Featuring scholarly and practitioner insights from HR and people leaders, industry experts, and researchers.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Mindy Vail about creating a supportive environment for organizational change. Mindy Vail has more than two decades of experience in leadership development, change management, education, and public speaking. Working with emerging leaders to veteran executives, her focus is cultivating a growth mindset and fostering resilience. Her new book, The Mindshift Effect: Where Change Management Is Redefined and Leadership Is Defined (April 16, 2024), provides a wellspring of inspiration for leading meaningful organizational change.  Check out all of the podcasts in the HCI Podcast Network (https://www.podbean.com/podcast-network/HCI) !

The year 2024 marked a breakthrough for AI integration in individual productivity, transforming AI into an indispensable personal assistant that could write emails, debug code, and create visuals—saving workers significant amounts of time daily. However, as we move into 2025, the challenge shifts from supporting individuals to enhancing collective intelligence within teams. Unlike the straightforward task of helping one person, aiding a team requires AI to navigate diverse personalities, conflicting ideas, and shared goals—much like coaching a basketball team rather than training a single player. This transition demands a new design paradigm for AI tools, where AI acts less like a know-it-all encyclopedia and more like a patient, neutral moderator facilitating collaboration, decision-making, and shared understanding. Highlights 🤖 2025 saw AI become a powerful personal assistant, boosting individual productivity dramatically. 🏀 The 2026 AI challenge is about enhancing collective intelligence, not just individual efficiency. 🧩 AI tools must evolve from providing answers to facilitating team collaboration and shared understanding. ⚠️ Beware of “work slop”—AI-produced outputs that look good but are flawed and costly to fix. 🧠 Overreliance on AI can cause cognitive de-skilling, weakening human problem-solving skills. 🚸 Entry-level workers risk losing growth opportunities as AI automates foundational tasks. 🗣️ Participatory design and psychological safety are essential for successful, trust-based AI adoption. Key Insights 🤖 From Solo Superpowers to Team Facilitation: The transition from AI as a personal assistant to AI as a team facilitator represents a fundamental shift in AI’s role. In 2025, AI was a tool that helped individuals complete tasks faster, akin to training a single athlete. Moving forward, AI must act like a coach orchestrating a team’s plays, managing interpersonal dynamics, and fostering shared goals. This requires AI to understand context, mediate conflicts, and synthesize diverse inputs rather than simply outputting answers. Such capabilities represent a deeper integration of AI into human workflows and social dynamics, pushing the boundaries of current AI design principles. 🕰️ Time Savings vs. Quality of Work: The initial excitement around AI adoption largely stemmed from the immediate and tangible time savings—writing drafts, summarizing documents, automating repetitive tasks. However, faster does not always mean better. The concept of “work slop” highlights the dangers of accepting AI outputs at face value. AI can produce superficially polished but fundamentally flawed work, leading to wasted time and eroding trust. This insight underscores that AI’s value lies not only in speed but in enhancing the quality and relevance of work, which demands smarter, more transparent AI behavior. 🧩 Design Challenge: Creating a Common Ground: AI for teams must bridge different perspectives and expertise, acting as a digital whiteboard where all ideas converge. For instance, in architectural design, AI should visualize the entire blueprint, highlight conflicts, and propose compromises rather than just speeding up isolated tasks. This requires AI to maintain context, track decisions, and facilitate negotiation—a departure from the isolated task-based AI tools of 2024. This insight points to a future where AI augments collective intelligence by enabling teams to see the “big picture” and make better decisions together. ⚠️ Risks of Cognitive De-skilling: Heavy reliance on AI for routine cognitive tasks can dull human skills. Just as constant calculator use can diminish mental arithmetic abilities, constant AI assistance can erode critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. When AI inevitably errs or faces novel situations, teams may be ill-equipped to respond. This highlights the importance of balancing AI assistance with active human engagement and continuous skill development to maintain a robust workforce capable of handling complexity and uncertainty. 🚸 Impact on Entry-Level Workers and Workforce Development: AI’s encroachment on routine tasks threatens traditional pathways for junior employees to learn the ropes and advance. If AI handles data organization, report writing, and research, new workers lose critical hands-on experience. This could create a “missing generation” of workers lacking foundational skills and leadership potential, endangering long-term organizational health. Addressing this requires intentional strategies to integrate AI as a learning aid rather than a replacement, ensuring junior staff have opportunities for growth and mentorship. #FutureOfWork #AI #CollectiveIntelligence #GenerativeAI #ResponsibleAI OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Hook - The AI Party For One Is Over 00:01:44 - Insight - From 'My AI' To 'Our AI' + The Pitfalls 00:04:43 - Action - Let Your People Cook + A Four-Step Plan

This report explores the pivotal transition from individual AI productivity to the development of collective intelligence within organizations. While initial adoption has yielded significant personal time savings, the next frontier focuses on how human-AI collaboration can enhance team dynamics and shared goals. The text emphasizes that successful integration relies on participatory design and worker trust rather than top-down mandates from leadership. It also addresses critical challenges such as labor market shifts for early-career professionals and the emergence of low-quality "workslop" that can hinder group efficiency. Ultimately, the research suggests that AI’s true value is determined by intentional organizational choices that prioritize human agency and skill development.

