Love Letters to Troublemakers

If your annual performance review feels less like an objective assessment of your labor and more like a high-stakes humiliation ritual, you are not imagining it.

In this episode of Love Letters to Troublemakers, Aparna Rae and Rob Hadley take on one of corporate America’s most toxic and anxiety-inducing sacred cows: the modern performance management industrial complex. From Peter Drucker’s 1950s "Management by Objectives" to Jack Welch’s brutal 1980s "vitality curve," we trace how an alignment tool degenerated into a gladiatorial bloodsport designed to justify rankings, suppress raises, and preserve executive bonuses.

Drawing on empirical research from Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall’s Nine Lies About Work, Rob pulls back the curtain on the statistical joke of the 5-point scale and the "Idiosyncratic Rater Effect"—proving that over 60% of a review score reflects the quirks, biases, and personality of the rater, not the performance of the person being rated. Aparna shares her own encounter with the "illusion of objectivity" during an interview at the Gates Foundation, and they examine how real-time AI surveillance tools (from mouse-tracking to Slack sentiment analysis) are actively stripping out human context to automate bias at scale.

Finally, we tackle the alternative: What happens when leaders stop funding multi-million-dollar consulting frameworks, ditch forced curves, and instead treat work as a collaborative group project focused on obstacle removal?

RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED:

• Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall

• Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux

• Aparna Rae’s Work & Updates: aparnarae.com

• Send your absurd calibration stories, PIP letters, and corporate screenshots to: [email protected]

#LoveLettersToTroublemakers #AparnaRae #RobHadley #PerformanceManagement #StackRanking #VitalityCurve #CorporateCulture #FutureOfWork #PeopleAnalytics #NineLiesAboutWork

"The machine is not coming to save you, but we can save each other. Your W-2 job, your corporate budget, your vendor lists—those are tools. You can use them to extract maximum efficiency for shareholders who are never gonna know your name, or you can use them to redistribute wealth, power, and safety so nobody in our community gets pushed to the margins." — Aparna Rae

IN THIS EPISODE

For years, white-collar workers—especially women and people of color—were sold a neat little playbook: lean into every committee, negotiate your salary, polish your personal brand, and the corporate meritocracy will reward you. But after conducting in-depth interviews with 40 mid-career women pushed out of traditional employment and forced into entrepreneurship, Aparna Rae brings the receipts: meritocracy is a lie. At the first hint of economic and political friction, organizations scrubbed equity from their mission statements, eliminated the roles of the very people who built their cultures, and left workers with elevated resting heart rates and unmanageable workloads.

Joining Aparna in the studio are two co-conspirators who survived the corporate trenches together at Nike: Dr. Evelyn Carter, author of Was That Racist?, and Season 1 co-host Lars Gallien. Together, they unpack what happens when the "canary in the coal mine" metaphor becomes a lived reality. From navigating the physical toll of opening Slack notifications to the practical power of overriding an executive contract veto to get an outsider paid, this episode breaks down why we must stop playing the single-player game of corporate self-advocacy and start building an underground network of workplace mutual aid.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH

If the corporate machine will never love you back, how do you use your access, proximity, and budget right now to protect and redistribute resources to someone outside the walls?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU (KEY TAKEAWAYS)

• Burnout is not simply an issue of working long hours; it is the direct physical result of giving 150% to a system that refuses to reciprocate. When companies trade meaningful security for symbolic perks, the nervous system pays the bill.

• If you have budget authority, vendor power, or a seat at the decision-making table, stop trying to run an empire at maximum efficiency. Use your social and political capital to override internal risk aversion, push back on corporate blacklists, and direct paid work to marginalized practitioners.

• Bridging cross-cultural divides requires moving beyond the transactional "quid pro quo" networking model. High-context solidarity means proactively tracking what your peers need and offering support without waiting for them to navigate the shame of asking.

