Track Changes On Podcast

Caroline Warnes
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Musings on the future of work, corporate accountability and burnout from an office escapee who thinks we can and should expect better www.trackchangeson.com

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Workplace Gaslighting, Bad Management or Something Else?

    Episode summary: How to tell if you're a victim of gaslighting at work Have you ever had something happen at work where the gap between what you remember and what your boss says happened is so big that you start questioning yourself? Gaslighting at work can be difficult to recognise, particularly when the same behaviours can also come from bad managers, dysfunctional systems or a corporate culture that’s toxic. This episode of Track Changes On looks at the research actually says about workplace gaslighting, how to recognise a pattern and why intent may matter less than the impact the behaviour is having on you. We also look at what gaslighting can tell us about corporate culture more broadly. If you’re interested in corporate culture explained, organisational culture explained or company culture explained through the behaviours people actually experience at work, this episode gets into what happens when an organisation allows reality to become something employees are expected to negotiate. In this episode * What gaslighting at work actually means * What gaslighting from a boss can look like * Why one strange interaction doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being gaslit * How repeated denial, contradiction and blame can develop into a pattern * Why intent isn’t necessarily required for workplace gaslighting * How bad managers and a toxic corporate culture can contribute to the problem * How to recognise when you’re starting to doubt your own judgement * Why documenting behaviour can be more useful than trying to prove someone’s intent * What to do if you think you’re experiencing gaslighting at work Research referenced in this episode Kukreja and Pandey, Workplace Gaslighting: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of a Scale (2023), Frontiers in Psychology. This study developed a workplace-specific measure of gaslighting based on supervisor-employee relationships. The researchers identified behaviours including denying previous promises, misrepresenting what an employee has said, undermining complaints and telling someone they’re imagining things. The study identified two dimensions of workplace gaslighting: trivialisation and affliction.  Kincaid and Stalion, An Interdisciplinary Review of the Gaslighting Literature and Future Research Agenda (2026), Journal of Organizational Behavior. This review describes gaslighting as a pattern of repeated manipulative interactions that accumulates over time and destabilises someone’s confidence in their own interpretation or perception of reality. Importantly, the authors don’t treat deliberate intent as a requirement, recognising that these patterns can also emerge through routine, defensive or institutionally reinforced behaviour.  The review also examines the potential harm associated with gaslighting, including increasing self-doubt, reduced self-trust and internalised blame. Workplace consequences discussed in the literature include withdrawal, silence, absenteeism and turnover intentions.  Paige L. Sweet, The Sociology of Gaslighting (2019), American Sociological Review. Sweet examines gaslighting through the lens of social relationships and power, arguing that it needs to be understood in the context of structural and institutional inequalities rather than solely as an individual psychological behaviour. The paper focuses on intimate relationships rather than workplaces but provides an important foundation for understanding the role of power in gaslighting. Supporting the show If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, here are a few things I’ve created: 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with me elsewhere 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    Workplace Gaslighting, Bad Management or Something Else?

