up as brain fog, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and a shrinking capacity to deal with workplace nonsense.

HR needs to stop treating declining energy like an individual time-management issue and start examining whether people ever get a genuine chance to recover.

You can’t performance-manage an entire workforce out of being depleted!

🏖️ Safe Space Summit:Copy anchor linkCopied

📣 John Baldino is taking the stage at Safe Space Summit!!!

🧠 Keynote topic: His session is about the thing almost no workplace talks about: forgiveness!! Every relationship can be repaired, but when mistakes get "managed away" instead of actually resolved, the same conflicts come right back six months later (and follow people to their next org, too).

He'll break down his trust response framework and show leaders how to own a mistake, address it, and repair relationships that feel too far gone. After 30+ years in HR, he still genuinely likes people, and he's got the stories, grace, and practical tools you need to hear!!

👀 4/4 speakers are announced and the lineup is officially LOCKED...

Wanna attend Safe Space Summit? Grab your spot here.

Did I mention... If you're a VP level or above at a company > 250, your travel & ticket are on us! That's free 99!

🛠️ In Your Toolkit: Copy anchor linkCopied

Gotta love when a super vague stat about AI comes out, but there’s no explanation for what any of us should do with the info! 🙃

Naturally, this has been happening more and more these days, so at the next HR Therapy, Dr. Ken Matos and I are digging beneath the shiny statistics to uncover what’s really happening with AI at work, and what those numbers mean for your people strategy.

It’s happening on Sept 29th, FYI.

Come save a seat and watch us interpret the data so it can finally make some sense!

🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF

I have this theory that some folks create a 14-step process for a thing because a 2-step process feels suspiciously easy.

Complexity can be the illusion of having a strategy, so it made me think of this question:

What part of your job are you overcomplicating because simplicity feels too risky?

🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW:

Efficiency might look great on a dashboard, but employees can absolutely tell when a streamlined process ends up making their lives worse.

If something saves you three hours but leaves everyone else confused that tradeoff deserves daylight.

Find one process that saves time but might be costing trust, and talk about it.

👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE

This is basically how I want everyone who joins Safe Space to feel! 😇

Read what members had to say here.

See ya on Friday!