• Sustainable career longevity begins by asking, "Who am I outside of late-stage capitalism?" Reconnecting with community gardens, school PTA boards, creative arts, and neighborhood care isn't a distraction from work—it’s the antidote to corporate isolation.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Book: Was That Racist? by Dr. Evelyn Carter

Research Reference: Aparna Rae’s field interviews with 40 mid-career women navigating corporate displacement and entrepreneurship

Episode Archive: Season 1, Episode 8 with Hala Saleh on the Myth of Self-Advocacy

Upcoming Article: Aparna Rae's upcoming analysis on women in work for Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnarae/

CONNECT WITH OUR GUESTS

Dr. Evelyn Carter: Visit her Official Website & Book Page | Connect on LinkedIn

Lars Gallien: Connect on LinkedIn

CONNECT WITH APARNA RAE

Website: aparnarae.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnarae

Share Your Story: Send a voice memo or email to [email protected]

"Organizations, they're not bystanders to AI and impact on jobs. They're the architects. And so when things happen, it was not by chance, by magic, by fiat from up above. There were people making choices." — Tauseef Rahman

IN THIS EPISODEWe are told that AI is here to liberate us from drudgery, but for many white-collar workers, it feels like the ultimate corporate "stick" to demand more production for less pay. AI is not just a neutral productivity tool; it’s a structural reorganization of who gets paid, how much, and why.

In this episode, Aparna and Rob are joined by Tauseef Rahman to look at the cold, hard receipts behind this shift. Tauseef leads US Workforce Rewards Solutions at Mercer and works globally with organizations on job design, total rewards, and reskilling strategies as AI reshapes roles.

We examine his latest white paper, Reinventing rewards for the AI multiverse, to ask the uncomfortable questions: Are companies genuinely redesigning work to elevate human capability, or are they using AI to hollow out jobs and cut costs under the guise of "efficiency"? We dive into the collapse of human expertise, the democratization of knowledge, and the impossible dilemma HR leaders face when caught between the human workforce and shareholder supremacy.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITHIf AI makes technical expertise abundant at near-zero cost, what does the organization owe a worker whose accumulated expertise it no longer values?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• The AI "Multiverse" is a Design Choice: The impact of AI on jobs is not predetermined. It can be used to elevate middle-tier workers to take on expert-level decision making, or it can be used to hollow out roles and replace human labor cheaply. Organizations are the architects of these outcomes.

• The Collapse of the "Expertise" Premium: For a century, compensation was built on the scarcity of expertise. AI is actively compressing the performance gap—raising the floor for novice workers while eroding the advantage of top performers. This breaks traditional pay-for-performance and "tournament" models of work.

• HR’s Impossible Dilemma: HR functions are caught in a bizarre balancing act between executing algorithmically-driven cost-cutting for shareholders and advocating for the realities of wage laborers.

• Know Where the Value is Created: Organizations often don't understand how work actually gets done on the ground. As a worker, knowing exactly what you do that creates tangible value is your best defense when executives try to "spray paint technology" over your role.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

White Paper: Reinventing rewards for the AI multiverse

CONNECT WITH TAUSEEF RAHMANTauseef Rahman leads US Workforce Rewards Solutions and oversees the Northern California and Hawaii market for the Workforce and Rewards business at Mercer. He spends his time thinking about where work is heading and how AI reshapes what organizations need from their talent strategy.

LinkedIn: Tauseef Rahman

Are Nonprofit Boards Failing the Sector? The Cost of Dysfunction & How to Fix It

Did you know there are nearly two million nonprofit organizations in the United States, generating roughly $3.5 trillion in annual spending? Yet, at the helm of most of these organizations are volunteer governing boards that are frequently lost in their own mythos and self-importance.

This week, we are dismantling the archaic architecture of nonprofit boards. Far too many people join boards just to feel good, attend galas, and stroke their egos, leaving the actual governance and mission delivery to suffer.