  2. Sep 30

    The Weird Psychology Behind Corporate Meeting Culture

    Episode summary: The weird psychology behind corporate meeting culture Corporate culture has a strange relationship with meetings. We complain about having too many of them, joke that they could have been an email and block out hours of our working week to attend them. Yet meetings remain deeply embedded in how companies communicate, make decisions and manage work. So why do companies have so many meetings? There’s some fascinating psychology behind meeting culture. Meetings make work highly visible, can create a sense that progress is being made and can change how responsibility for decisions feels when those decisions are made collectively. They’re also influenced by organisational hierarchy, including who gets invited, who gets heard and whose opinion carries the most weight. This episode of Track Changes On looks at corporate culture through the psychology of meetings and asks why something so many employees complain about remains such a dominant part of working life. It also explores the relationship between meetings and workplace productivity. In knowledge work, some of our most valuable work can be difficult to observe. Thinking, writing, analysing information or solving a difficult problem may look like very little from the outside. A meeting, by comparison, is highly visible: calendars are full, people are talking and everyone appears busy. That raises an interesting question about productivity culture. Are meetings always helping us do the work, or can talking about the work sometimes become a substitute for doing it? Of course, meetings have a legitimate role in company culture. Synchronous conversations can help people work through complex problems, respond to each other in real time and make use of social cues that are harder to reproduce asynchronously. The problem comes when meetings become the default rather than a deliberate choice. So how can you tell when a meeting is doing useful work? And what might our reliance on meetings tell us about organisational culture more broadly? In this episode * Why meetings are so deeply embedded in corporate culture * The psychology behind why meetings can feel productive * How meetings make work and employee activity more visible * Why collective decision-making can change how responsibility feels * How hierarchy and status influence what happens inside meetings * Why meeting culture can reduce the time available for focused work * What synchronous conversations genuinely do well * How to decide whether something actually needs a meeting Research referenced in this episode Rogelberg, Kreamer and Gray, Thirty Years of Meeting Science: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead (2026), Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. A review of decades of meeting research examining what makes meetings effective, how people behave within them and the role of factors including hierarchy and status in meeting participation. Research on shared responsibility in collective decision-making (2019). Research examining how responsibility changes when people make decisions collectively rather than individually. The literature suggests that sharing a decision with others can reduce some of the psychological burden associated with personal responsibility and affect feelings such as regret following a decision. Otter.ai and Steven Rogelberg, meeting research (2022). A study of 632 employees examining meeting attendance and the financial cost associated with meeting time. The research estimated substantial organisational expenditure on meetings, including meetings employees believed they could skip if they were kept informed about what happened. These figures are estimates based on survey responses and salary assumptions rather than direct measures of financial loss. Research on synchronous communication and social presence. Research into synchronous communication examines the value of immediate interaction and access to social and paralinguistic cues, including tone, facial expressions and other information that can be harder to communicate asynchronously. Supporting the show If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, here are a few things I’ve created: 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with me elsewhere 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    The Weird Psychology Behind Corporate Meeting Culture

  3. Sep 23

    The Problem With Work “Families”

    Toxic Workplace Culture: Why “We’re Like a Family Here” Is a Red Flag “We’re like a family here.” It’s a phrase that appears in job ads, interviews and conversations about corporate culture, and for some people it’s an immediate red flag. There are plenty of familiar signs of a toxic work environment, from micromanagement and excessive approval processes to workplace rules built around the assumption that employees can’t be trusted. Yet some of these toxic workplace behaviours point to a broader dynamic that gets far less attention: companies hiring capable adults, giving them significant responsibilities and then treating them as though they still need permission, supervision or verification to make ordinary decisions. There’s a term for this: workplace infantilisation. It overlaps with micromanagement and paternalistic management, but it can also be embedded in corporate culture rather than coming from one toxic or micromanaging boss. Research into workplace paternalism has even examined the familiar “we’re like a family here” metaphor, including the way it can position managers as parental figures and employees as the children. This episode of Track Changes On looks at the strange amount of permission-seeking we accept as a normal part of corporate life, from asking another adult for permission to take leave to needing approval for decisions that sit comfortably within our professional expertise. It also explores the contradiction between companies telling employees to take ownership while creating environments where asking permission is safer than exercising independent judgement. Research on autonomy at work suggests this distinction matters: autonomy-supportive leadership is associated with stronger motivation, engagement, job satisfaction and wellbeing. So what happens when a workplace says it trusts its employees, while its management practices communicate something very different? And could some of the behaviour managers complain about, including employees constantly seeking approval or refusing to make decisions, actually be behaviour the workplace has taught them? In this episode * What workplace infantilisation means and how it differs from micromanagement * Why “we’re like a family here” can create an uncomfortable parent-child dynamic at work * How excessive approval and permission-seeking can become part of corporate culture * Why employees may stop taking ownership when independent decisions repeatedly get questioned * What research tells us about employee autonomy, motivation and workplace wellbeing * How to distinguish legitimate workplace accountability from unnecessary control * Why toxic workplace behaviours don’t always come from a toxic boss Research referenced in this episode Slemp et al., Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review (2018), Motivation and Emotion. A meta-analysis of 72 studies examining autonomy-supportive leadership. The research found positive associations with autonomous motivation, job satisfaction, engagement and wellbeing, alongside negative associations with workplace distress. Alakavuklar, “We Are a Family” – A Critical Organizational Discourse Analysis (2009). Examines the use of family language within organisations and its relationship with paternalistic management. The paper discusses how the family metaphor can position managers as parental figures who direct and supervise employees while creating expectations around loyalty and obedience. Casey, “Come, Join Our Family”: Discipline and Integration in Corporate Organizational Culture (1999). Research examining the use of “family” and “team” metaphors in corporate culture and their relationship with organisational discipline and control. Rather than assuming family-oriented cultures necessarily empower employees, Casey examines how these cultural practices can regulate employee behaviour. Oravec, research on employee infantilisation and workplace monitoring (2024). Uses “employee infantilization” to describe constraints on employee agency, including situations where organisations effectively determine employees’ needs or treat their judgement as diminished. Reid, Industrial Paternalism: Discourse and Practice in Nineteenth-Century French Mining and Metallurgy (1985), Comparative Studies in Society and History. Examines the much longer history of paternalistic employment relationships and the use of family relationships to frame employer authority and worker dependency. Supporting the show If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, here are a few things I’ve created: 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with me elsewhere 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    The Problem With Work “Families”

