Hello, People Leaders! ✨ If your team is still losing time to projects nobody remembers starting, this week’s issue may hit a little too close to home. Let’s talk about zombie projects before they eat another quarter of your productivity and budget.
On today’s agenda:
🌊 Don’t drown in AI
📈 Benefits pricing pressure
CULTURE CUE
⚡ Productivity Cleanup Challenge — Ask your team to list 1 recurring task or project they think should be paused, simplified, or automated. You may uncover your biggest time drain faster.
THE HR SPOTLIGHT
🧟 Zombie Projects: The Horror Story Draining HR Teams
If your HR team has projects that are technically “active” but nobody’s touched since the last reorg… oh dear, you may have workplace zombies. The scary part? These stalled initiatives quietly drain productivity, morale, and already-tight HR budgets.
👻 The Work that Refuses to Die - Zombie projects are becoming a bigger problem in cautious hiring environments. Atlassian’s report found that 44％ of workers entered 2026 dealing with stalled projects still marked “in progress,” with over 90％ reporting negative effects like stress, cluttered workloads, and lower productivity—ultimately impacting the bottomline.
🔦 HR’s Survival Kit - Small HR teams can’t afford “haunted” workloads. Give these cleanup moves a go:
Assign clear project expiration dates
Review inactive projects every quarter
Normalize shutting down low-value initiatives
Reward prioritization, not just constant activity
Sometimes the most strategic thing HR can do is finally say, “We’re not doing this anymore.”
TOGETHER WITH CUSTOMGPT AI
🌊 Everybody’s Drowning, and AI isn’t Helping HR
HR teams are swamped answering routine questions, and employees aren’t getting timely responses. “Just use AI,” someone tells you. 🙄
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FLASH VOTE
What usually causes projects to become “zombies” in your workplace?
LAST MONDAY’S POLL: HR teams are primarily focused on AI recruitment tools, performance & engagement platforms, and core HRIS systems as top areas of software exploration. It’s less about adding layers and more about tightening impactful systems.
WEEKLY GOODY REMINDER
Employee Handbook [Template]
Last week’s HR goody — simplify how you build and maintain your employee handbook.
Only available for download to subscribers.
THE HR PULSE
🧠 Meta’s AI Push Hurts Morale — Wired
What’s unfolding: Meta is cutting jobs while heavily investing in AI, with employees reportedly describing morale as increasingly tense.
Why it matters: HR leaders should watch for trust and engagement dips when AI expansion and layoffs happen side by side.
💼 LinkedIn Cuts 5％ of Workforce — PersonnelToday
What’s unfolding: LinkedIn is laying off hundreds of employees despite continued business growth.
Why it matters: HR teams may need stronger manager communication and retention efforts as job security concerns continue spreading across tech.
📈 Benefits Pricing Pressure Grows — Traders Union
What’s unfolding: Rising healthcare and benefits expenses are pushing employers to rethink plan structures and spending.
Why it matters: HR leaders should focus on transparency and help employees understand the real value of their benefits before open enrollment season ramps up.
LAST CHANCE - Ends tonight, MN EST
Mega HR Bundle (100+ templates)
Don’t miss this — one easy download to cut down admin work during the busiest HR cycles.
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COMPLIANCE CORNER
⏳ Employer Loses Arbitration Fight After Delay — HCA Mag
What’s unfolding: An Ohio nursing home lost its right to arbitration after waiting seven months to raise the issue in court.
HR implications: The case is a reminder that slow legal responses can become an expensive delay. Review arbitration procedures and escalation timelines before disputes arise.
🎬 Netflix Pushes Back on Texas Lawsuit — YahooFinance
What’s unfolding: Netflix is fighting a Texas lawsuit tied to data privacy and platform design concerns.
HR implications: HR leaders should revisit employee data transparency and monitoring policies before trust issues grow internally.
⚖️ Colorado’s AI Hiring Law Gets a Rewrite — HR Dive
What’s unfolding: Colorado lawmakers revised the state’s upcoming AI law to focus more narrowly on “consequential decisions” like hiring, pay, and promotions.
HR implications: HR teams using AI-driven tools should review compliance plans before the law takes effect in 2027, especially around bias audits and documentation.
HR TREND WATCH
🗓️ Floating Leaves: The Policy for Modern Workforces
Digesting the data: Traditional calendar-locked holidays are starting to feel a bit rusty for diverse workforces. Recent insights reveal a distinct trend toward floating leave policies, which break away from rigid, company-wide holiday schedules to give employees direct control over their time-offs. Typically allocating 2 to 3 days out of the annual calendar, these policies let workers skip traditional corporate closures in favor of days that carry deep personal, cultural, or religious significance.
In more multicultural workforces, forcing everyone to take the exact same days off—like New Year’s or traditional federal holidays—can alienate employees who would rather use that time for their own cultural milestone or a child's birthday. The data shows that implementing this targeted autonomy becomes worth it with elevated mental health, greater job satisfaction, and preserved core PTO banks.
Outlook for HR: For HR leaders, this is a low-budget, high-impact lever for building a truly inclusive culture. However, implementation must be intentional to prevent logistical chaos. Because floating leaves let employees take their time-offs during non-standard, highly busy operating periods, HR must build clear, accessible approval guidelines—such as a first-come, first-served policy—to prevent simultaneous team blackouts.
BREAKROOM
SMART READS
💙 Top EAPs That Support Employee Wellbeing
🤝 How to Build an Awesome Company Culture
🎯 External Recruitment Methods: Pros & Cons
—Created with care by Vivienne Ravana via Beehiv.
P.S. AI that doesn’t hallucinate? See for yourself: Try CustomGPT AI.