Host Aparna Rae is joined by Juliet Buder and Mina Velamoor, authors of Measuring Governance to Optimize Nonprofit Impact. We dig into the "give or get" rule, the financial bleed caused by executive turnover, the toxic consequences of treating governance like a speed limit, and why the sector might need to eliminate volunteer boards entirely.

IN THIS EPISODE, WE DISCUSS:

• Why board seats are often treated as high-society perks rather than serious fiduciaries of public trust.

• Why ineffective administrators and disengaged board members are allowed to stick around in nonprofits when they would be fired immediately in the corporate world.

• How performative boards drive the highest leadership turnover rate of any sector, bleeding resources away from the community.

• Juliet and Mina’s data-driven approach to holding boards accountable and measuring their actual impact on the mission.

• Why complex, high-stakes nonprofits should consider paying board members to transform volunteer cheerleading into professional labor with real liability.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Read Aparna’s latest article in Nonprofit Quarterly: Nonprofit Boards Are Failing the Sector: Here’s How to Fix Them

• Explore Juliet and Mina's research and the full meta-analysis: Governance for Impact

CONNECT WITH US:If you aren't ready for the friction of real change, it's time to step out of the leather armchair. Keep making good trouble wherever you are!

Visit us at aparnarae.com

Welcome to Season 2 of Love Letters to Troublemakers (formerly Circle Back Club): (Not) The Best Places to Work.

In our season premiere, Aparna Rae and co-conspirator Rob Hadley take a sledgehammer to the multi-million-dollar industrial complex of workplace certifications.

From the pay-to-play economics of top workplace lists to the glaring hypocrisy of companies like Enron and Amazon taking home awards, we pull back the curtain on why these lists actually exist.

We explore how these certifications are designed to inflate executive egos, act as recruitment shields, and gaslight workers into thinking a toxic culture is actually a personal failing. We also examine why identity-based lists—like "Top Employers for Women"—often mask deep pay disparities and a total lack of basic accommodations for working mothers.

Rob shares his insider perspective from running an employee experience analytics group on how these surveys are manipulated and why a company-wide ranking is essentially meaningless when culture varies drastically from one department to the next.

If your work feels absurd right now, you are not imagining it. Join the investigation, send us your worst corporate memos, and let's dissect the sacred cows of corporate culture together.

TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - The inherent hypocrisy of wanting to be on a "Best Places" list00:45 - Welcome to Season 2: Taking a sledgehammer to sacred corporate cows04:57 - The reality of running employee experience analytics07:20 - How the lists actually work: Application fees and manipulated surveys10:24 - The Hall of Fame of Harm: Enron, Starbucks, and Amazon12:59 - Mouse vibrators and workplace surveillance13:38 - The $200k healthcare executive docked pay for a lack of keystrokes16:23 - Why identity-based lists are often the most frustrating and deceptive24:15 - Executive ego and screaming over bonus stoplight charts37:40 - The Verdict: Keep it, fix it, or let it die?

RESOURCES & LINKS:

• Website: https://aparnarae.com

• Send your stories and redacted screenshots: [email protected]

#LoveLettersToTroublemakers #AparnaRae #FutureOfWork #CorporateCulture #BestPlacesToWork #WorkplaceSurveillance #HRCompliance #Bestplacestowork #greatplacestowork

Welcome to Season 2 of Love Letters to Troublemakers (formerly Circle Back Club). This season, we are launching an open-source investigation into the sacred cows of modern work culture - the practices, policies, and habits everyone performs but nobody actually believes in.

From the award badges your company paid a ton of money for, to wellness apps masking unmanageable workloads, to "unlimited" PTO that you can never actually take, we are putting corporate absurdity on trial. Every episode, we ask where these policies came from, who they actually serve, and what would work better, before delivering a final verdict: keep it, fix it, or let it die.

