Charter

05/11/2025

Candidates are being less choosy about job offers, a recent analysis by Glassdoor suggests. Some 17% of people posting on Glassdoor in September that they received an offer said they declined it, compared to 20% in August and 26% in September 2024.

“We see that as an indication of concern and uncertainty, people wanting to seize opportunities when they get them,” said Owen Humphries, president of Glassdoor, the employer-rating platform. “It's a tough time to be a job seeker.”

It also suggests that employers of white-collar workers are more likely to actually land any new talent they’re seeking, making it a favorable time to be hiring.

Another sign of a weak job market.

04/11/2025

Working on a high-performing team can feel like pulling off a performance of The Nutcracker. Every dancer in the company hits their mark, twirls perfectly in sync, and catches their partner leaping into midair.

Offstage, there’s even more business leaders can learn from ballerinas about the leadership behaviors that help workers thrive in high-pressure environments.

In yesterday's Charter Pro briefing, we covered a recent research paper focused on a ballet company that has broader lessons for the two sides of perfectionism at work—and the dehumanizing and rehumanizing cues in workplace cultures that lead to them.

Read Charter Pro for insights from the paper and our conversation with Rachael Goodwin, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University and the co-author of the paper.

New research on leadership behaviors that lead to healthy performance pressure.

03/11/2025

As spending on genAI continues to grow, companies are eager to find a return on the investments they’ve made. There are signs that few have yet pulled that off.

Even more, trying to quantify those payoffs may be a trap, argues Liran Belenzon, co-founder and CEO of BenchSci, which makes AI applications for pre-clinical research and drug discovery.

Here's why, and what to do instead:

The challenges in measuring AI’s ROI. The state of white-collar jobs. The meeting behaviors driving CEOs crazy.

31/10/2025

Want to know how enterprises like Spotify and SAP are rethinking distributed work in 2025?

Join Running Remote and Charter for "Distributed Workplace Unboxed vol. 3," where you'll hear from leaders at Glean, Upwork, Zoom, HubSpot, Harvard, and more.

Each speaker gets 2 minutes to deliver a high-signal insight you can use immediately.

This is the playbook for enterprise distributed work. Don’t miss it.

Register here: https://runningremote.com/events/dwu-2025/

31/10/2025

Year-end reviews are approaching, many organizations are looking to constrain costs, and some leaders are heading into the holidays without the budget for raises, bonuses, or end-of-year perks that employees may be expecting.

How you show up now will determine whether your team enters 2026 discouraged or determined. In yesterday's Charter Pro Digest, Charter's Massella Dukuly shares her advice for how to lead with honesty, fairness, and care when money’s off the table:

How to motivate your team when budgets are tight and bonuses aren't on the table.

30/10/2025

When it comes to AI adoption, "you're starting to see the prophecy of McKinsey,” says Kian Katanforoosh, founder and CEO of AI-powered skills intelligence platform Workera and adjunct lecturer at Stanford.

The consulting firm writes that for a typical digital solution, for every $1 companies spend developing the technology, they should spend $1 on change management. For genAI, however, the firm says the ratio is closer to $3 on change management for every $1 spent developing and deploying a genAI solution. “And the truth is—we're seeing it now—it's actually probably $10 in people,” says Katanforoosh.

“The prophecy is now becoming a reality, which is all these companies are realizing the software [programs] are sitting, nobody's using it because they don't know how to use it, because business process automation is needed, because it actually doesn't automate the job—it automates maybe certain tasks or maybe it doesn't even automate, it augments the task. And you're asking a lot of your employees without actually enabling them…”

More from our conversation with Katanforoosh:

Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh on the state of enterprise AI adoption and why agents are transforming work in coding but struggling elsewhere.

29/10/2025

Often, the biggest thing holding leaders back is their own unconscious assumptions and limiting beliefs, argues executive coach Muriel Wilkins in Leadership Unblocked. These “hidden blockers…keep us locked in unproductive patterns and unable to move forward, and they’re so ingrained, so habitual, that they’re experts at eluding detection,” she writes.

More on how to replace those hidden blockers with more helpful beliefs, according to Wilkins:

Unconscious beliefs that block leaders and a practical framework for replacing them with mindsets that work.

28/10/2025

At this year's Charter Workplace Summit, Financial Times writer Isabel Berwick joined us onsite to report on the most pressing conversations about the AI rollout.

Her conclusion: The AI rollout is here—and it's messy. Check out the latest video from FT Working It on the most promising tactics for realizing AI's full potential, based on Berwick's conversations at CWS:

Businesses are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI for the workplace. But getting employees to use the tools to their full potential is a huge tas...

28/10/2025

One important role of conversations is the creation and sharing of knowledge, Microsoft chief scientist Jaime Teevan noted onstage during the Charter Workplace Summit. (She was talking about how artificial intelligence can facilitate that and enable the capturing of that knowledge.)

At the link below, you can download our Workplace Summit playbook, which encapsulates the extraordinary amount of knowledge created and shared during our fifth annual Summit, which took place on Oct. 14 and featured top executives, researchers, and other workplace leaders coming together to discuss a new playbook for winning at business, people, and AI.

It covers the most pressing talent-related issues of the moment—from economic uncertainty, change management, and AI to new models of leadership and the outlook for early-career jobs.

Download it here:

Download the playbook for the 2025 Charter Workplace Summit.

27/10/2025

When it comes to the skills of the future, Merit America founders Rebecca Taber Staehelin and Connor Diemand-Yauman are betting on "jobs that combine head and hands—things that require a real ability to problem solve, to have real technical knowledge coupled with physical manipulation," Taber Staehelin told Charter.

Even more, they're focused on the "meta skills that will serve learners through every step of their career journey. By that I mean skills like grit, like learning how to learn, time management, project management, motivation," says Diemand-Yauman

More from our conversation from the Merit America co-founders:

Why AI agent projects will be cancelled. What happens when you focus on the outcome of training rather than just skills involved. Your email inbox and the market signals you’re sending.

23/10/2025

Many leaders might assume that the best way to respond to employee feedback is to respond quickly with changes, but a recent research study reveals that such rapid shifts in leadership behaviors might actually backfire for managers.

“When it comes to perceptions of the change from your direct reports and followers, rapid changes without explanation or context might seem quite unbelievable and quite inauthentic,” says Danbee Chon, a professor of management at the University of South Florida Muma College of Business and lead author on the paper.

Here's what to do instead when you get upwards feedback about your leadership behaviors:

Research suggests leaders who respond too quickly to employee feedback risk appearing inauthentic. Here's what to do about it.

22/10/2025

“The allocations we observe—who gets a donated kidney, a seat in the best elementary school, or a job at Google—can seem arbitrary and unfair,” writes Professor Judd Kessler in "Lucky By Design." “But there are rules that dictate how things are allocated in hidden markets, even if we aren’t always aware of them.”

We read Lucky by Design and shared our favorite advice from Kessler on how to navigate and design these "hidden markets." Read our book briefing for more:

Strategies for navigating hidden markets, from job searches to email management.