Hello and Happy Friday!
There’s been a shocker of a statistic this week that fewer and fewer people are putting work first. All I can say to that is THANK GOODNESS!! Loving your job is great, but having that be the main source of joy is a concern when it can all be taken away from you in a heartbeat.
In other news this week, I came across a really thorough and in depth article about how to use AI in your role; how many jobs these days offer remote working; and a fascinating article on what people say when HR isn’t listening.
Whatever you’ve been up to this week, I hope you’ve had a good one! Europe has had a few days of respite from the heat before it gets hotter again over the weekend. Still no rain for me - so my lawn looks like hay. Brilliant.
Yvette 🌵
NewsWrap
New data from LinkedIn (note from last week’s Extra Wrap: notice the audience!) is suggesting that our attitudes to work are changing. Around two thirds of professionals in the UK now ‘work to live’ rather than ‘live to work’. What’s your view on this? Mine is that jobs are becoming less and less who we are as a person and more of just what we do. If your job is so great that it’s also your hobby - that’s awesome, but wholly unrealistic for most of us. So, are our social lives getting better; are we setting stronger boundaries; or are our jobs just getting worse? 🤔
This article I came across this week follows an EA at Vanderbilt University and how she uses AI in her day to day role. I do think this is an interesting read because in my experience, a lot of us are toying with AI, perhaps using it for this task or that task, but to set up a whole structure around our roles for it to be involved in almost all aspects of our day is something that is frankly quite scary. It’s the skills and knowledge from our careers that allow us to be able to do this - and check that it’s running correctly - rather than setting it up and blindly following (like I do in my car with my satnav)
If you book travel to Europe, you might already be aware of the horrendous queues at airports due to the (supposedly streamlined) EES (Entry/Exit System). This system takes fingerprints and photos of travellers, but in doing so, it means double or triple the time to clear each person through passport control (having done this several times in the past 12 months, I can vouch for it being slow and painful). What does this mean for business travellers? Well, basically you need to get your traveller to arrive at the airport in plenty of time. There are reports of planes taking off half empty because people are stuck in the queues. Apparently this will all settle down in a couple of years…. yay.
How many new roles in the US offer some form of hybrid working option? It’s rather a lot (although the survey was carried out by a recruiter who - I believe - specialises in office based jobs, and not roles in healthcare, education, agriculture, etc).
On top of that, apparently 25% of us would consider a role which required you to be office based five days per week - which is quite a lot higher than I would have thought. So what does limiting working locations do to talent pools? I’ll let you guess the answer to that one…!What do people talk about when HR isn’t listening? The 2026 Psychological Safety Study took anonymised conversations between employees and licensed counsellors from 88 million workers. Turns out, when we feel psychologically unsafe, we go quiet. Shocker! Globally, the top concern people have is work-life balance, and the second is job performance anxiety. This is a fascinating article that looks at what we actually care about, and it supports why Gallup is finding that employee engagement is at an all time low - we don’t feel safe talking about these things with our managers!
📊 What the numbers won’t tell you
Every other day a new report or dataset lands in your inbox. Salary benchmarks, industry trends, workplace satisfaction indexes, you name it. Each one arrives with a headline figure and an implicit invitation to compare yourself, your role, or your organisation against it.
By referring your friends and colleagues to The Admin Wrap, you can earn yourself free access to The Extra Wrap - our in depth thought leadership pieces which are sent out every Monday. Can you make it to the top of the leader board?
🔎 RealityWrap:
You Only Got the Raise Because You Resigned
Here’s a pattern you might already be familiar with. You ask for a raise: there’s no budget. You ask again at review time: still no budget. Then you hand in your notice, and suddenly there’s budget. Sometimes a lot of it, found within 48 hours.
Nothing about your performance changed between Tuesday and Thursday. The only thing that changed was the cost of losing you became real.
That’s the real maths behind most counteroffers. Your salary was never a reflection of your value. It was a reflection of what they thought they could get away with paying. The moment you proved you had options, that number moved.
The worst part about this is that accepting the counteroffer rarely fixes anything. The reasons you started looking are usually still there in six months. The manager who overlooked you is still your manager. The workload that pushed you to look is still your workload. Except now your exec knows you were halfway out the door, and you know exactly what it took to be taken seriously.
So what do you do with this? You don’t need to resign to test it. But you do need to stop waiting for your value to be noticed. Know your market rate. Say the number out loud before review season, not during it. Put your case in writing so it can’t be forgotten or ignored. Remember, if the only time your company finds money is when you’re leaving, believe what that tells you. You shouldn’t only get paid your worth through threats.
The raise you get by keeping quiet is always smaller than the one you get by having options.
EventWrap
The next cohort for the Carve AI course starts on 21st July for the summer intake. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is your chance to sign up. You can read all the details, including what’s included each week, here
The Office Management Show is hosting their next conference on 25th September at The May Fair Hotel in central London (which is lovely - I’ve been there!). Office Managers can attend for free, but there’s the choice of paying a fee to get lunch and post-show drinks. Get all the info you need here
On 9th July, Office Dynamics are hosting a webinar to help you with your presentation skills. Present With Confidence will give you advice on how to position yourself strategically, communicate with credibility, and be more effective at influence others. All the details are here
For a list of Conferences, head over to the Conferences section in our Ultimate Assistant’s Toolbox.
If you are running an event aimed at administrative professionals, please send me an email and let me know all about it - hello@theadminwrap.com
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