If work feels absurd right now, you're not imagining it. Only one out of three people feel respected at work. It’s a design problem, and it’s following us home to our families, our neighborhoods, and eventually, the ballot box.

CALL TO ACTION: Be our sources. Send us the memos, job postings, and Slack messages that made you stare at a wall, and we'll read the best ones on air. New episodes drop on Thursdays.

📧 [email protected]

"We have lost the art of struggle... We need strong neural pathways built through pressure, not stress, but pressure. And that comes through challenging our thinking." — Ruhee Meghani

IN THIS EPISODE

The AI train has left the station. While media headlines fixate on tech giant valuations, compute power, and data center energy consumption, a quieter crisis is taking place inside the daily lives of white-collar workers. We are told AI will free up our time and build capacity, yet daily users are experiencing unprecedented levels of cognitive exhaustion, job precarity, and structural anxiety.

In this episode, Aparna Rae is joined by Ruhee Meghani, founder of Allied Collective, calling in from Melbourne, Australia. Australia leads the world in progressive workplace safety legislation, formally classifying workplace stress, low job control, and poor organizational change as legally enforceable psychosocial hazards.

Aparna and Ruhee examine AI through this regulatory lens, moving past tech hype to ask the human questions: How does cognitive offloading erode critical thinking and creativity? How is AI surveillance destroying psychological safety? And why is "AI transformation" often driven by executive FOMO rather than true organizational need?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• The 17 Psychosocial Hazards: Australia legally regulates psychological injury from 17 distinct hazards—including high job demands, lack of job control, poor organizational change management, and remote isolation.

• The Cognitive Gym: Replacing human reflection, writing, and problem-solving with AI shortcuts strips our brains of the "sustained pressure" required to build strong neural pathways, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence.

• AI Surveillance as Structural Harm: Keystroke tracking, mouse-movement metrics, and video emotion/engagement scoring create intense workplace anxiety and erode workplace trust.

• The "Work Slop" & Efficiency Paradox: AI tools rarely reduce workloads; they accelerate output expectations, compress deadlines, and flood workflows with low-quality content.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Australia's Safe Work Framework: Safe Work Australia Psychosocial Hazards

• Documentary: Coded Bias (Directed by Shalini Kantayya)

• Philosophical Frameworks: The Eight Limbs of Yoga & Samadhi (Self-Actualization)

CONNECT WITH RUHEE MEGHANI

• Website: alliedcollective.com.au

• Ruhee Meghani on LinkedIn

"Work across so many sectors trains us to treat real-world human problems like abstract strategy exercises." — Aparna Rae

IN THIS EPISODE

Are you tired of staring at a 50-slide strategy deck that feels entirely disconnected from the real world? In this episode, host Aparna Rae is joined by innovation researcher, knowledge architect, and equity designer Dr. Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon to explore the "sense-making trap" of white-collar professional life.

Together, they unpack why knowledge workers feel comfortable analyzing systemic issues from behind a screen but freeze when faced with relational, community-level work. Pierce introduces the concept of exposure therapy for changemakers, explaining why embodied knowledge matters more than theoretical frameworks, how philanthropic power turns communities into chessboards, and why you don’t need a massive grant to start making change.

From community weaving canvases to "social judo," this episode is your blueprint for getting your reps in and moving from thinking to doing.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH

Is your action for you, or is your action for we?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• Embodied Knowledge vs. Abstraction: You cannot learn how to swim by watching videos; you have to get in the water. White-collar workers need exposure therapy to the communities they are trying to impact.

• Start Small and Get Your Reps In: Build your changemaking muscle locally—through neighborhood associations, mutual aid groups, school boards, or simply paying forward a local need.

• Healthy Communities Feel Like a Forest: Ground your networks in biological ecosystems rather than brittle, top-down castles with moats.

