Inside This Issue:
Welcome to your weekly newsletter by the Employee Experience Magazine.
We lead on mental load. There's a growing pile of advice about it now which we take a look at along with the one intervention that doesn’t exist yet, but we think it should.
And then the Employment Rights Act, where several changes land inside fifteen months and we explain what it means when they are put together.
Then a large preregistered experiment on what happens to people's willingness to contribute when they believe AI has already done the creative part, which is an interesting pattern to observe when we’re still in fairly early stages of adoption overall…
Featured Insights:
Harvard Business Review is right that mental load is invisible and expensive. Its fix asks leaders to make it visible, set boundaries and model recovery, which is three more jobs for the most loaded people in the building. Here's the case for subtraction instead, and why nobody ever gets round to it.
Three Employment Rights Act changes land within fifteen months: the tribunal claim window doubles, the unfair dismissal qualifying period drops from two years to six months, and the compensatory award cap disappears. Together they shift the economics of getting a dismissal wrong, and reframe what "all reasonable steps" on harassment actually means for the evidence you'll need to show.
Join us at UNLEASH in October
UNLEASH has officially released the agenda for UNLEASH Paris 2026, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store.
Taking place from 20–22 October, this year’s event will bring together HR, business and technology leaders to explore the big questions shaping the future of work. The programme covers everything from AI, skills and workforce strategy to reward, people data, operating models, talent and transformation.
It promises to be three packed days of fresh thinking, practical insight, new technology and valuable conversations with people who are helping to shape what comes next for work and the workplace. Take a look at the newly released agenda and start planning your visit.
Could you qualify for a free ticket or discounted entry? Click here to find out.
In other news
Stay current with key headlines and announcements from across the industry.
The Extra Point
One of the government business cases featured in this issue includes a useful calculation that most organisations never make.
The programme expects to help around 124,000 people into work over four years. But only about 20,000 of those outcomes are considered to have happened because of the programme. The other 104,000 would probably have happened anyway.
This is known as additionality. In plain English, it asks: did the programme actually make a difference, or did it simply happen alongside the result?
A retention programme reports how many people stayed. A wellbeing platform reports how many people used it. A leadership course reports how many participants were later promoted. But those figures do not tell us how many of those outcomes were caused by the intervention.
To get closer to the answer, you need something to compare against. That could be a control group, previous performance, or the usual rate of change before the programme began. It is worth doing because it helps you separate which programmes genuinely delivered results, and which just helped boost what was already going to happen anyway.
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