Abstract: This report synthesizes recent evidence on how artificial intelligence is reshaping work, drawing from Microsoft's 2025 New Future of Work Report and the broader research literature. While 2024 marked individual productivity gains from generative AI, 2025 signals a critical shift toward collective productivity—how teams, organizations, and communities can improve together with AI. Adoption continues to accelerate globally, with enterprise ChatGPT messages increasing eightfold year-over-year, yet organizational success depends heavily on employee engagement, trust, and participatory design rather than top-down mandates. Evidence reveals meaningful productivity gains and time savings, particularly in knowledge work, but also emerging challenges including AI-generated "workslop," cognitive deskilling risks, and mixed labor market effects concentrated among early-career workers. Human-AI collaboration is evolving from passive tool use to active partnership, requiring new interaction paradigms, robust common ground, and cognitively engaging workflows. Teams face distinct challenges as AI shifts from supporting individuals to enabling group work, demanding new evaluation frameworks, proactive agent behaviors, and careful attention to social dynamics. This report examines adoption patterns, workforce impacts, collaboration design, cognitive implications, and sector-specific transformations while highlighting that AI's ultimate value depends not on technical capabilities alone but on intentional organizational choices that prioritize human agency, skill development, and equitable outcomes.

This research explores digital detox as a strategic organizational response to the growing problem of technostress and the erosion of work-life boundaries. Excessive workplace connectivity is linked to diminished productivity, cognitive exhaustion, and employee burnout, prompting companies to implement structured disconnection initiatives. The text details evidence-based interventions such as email-free blocks, communication protocols, and technology redesigns that foster deep work and recovery. By examining case studies from major firms, the authors demonstrate that intentional disengagement can actually enhance long-term performance and talent retention. Ultimately, the source advocates for a human-centered approach to technology governance that balances digital connectivity with the essential need for psychological renewal.

This video addresses the increasingly pervasive “always-on” culture driven by digital technology in the modern workplace. It opens by illustrating how work-related notifications interrupt private life, blurring boundaries between professional and personal time. This constant connectivity, while intended to boost productivity, often leads to chronic stress, mental exhaustion, and burnout among employees, negatively impacting both individual well-being and organizational performance. The core issue lies in the erosion of clear boundaries around work hours, fueled by workplace cultures that equate immediate responsiveness with commitment. Highlights 📱 Digital technology blurs boundaries between work and personal life, creating an “always-on” culture. 😰 Constant connectivity leads to chronic stress, exhaustion, and disrupted sleep. 🚫 The erosion of boundaries causes decreased productivity, creativity, and increased burnout. ⏰ Clear temporal rules, like after-hours quiet time, help employees mentally disconnect. 🛑 Limiting communication channels and promoting micro-breaks improve focus and reduce cognitive overload. 👥 Leadership modeling healthy digital habits is vital for cultural change. 📊 Measuring stress and communication patterns helps organizations refine digital work policies. Key Insights 📵 Always-on culture undermines mental health and productivity: The persistent pressure to be available leads to chronic stress and burnout, which impair cognitive functions such as memory, focus, and problem-solving. This not only harms individual employees but also diminishes overall team performance and organizational innovation. Sustained high-alert states prevent the brain from entering restorative downtime necessary for creativity and deep thinking. 🛠️ Technology is a double-edged sword: While digital tools were designed to enhance efficiency, unchecked use can drain cognitive and emotional resources. The key is to use technology intentionally to support work, rather than allowing it to dictate employees’ time and attention. Structured breaks from digital communication restore balance and productivity. 🕐 Temporal boundaries are critical: Clear rules about when work communications should and should not occur—such as after-hours quiet times—enable employees to mentally “clock out.” Companies like Volkswagen demonstrate that disabling after-hours email delivery can significantly improve employee recovery and reduce stress. 📞 Simplifying communication channels reduces overload: Defining specific tools for distinct purposes (e.g., email for formal communication, chat for quick questions) prevents fragmentation of attention and reduces the cognitive load caused by switching between multiple platforms. This clarity helps teams collaborate more effectively without constant interruptions. 🚶 Micro-breaks and intentional downtime are essential: Small habits such as stepping away from screens, taking short walks, or scheduling walking meetings help maintain focus and prevent burnout. Organizational support for these habits, like Intel’s quiet time blocks, fosters an environment conducive to deep work and mental restoration. 👩‍💼 Leadership behavior shapes organizational culture: When leaders model healthy digital habits—such as disconnecting fully during vacations or respecting quiet hours—they send a powerful message that rest is valued. This top-down approach is crucial because systemic change depends on leadership commitment rather than individual effort alone. 📈 Measuring digital overload and stress guides improvement: Collecting data on after-hours email volumes, meeting hours, employee stress levels, and retention trends provides actionable insights for organizations to continuously refine their digital communication policies. This evidence-based approach ensures that initiatives to reduce digital overload are effective and sustainable. #DigitalDetox #Technostress #WorkLifeBalance #OrganizationalStrategy #DigitalWellbeing OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Problem → Promise (The Modern Dilemma and Hidden Costs) 00:01:51 - Proof (Evidence and Definition) 00:03:16 - Practice (Interventions, Modeling, and Momentum) 00:05:16 - Momentum (Modeling, Measurement, and Closing Call-to-Action)

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Jonathan Escobar Marin about his recent book, " LEAD TO BEAT: The Leadership Rhythm That Shapes Tomorrow." Jonathan Escobar Marin has been bridging the nuanced gap between strategy and execution – and between executives and their associates – for the world's leading corporations for over two decades. His distinguished efforts have resulted in an exceptional track record, marked by over 320 successful transformations across more than thirty-two countries. After leaving school at sixteen, he later transformed adversity into advantage, ultimately guiding global boards and C-suites across FMCG, retail, pharmaceutical, and tech sectors, where he has consistently empowered firms to outperform markets and dismantle organizational complacency.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Jevon Wooden integrating empathetic leadership into your strategies. Jevon Wooden is a sought-after speaker, coach, and author specializing in empathetic leadership. A veteran, CEO, and expert in emotional intelligence and DISC, he empowers leaders to build high-performing teams, foster thriving workplace cultures, and achieve sustainable business growth. Jevon's insights have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, and more.