  
  

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Relationality by David Jay

• Beautiful Trouble (Toolkit & Library) — beautifultrouble.org

• Tesa Collective (Movement-organizing games) — tesacollective.com

• One Piece (Anime/Manga governance model)

  
  

CONNECT WITH DR. PIERCE GORDON

Explore his curated social change library and framework at piercegordon.me

"Brands are for products. People are defined by stories. And when they tell those stories in powerful ways, there is nothing more magnetic."

IN THIS EPISODE

If you have ever felt dirty trying to "build a personal brand" on LinkedIn, or cringed at the pressure of corporate self-promotion, this episode is your antidote.

Aparna is joined by Amanda Hirsch, former Editorial Director of PBS.org and CEO of Mighty Forces - a storytelling company designed explicitly for people who give a damn. Together, they tear down the sterile, hyper-optimized machine of "personal branding" to discuss why brands belong to products, while human beings belong to stories.

Changing this narrative requires immense courage. Too often, white-collar workers face deep-seated fear and severe corporate retaliation when they try to step away from compliance and speak out. The system is designed to keep us quiet and it is time we reclaim our voice.

Aparna and Amanda break down why your authentic, intentional voice matters more than ever right now. Your true perspective is not a personal brand to be managed for algorithms – it is a non-negotiable tool for collective liberation and real structural change.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH

What’s possible when we share our stories - for ourselves and others?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• Ditch the Corporate Brand Label: Humans are not products or companies. When we force ourselves into marketing caricatures, we strip away our nuance.

• The Self-Promotion Gap: Women and marginalized professionals consistently struggle to advocate for their own brilliance online due to societal penalties—but rewriting your LinkedIn profile to reflect your true impact is a necessary, collective reclamation of space.

• From Striving to Collective Belonging: Storytelling shouldn't be a solo performance designed for individual gain. The deep medicine our world needs right now is showing up in the public square.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Learn more about Amanda’s work at mightyforces.co

• Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahirsch/

• Improvising Adulthood: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Amanda Hirsch

Send us your stories, thoughts and connect with Aparna at [email protected]; circleback.club or aparnarae.com

"No billionaire can pull off theft in broad daylight without the help of everyday professional class workers who choose to stay silent or act out of outright complicity."

IN THIS EPISODE We like to think that modern organizations are deeply objective, metrics-driven spaces. But what happens when objective data rubs up against the financial and personal goals of senior leadership? Let's say it plainly: the evidence typically loses.

In this summer bonus episode, Aparna Rae goes completely solo to unpack how data has been weaponized as an employer risk-management apparatus rather than a tool to protect people. Drawing from shocking insider stories—including a healthcare CHRO who cherry-picked engagement data to safeguard executive bonuses and a retailer that outright denied a warehouse team’s tactical request for winter gloves—Aparna challenges us to look closely at the middle tier of everyday professionals who make brazen extraction possible.

We're also looking closely at the education sector, exposing the multi-million dollar EdTech fraud schemes birthed directly by the Forbes "30 Under 30" pipeline, the pseudo-science behind corporate stack ranking, and the fine print that completely dismantles McKinsey’s most famous diversity case studies.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH When data flatters power a little too neatly, do you have the structural courage to double-click and ask where it came from?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU * The "30 Under 30" to Indictment Pipeline: The collapsing infrastructure of companies like All Here proves that the Venn diagram of founders committing massive investor fraud and the people celebrated on elite tech lists is practically a complete circle.

• McKinsey’s Replicability Crisis: Independent scientific researchers proved that the famous studies linking diversity to financial performance got the arrow backward. Strong corporate profitability allows companies to invest in diversity, not the other way around. We should invest in equity because humans deserve a dignified way of making a living—not because it pads a spreadsheet.

• The Cost of Truth-Telling: Highlighting Sarah Wynn-Williams’ groundbreaking memoir, Careless People, and the lengths to which tech oligarchs will go to legally silence corporate whistleblowers.

• The File vs. The Floor: Filing a business license is not evidence of income. Real data fidelity requires precise, continuous accurate representation.