  4. Sep 16

    Why Women’s Personalities Become Workplace Feedback

    Episode summary: Why are women still told to watch their tone at work? Companies say they want strong female leaders. Yet women are still more likely to receive workplace feedback about their personality, communication style and likeability. The problem is easy to dismiss as a question of behaviour. Sometimes people are rude, aggressive or difficult at work and managers should address it. The more interesting question is why research consistently finds women receiving different kinds of feedback from men, including more criticism focused on personality rather than specific skills or outcomes. In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes looks at the unwritten behavioural rules women learn to navigate at work, from being told to watch their tone or appear more approachable to expectations around smiling, appearance and being pleasant. Drawing on her own experience of learning to mask and manage criticism long before entering corporate life, she explores what happens when women start anticipating these expectations and policing themselves. She also looks at the research on gendered performance feedback, the competence-likeability double bind and emotional labour, and asks whether this additional behavioural workload may be one part of a much bigger story about why women find corporate work exhausting. In this episode - Why women receive more personality-based feedback at work- The difference between legitimate behavioural feedback and vague criticism about “tone”- Why assertive women can face a likeability penalty- How women learn to manage smiling, warmth and approachability at work- The additional emotional demands women can experience in corporate environments- What burnout and unpaid-work data can and cannot tell us about women’s exhaustion Research referenced in this episode Kieran Snyder, The Abrasiveness Trap: High-Achieving Men and Women Are Described Differently in Reviews (2014). Analysis of 248 performance reviews from 28 technology companies. The study found personality criticism in 71 of 94 critical reviews received by women compared with two of 83 received by men. Textio, Language Bias in Performance Feedback (2024). Analysis of more than 23,000 performance reviews across more than 250 organisations found women received 22% more personality-based feedback than men. Note: this is large-scale workplace research rather than a peer-reviewed academic study. Jampol, Rattan & Wolf, A Bias Toward Kindness Goals in Performance Feedback to Women (2023), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Across experimental studies and field data, researchers found feedback givers placed greater emphasis on kindness when giving critical feedback to women, associated with stereotypes about women's warmth. LaFrance, Hecht & Paluck, The Contingent Smile: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Smiling (2003), Psychological Bulletin. A meta-analysis covering 143 reports and more than 59,000 participants found women smiled more than men on average, with the difference varying substantially according to social context. Purvanova & Muros, Gender Differences in Burnout: A Meta-Analysis (2010), Journal of Vocational Behavior. Across 183 studies, women showed slightly higher emotional exhaustion while men showed higher depersonalisation. The average gender difference in emotional exhaustion was small. Gallup, workplace burnout data (2025). Among full-time US workers surveyed in Q4 2025, 31% of women compared with 23% of men reported feeling burned out very often or always. Across 2022–2025, the reported rate among women leaders averaged 29% compared with 19% among men leaders. Australian Bureau of Statistics, How Australians Use Their Time (2024). Among Australians performing unpaid work, women averaged 4 hours 53 minutes per day compared with 3 hours 52 minutes for men. Mothers of children under 15 also spent more time caring for children than fathers. Ybema et al., systematic review of gender differences in exposure to psychosocial work factors (2023). While gender differences were inconsistent across many workplace stressors, all seven included studies examining emotional demands reported higher exposure among women. Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    Why Women’s Personalities Become Workplace Feedback

