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Hiii,

Transform is in full swing, and my brain is running at about 1000 miles an hour between sessions and newsletters. 🤪

My social battery will be empty by the weekend, but I won’t let any of that get in the way of our fun today!

This week, we're talking about Burger King inventing an AI to score employee friendliness…not their food quality or their speed, but their vibe. How that’s a coaching tool? TBH, I dunno.

We're also getting into the burnout that's hollowing out HR people everywhere, and there's some data on workaholism that I genuinely want you to print out and slide under your CEO's door with no context whatsoever. 

It's a full week. It's always a full week. 

Let's get into it!

✨ Don't forget: You can always vent, celebrate a win, or find support in Safe Space

✨ Don't forget: You can always vent, celebrate a win, or find support in Safe Space

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🍔 Does Burger King’s new AI headset take employee tracking too far?

The TL;DR: Burger King rolled out an AI headset called "Patty" that listens to employees and tracks whether they're saying things like "please," "welcome," and "thank you," then shares that data with managers. The company says it's a coaching tool, not a surveillance one.

Employees, unsurprisingly, are not thrilled...

My POV: The second you start monitoring how someone says hello, you've stopped trusting them, and employees can feel that. Once you lose trust, it’s extremely difficult to get back!

HR leaders should pay attention here because the line between "coaching tool" and "gotcha mechanism" is thinner than most companies want to admit, and how you roll out tech like this says everything about your culture. 

If your people are already anxious about AI taking their jobs, adding a friendliness score to the mix is nothing more than pressure with a softer name.

On the mic this week: Eva Bak is a strategic people leader with 15 years of experience across talent acquisition, career development, and employee engagement. Before HR, she worked as a mental health therapist, bringing a deep understanding of human behavior and emotional well-being into her work. She’s known for building people-first, values-driven cultures while helping both businesses and humans thrive (yes, both at the same time).

Pin this:

• Burnout is what happens when stress cycles never get completed and just stack up.
• HR is uniquely vulnerable because it’s a helping function with high emotional labor, low visibility, and constant dual loyalty.
• Lack of community and safe outlets makes burnout worse, and unfortunately, HR often has no place to process what they carry.
• Warning signs include overworking, disengagement, memory issues, and even too positive or neutral feedback masking deeper issues.

My H*ly Sh*t Moment: The scariest part of burnout is that feeling of slowly losing connection to work you once loved, while still showing up every day like everything’s fine.

▶️ Press Play

Stat: Nearly half of employees say they’re workaholics

My spiral: We've built entire cultures around the optics of overwork, rewarding presence over output and hours over impact. 

And yet here's the data confirming what most of us already know, which is that more hours is NOT the same as better work! 

For People Leaders, this is the conversation we need to be having with our executives, because if 80% of workers are telling us the extra hours aren't moving the needle then what are we even doing???

Somewhere right now, a great candidate is ghosting your hiring manager, a req has been open for like 90 days, and leadership is asking why you can't just move faster! 🫠

If that sentence hit a little too close, this month's HR Therapy on March 31st was made for you. 

We're getting into all of it:

• Why hiring feels like organized chaos
• Why your timeline is so dang slow 
• What it looks like to finally run a clean process that candidates and orgs alike can enjoy

Consider this your opportunity to reset and get it right…so join us and let’s have some fun!

🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF

❤️ HR people are the worst at this…and I say that with full love because I am one. 

We're so wired to hold everyone else up that sometimes our own boundaries become completely optional. 

So today, I want you to sit with this one:

“When was the last time you said no and actually meant it?”

🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW:

This one might feel a little uncomfortable, but that's exactly why it works! 

The best thing you can do for your team right now is just keep it real and ask a question nobody else is brave enough to ask:

"What's one thing you're pretending is fine, but isn't?"

👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE

Only a people person would turn their job search into a vendor evaluation, and honestly, I respect the efficiency.

Read what members had to say here.

I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears.

Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. 

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