RESOURCES MENTIONED * Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

• Green & Hand Research on the replication failure of McKinsey's diversity metrics

• Season 1, Episode 6 with Dr. Nicole DeKay on the psychological harm of stack ranking

CONNECT WITH US Our digital space: aparnarae.com

Send this episode to a data lover or people analytics professional in your circle: [email protected]

"The room isn’t empty because we stopped wanting to learn. It’s empty because we’ve made it harder to feed the hunger."

IN THIS EPISODE

Have you noticed that your interest in webinars, certificates, and professional cohorts has completely plummeted over the last couple of years?

You are not alone.

Sign-ups are down, virtual attendance is dropping, and the energy in professional learning spaces feels hollow.

In this special summer mini-episode, Aparna Rae digs into the data behind our collective white-collar exhaustion to share a working theory: We broke Maslow’s hierarchy.

Aparna breaks down the steep "cognitive tax" of job precarity, the quiet slashing of corporate training budgets, and the very real reason why your tolerance for generic upskilling webinars has completely cratered.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH

When organizations demand that workers "bootstrap" their own professional development during a historic decline in high-skill jobs, who actually has the cognitive margin to show up?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• Survival Mode is Cognitively Expensive: When you are calculating immediate bills or navigating layoff anxiety, your brain naturally prioritizes food, shelter, and caregiving over an abstract AI literacy course.

• The "Bullshit Meter": If a team has been cut in half while responsibilities double, workers have zero patience left for panel presentations.

• Learning Outside the W2 J-O-B: White professionals are rejecting hollow corporate upskilling, but they are deeply hungry for real, tangible skills 0 art, cooking, knitting, gardening, and connecting with nature.

CONNECT WITH US

Our digital home: circleback.club; aparnarae.com

Share how you’re experiencing learning and bandwidth in your own life: [email protected]

Who Built This?

The History of Modern Corporate Culture.

If you’ve ever felt like a replaceable cog in a machine that values spreadsheets over people, it’s because the system was redesigned to feel exactly that way.

IN THIS EPISODE Aparna and Lars sit down with finance veteran Bachul Koul to trace how we moved from small, community-rooted businesses to a world where "shareholder primacy" is the only law that matters. We dig into the 1970s shift that turned managers into enforcers of the bottom line and explore how the saturation of "junk" products has hollowed out the meaning of our daily labor. It’s a look at the "frozen middle" of management and the moment "burnout" became an official part of the human experience. This isn't just a history lesson; it's a map to help us find our way back to a definition of value that actually includes our humanity.

THE QUESTION WE'RE SITTING WITH If the world will never define "enough" for you, how do you calculate it for yourself?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

• Calculate Your "Enough": Reflect on what a beautiful life looks like to you and the actual cost required to support it, rather than chasing external markers of success.
• The Employee Primacy Block: Reclaim your time by putting a two-hour "made-up meeting" on your calendar this week to nap, move your body, or simply rest.
• Human Connection over Productivity: Break the isolation of the "shareholder model" by asking a coworker what they actually care about outside of their deliverables.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business — Alfred Chandler Jr. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-visible-hand-the-managerial-revolution-in-american-business-isidor-straus-professor-of-business-history-emeritus-alfred-dupont-chandler/1232ccd5ecda54c5?ean=9780674940529&next=t
• The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits — Milton Friedman, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
• Ownership Works — An organization focused on providing all employees with a stake in the value they help https://ownershipworks.org/create
• Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) — A community of tech workers organizing for labor rights and ethical technology https://techworkerscoalition.org/
• Stone Butch Blues , Leslie Feinberg https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/
• The Invisible Hand, Adam Smith https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=the+invisible+hand+adam+smith%27
• Working Class History Podcast https://workingclasshistory.com/podcasts/
• Corporate Erin https://www.instagram.com/corporate_erin/

CONNECT WITH US

Bachul Koul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashomati-bachul-koul/

Aparna on LinkedIn:linkedin.com/in/aparnarae

Lars on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien

Want to bring this conversation into your organization? Aparna and Lars speak at HR conferences, Fortune 1000 ERGs, and philanthropic foundations. Reach out at [email protected].