  5. Sep 10

    The AI Industry Wants You to Be Afraid of Falling Behind

    Episode summary: Are we buying AI because we’re afraid not to? AI was initially sold as an extraordinary opportunity. Greater productivity, competitive advantage and new ways of working. Increasingly, however, another message has entered the conversation: adopt AI or risk being left behind. Workers are told their colleagues will have an advantage if they use AI. Companies worry their competitors are moving faster. Women are warned that lower rates of AI adoption could leave them particularly vulnerable as the technology changes the workplace. In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes looks at fear as an AI marketing tool and asks what happens when adoption starts to feel inevitable. She explores the commercial interests behind some of this messaging, what the research actually tells us about women and AI and the important difference between becoming more productive with AI and developing the underlying skills we need for our careers. In this episode * How fear of being left behind became part of the AI conversation * Why the idea that “AI won’t replace you, someone using AI will” deserves more scrutiny * What the research actually says about women’s AI adoption and occupational exposure * Why productivity gains do not automatically prove long-term business or career value * The difference between performing better with AI and developing expertise * Why companies and workers should still expect AI to make its case Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    The AI Industry Wants You to Be Afraid of Falling Behind

  6. Sep 2

    When Looking Busy Becomes the Job

    Episode summary: When looking busy becomes the job Do you ever feel like corporate work is sometimes one big performance? Being visible, staying online, attending meetings and keeping that little Teams dot green can all become evidence that you are working. Some jobs genuinely require presence and activity. But for knowledge workers hired for their expertise, judgement or creative thinking, visible activity can be a poor measure of the value they produce. In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes explores the difference between a performance culture and a performative culture, and what happens when organisations confuse activity with productivity. Drawing on her own experience of having some of her best ideas away from her computer, she looks at research into walking, creative thinking and the incubation effect to explore why valuable cognitive work does not always look like work. She also examines research into electronic performance monitoring and asks whether increasingly sophisticated employee surveillance actually improves performance. The episode also looks at return-to-office mandates and the performance of collaboration. If an organisation can measure how many people came into the office, does that tell it whether meaningful collaboration happened or whether the work improved? As AI changes how quickly knowledge workers can produce certain outputs, Caroline asks whether management practices built around visible activity are becoming increasingly disconnected from the work organisations actually need people to do. In this episode * Why visible activity can be a poor proxy for knowledge-worker productivity* What research into walking and incubation tells us about creative thinking* Why employee monitoring can change behaviour without improving performance* How return-to-office mandates can confuse physical presence with collaboration* Why AI makes the distinction between activity and outcomes increasingly important Research referenced in this episode Ravid, D. M., White, J. C., Tomczak, D. L., Miles, A. F. & Behrend, T. S. (2023). A meta-analysis of the effects of electronic performance monitoring on work outcomes. Meta-analysis of 94 independent samples involving 23,461 workers. The study found no evidence that electronic performance monitoring improved worker performance and found an association with increased worker stress. Oppezzo, M. & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. DOI: 10.1037/a0036577. Sio, U. N. & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. DOI: 10.1037/a0014212. Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature, 630, 920–925. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2. The randomised controlled trial of 1,612 employees found that hybrid working reduced attrition by one-third without damaging performance. Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created. 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    When Looking Busy Becomes the Job

  7. Aug 26

    When Did Companies Stop Valuing Our Time?

    Episode summary: When did companies stop valuing our time? Time is the one resource we can't replace. Yet at work, we have become remarkably comfortable with the idea that companies can ask for more of it without paying for it. Unpaid overtime, expanding workloads after workforce cuts and increasingly drawn-out recruitment processes all rely on a similar assumption: when the cost of someone's time sits with the individual rather than the company, that time can start to look free. In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes explores how becoming a parent and then a business owner changed the way she thinks about the value of her time. She looks at how the industrial model of work gave employers defined periods of workers' time, what happens when modern knowledge work removes those boundaries and whether AI-driven productivity gives us an opportunity to rethink the bargain. In this episode * Why time has become one of the most valuable things we give to work * How modern knowledge work has blurred the boundaries of the working day * Why workforce cuts can turn productivity into work intensification * How lengthy recruitment processes can become extractive of candidates' time * Who gets the time dividend when AI makes us more productive * Whether knowledge work should move towards a more outcome-oriented model Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    When Did Companies Stop Valuing Our Time?

  8. Aug 19

    Are Companies Cutting the Expertise They’ll Need Later?

