Vol. 2 No. 1 (2026): Work, Fairness and Technology

This study follows 1,200 employees across 14 organisations over three years to examine how flexible scheduling shapes wellbeing, retention and perceived fairness. Drawing on annual surveys and administrative records, we compare employees with stable, expanding and reduced access to flexible arrangements, including compressed weeks, remote days and self-managed shifts. Multilevel growth models show that increased flexibility is associated with lower emotional exhaustion and higher job satisfaction, with the strongest gains among caregivers and employees with long commutes. These benefits depen…

Automated screening tools are now widely used to shortlist job applicants, and their vendors often present procedural transparency as a guarantee of fairness. This article examines that claim. We analyse 46 hiring systems used by mid-sized employers, combining audits of published decision rules with interviews of recruiters and applicants. We find that making a procedure visible does not prevent unequal outcomes when the data used to train or tune the tool reflect earlier patterns of exclusion. Applicants also read transparency differently from designers: many treated detailed scoring explana…

Hybrid work has changed the conditions under which team members decide whether to speak up, admit mistakes or challenge a colleague. This mixed-methods investigation asks how psychological safety develops when part of the team is co-located and part is remote. We surveyed 612 members of 88 teams and followed twelve of them for six months through interviews, meeting observation and communication records. Quantitative results show that psychological safety is lower in teams where in-person days are not synchronised, and that this gap is explained by uneven access to informal conversation. Quali…

Skills-based talent analytics promises to replace job titles and degrees with direct evidence of what people can do, yet organisations struggle to decide which skills data deserve trust. This article proposes a compact taxonomy for skills inference and evaluates it against supervisor-rated performance. We combine self-reported skills, assessment results and signals drawn from project and learning records for 3,400 employees in five companies, and we compare three inference approaches of increasing complexity. A simple model built on a well-defined taxonomy matched the predictive value of more…

This review considers a recent book that takes stock of how work is changing and asks what leaders, workers and policymakers should do about it. The author moves from automation and platform labour to hybrid offices, ageing workforces and shifting expectations of employers, supporting each theme with case studies and a wide reading of current research. We assess the strength of the central argument, the quality of the evidence and the usefulness of the practical chapters. The book is at its best when it connects technology to everyday decisions about schedules, skills and career paths, and we…

This review examines a book on leading organisations through uncertainty, written for managers who face rapid change without reliable forecasts. The author argues that leadership in unclear conditions depends less on prediction than on learning quickly, communicating honestly and keeping people connected to a shared purpose. Chapters on decision making, team resilience and ethical judgement draw on interviews with executives from healthcare, education and manufacturing, and each ends with exercises that readers can apply to their own settings. We consider how well the evidence supports the cl…