New episodes every week. Follow Circle Back Club so you never miss one.

You're not burned out because you're weak — you're burned out because the system was designed this way. This isn't a self-help episode. It's a reality check — and the beginning of something better.

IN THIS EPISODE

You already know something is wrong. Maybe it's the Sunday dread, or the way your stomach drops when your boss Slacks you at 9pm, or the creeping feeling that you've given everything to a job that could disappear tomorrow. In this first episode, Aparna and Lars name what most of us have been too scared, too busy, or too gaslit to say out loud. They dig into the real data on white collar layoffs and disengagement, expose the moral compromises baked into everyday corporate work — from Project Nimbus to ICE contracts — and get into what all of this is doing to our bodies, our families, and our democracy.

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

Listen to your body this week. In your next meeting, pause and ask yourself: what does my body feel right now? Notice your posture, your jaw, your breathing. You don't have to do anything with what you find — just track it. Your nervous system has been paying attention even when your brain checked out.

Name it to change it. This week, resist the urge to treat your work stress as a personal failing. The layoffs, the moral compromises, the exhaustion — none of it is because you aren't resilient enough. It's structural. And structural problems need collective responses.

RESOURCES

• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory — David Graeber. The anthropologist who argued that corporations have convinced us being busy is morally virtuous — and what that's done to us. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-Graeber/9781501143335
• Ruined by Design — Mike Monteiro. The core idea: the world is working exactly as designed. If it's broken, that's on us. https://www.ruinedby.design
• No Tech for Apartheid — The worker-led campaign of Google and Amazon employees organizing against Project Nimbus. Follow them, support them. https://www.notechforapartheid.com
• Coworker Solidarity Fund — Financial support for the 50+ Google workers fired or arrested for protesting Project Nimbus. Donate here. https://coworkerfund.org/get-funded/googlers-fund-application
• Gallup: U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low — The data behind the decade-low engagement numbers: only 31% of U.S. workers engaged in 2024. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-sinks-year-low.aspx
• Gallup: State of the Global Workplace Report — The broader annual report on global engagement, wellbeing, and what it's costing us. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
• Stanford Business School research on workplace mortality — Studies linking toxic workplace environments to over 120,000 deaths per year in the U.S. and 5–8% of annual healthcare costs. https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/new-stanford-research-says-5th-leading-cause-of-death-is-workplace.html
• McKinsey Health Institute — Research showing toxic workplace behavior is the single largest predictor of negative employee outcomes — more than twice the impact of all positive practices combined. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/present-company-included-prioritizing-mental-health-and-well-being-for-all
• CONNECT WITH US

Aparna on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aparnarae

Lars on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien

Got an ick? Got a hope? We want to hear from workers. Send us your story — written or as an audio recording — to [email protected]. We'll weave your voice into the show.

Want to bring this conversation into your organization? Aparna and Lars speak at HR conferences, Fortune 1000 ERGs, and philanthropic foundations. [email protected]

New episodes every week. Follow Circle Back Club so you never miss one.

The Circle Back Club envisions a future of work grounded in community, wellbeing, dignity, and care instead of endless financial growth and burnout. When you join the Circle Back Club, you’re joining a community committed to challenging the status quo. We’re circling back and asking the tough questions, like: “what if it didn’t have to be this way?”

CONNECT WITH US

Aparna on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/aparnarae

Lars on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-gallien

Want to bring this conversation into your organization? Aparna and Lars speaks at HR conferences, Fortune 1000 ERGs, and philanthropic foundations. [email protected]

New episodes every week. Follow Circle Back Club so you never miss one.