    Episode summary: AI needs specialists. So what happens if we stop creating them? Generative AI is already changing the economics of specialist work. Organisations are looking at where AI can reduce their reliance on writers, designers, developers and other people with deep expertise. In the short term, the productivity argument can make sense. But what happens over the longer term if fewer people can make a living developing specialist skills? In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes looks beyond the immediate impact of AI on jobs to ask what happens to human expertise five, ten or twenty years from now. Drawing on her own experience as a writer, she explores how professional practice develops specialist knowledge, what organisations risk losing when they reduce that capability and why this could create problems for AI itself. She also looks at emerging research into human knowledge and model collapse, and asks whether organisations focused on today's efficiency gains are paying enough attention to where tomorrow's expertise will come from. In this episode * Why specialist expertise depends on years of sustained professional practice * What happens to the talent pipeline when fewer people can make a living from specialist work * Why reducing specialist capability could affect continuous improvement inside organisations * What emerging research says about AI, human learning and knowledge collapse * Why AI's continued reliance on human-generated knowledge raises a longer-term question about who will create that knowledge in the future Research referenced in this episode Acemoglu, D., Kong, D. & Ozdaglar, A. (2026). AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse. NBER Working Paper No. 34910. DOI: 10.3386/w34910. Read the NBER working paper Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature, 631, 755–759. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y. Read the Nature paper Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created. 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels 📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    Are Companies Cutting the Expertise They’ll Need Later?

  9. Aug 12

    What Happens When AI Makes Everyone a Specialist?

    Episode summary: AI, specialists and the empathy gap Generative AI has changed the way we work, but it has not changed work equally. For generalists, AI has opened up new possibilities, making it easier to write, design, analyse and create. For many specialists, the experience has been very different. Their life's work, often developed over decades, has become part of the knowledge that powers these systems. In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes explores the empathy gap emerging between specialists and generalists in the age of AI. Drawing on her own journey as a lifelong writer, she asks why provenance suddenly seems to matter less in conversations about AI than it does in almost every other part of our lives, and makes the case that acknowledging where AI's capabilities come from is not about rejecting the technology. It's about recognising the people behind it. In this episode * Why AI is creating an empathy gap between specialists and generalists * Why many specialists see their craft as a calling, not just a career * How generative AI was built on decades of accumulated human expertise * Why "it doesn't matter where it came from" can feel dismissive to the people behind that expertise * Why provenance, transparency and empathy should be part of the AI conversation Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    What Happens When AI Makes Everyone a Specialist?

  10. Aug 5

    The Case for Empathy in Corporate Leadership

    Episode summary: When did workplace empathy become a deadly sin? Empathy has become an unexpected target in leadership circles. A growing number of books and commentators argue that it makes leaders weak, clouds judgement and prevents organisations from making difficult decisions. But what if that argument is based on a misunderstanding of what empathy actually is? In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes explores why empathy is not the opposite of decisive leadership, but one of the foundations of good judgement. She examines the growing backlash against empathy, what history tells us about some of our most respected leaders, and why organisations should treat empathy as a core leadership capability rather than a personality trait. In this episode - Why empathy has become one of leadership's most controversial topics - The difference between empathy, agreement and good judgement - What history teaches us about empathetic leaders making difficult decisions - Why empathy should be considered a prerequisite for leadership - What your organisation's attitude towards empathy reveals about its decision-making culture Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Content referenced in the episode Caroline's recent Substack article on leadership and empathy Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    The Case for Empathy in Corporate Leadership

  11. Jul 29

    Why Two Different Truths Can Exist at Work

    Episode summary: What's happening to trust at work? Employee engagement has been falling since 2022, yet the latest Edelman Trust Barometer suggests most employees still trust their employer. So how can both be true? In this first episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes explores the difference between institutional trust and the psychological contract, and why employees may be spending more mental energy trying to reconcile the organisation they believe they work for with the one they experience every day. In this episode - Why one Instagram Reel sparked an unexpected conversation about trust - What Gallup and Edelman reveal about the modern workplace - The difference between institutional trust and the psychological contract - Why conflicting workplace signals create invisible cognitive work - What psychological contract breach might explain about declining engagement Companion article This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth. Content and research referenced in the episode - Caroline's Instagram reel on trust - Gallup employee engagement data - 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer - Research on corporate employee burnout Supporting the show If you enjoy Caroline's work and would like to support it, here are a few things she's created 🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs & insulated tumblers for corporate rebels📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment Subscribe Subscribe to Track Changes On for weekly conversations about the future of corporate work, AI, careers and organisational change. Connect with Caroline 📸 Instagram | 🧵 Threads | 🔗 LinkedIn Get full access to Track Changes On at www.trackchangeson.com/subscribe

    Why Two Different Truths Can Exist at Work
  • 11 Episodes

About

Musings on the future of work, corporate accountability and burnout from an office escapee who thinks we can and should expect better www.trackchangeson.com

Information

  • Creator
    Caroline Warnes
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Caroline Warnes
  • Show Website
    Track Changes On Podcast

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