Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
The issue isn’t ambition, it’s exhaustion
A growing share of employees are absorbing extra work without promotions, pay raises or formal title changes. Welcome to The Great Pile-On
We’re now a few months into 2026, but for many workers, it feels like the rough end to 2025 just keeps rollin’ on. Maybe your team is a little leaner now, with a few faces let go. Perhaps your boss is constantly chirping at you to make more use of Copilot to pick up the slack.
Congratulations, you’ve been piled-on. And you’re not alone.
A new study from Wiley, which surveyed around 2,500 workers, has put a name to the phenomenon of how work is being redistributed among the now-reduced headcount, calling it ‘The Great Pile-On’. Nearly a third of respondents said they’d recently absorbed additional duties, with more than half saying those duties landed on them in the wake of layoffs or restructuring.
The phenomenon itself isn’t new; survivors have been picking up the slack after layoffs as long as there have been layoffs. What Wiley’s study is probing is the degree to which it has become the operating logic of many companies, which are taking ‘do more with less’ to its most literal end.
Wiley’s data suggests that, at first, workers were happy to pitch in a little more. Engagement actually increased, productivity went up and morale held. “On the surface, The Great Pile-On appeared to be working,” the report’s authors wrote. But the early lift was also short-lived: after the three-month mark, disengagement rises quickly.
“As weeks turn into months, the cracks begin to show. What was once a motivating opportunity to pitch in during a challenging time has now become a more permanent strain.”
Where the strategy looks set to fail, experts are suggesting, is that it is all stick, no carrot. And at the same time as the work is being redistributed, employees surveyed say the doors to promotions are being closed — there’s no timelines to promotions, no talk of salary growth and many are just being told to deal with it (a formalization of the ‘ghost growth’ trend we saw discussed last year).
What comes next will be an indicator to watch. Firms cut nearly 55,000 jobs citing AI last year, which is certainly a major part of the Great Pile-On, but some are predicting the rebalancing of work will require additional headcount in 2026.
“In many instances, companies are laying off workers for AI capabilities that don’t exist yet, betting on future promises rather than proven technology,” wrote HR Executive’s Jill Barth, citing research from Forrester Research. “When that bet fails, companies face a choice: admit the mistake and rehire at previous salaries, or quietly fill gaps with lower-cost offshore labour. Forrester predicts most will choose the latter.”
CEOs suddenly fear AI will take their jobs, too
Having second thoughts, huh?
If you’re reading this one from the corner office, ask yourself: how’s the mood around the boardroom table these days?
If it’s anything like the bulk of CEOs or other C-suite executives, the answer might be a little nervy and uncertain, as early executive exuberance over AI has started to compete against the same rising sense of anxiety and worry experienced by the lower ranks over the last few years.
An AlixPartners survey of 3,200 CEOs worldwide puts some numbers to this: 45 per cent of CEOs now fear losing their jobs due to (vaguely defined) “disruptive forces,” and 40 per cent say they are more anxious now than they were a year ago. “CEOs are steering through an era defined by relentless macroeconomic headwinds and market volatility,” said AlixPartners’ co-CEO, David Garfield. “In this climate, agility and discernment aren’t optional — they’re essential for survival.”
There are real stakes here for CEOs. At U.S. publicly traded companies last year, a record 446 CEOs departed their positions (willingly and otherwise), which analysts suggest is evidence that CEOs really do have a reason to feel nervous, since they’re being given a lot less leash. “Modern boards are no longer allowing CEOs to stay in their highly-paid positions if they’re not seeing results, and often, CEOs have one or two quarters to prove effectiveness,” said Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Of course, if you’re not reading this from the corner office, your response is likely, “Welcome to the party.” Forty per cent of CEOs now say they are experiencing high levels of anxiety, but when rank and file workers were surveyed last year, the number hit 53 per cent. The CEO crisis may be hitting hard in 2026, but by and large, their employees were there first — CEOs, perhaps, just have a much louder soapbox.
Still, a creeping sense of anxiety and burnout in the C-suite ought not to be ignored. Being miserable at the top still entails some misery, and it comes at a time when people are looking to leadership for answers to pervasive uncertainty. “There’s still a false belief that if a CEO or a C-suite leader shows signs of struggle, it will erode confidence in their leadership,” said Dr. Amy Gagliardi of McLean Hospital, which studied the subject.
Much of the anxiety, it seems, is about how to get firms and organizations onto the other side of what many CEOs see as a generational shift in how we work. “The challenge is not a lack of strategic vision,” stated a Russell Reynolds report. “It is a gap in execution confidence. CEOs may see where the organization needs to go, but they’re less certain their teams can mobilize fast enough to get there.”
Please don’t circle back
Your suspicions are correct: Advocates of corporate jargon aren’t the sharpest pencils in the office
Somewhere in an office near you, someone is about to stand up in an afternoon meeting and propose the team do something like, “pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence,” or “synergize some innovative new Q2 efficiencies.”
Everyone will nod, impressed. No one will ask what it means, though, and according to new research from Cornell, that silence might be telling you something important about who’s in the room.
Cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell built what he calls a corporate jargon generator, a tool that mashed buzzwords into sentences that sound like a quarterly strategy deck but meant nothing (phrases like, “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing”), then showed those sentences to more than 1,000 office workers alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders and asked them to rate each for “business savvy.” The resulting paper is titled The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (yes, this is the actual academic title).
Next, he applied the same experiment to corporate mission statements, then he had participants complete a cognitive test and a situation judgment-making test.
“Corporate bullshit receptivity emerged as the only significant predictor (negative) of decision-making performance,” Littrell said. “At best, corporate bullshit can sometimes seem harmless. At worst, it can disrupt organizational and employee effectiveness in numerous ways including obstructing clear communication, increasing employee disengagement, tarnishing a company’s reputation and exposing businesses to potential financial and legal risks.” (Academic jargon, it seems, is not so much one of Littrell’s concerns.)
One of the interesting wrinkles in the research, though, was that the jargon seemed to be motivating to some. While much of the coverage of the study focused on the cognitive scores, Littrell also found that BS-receptive employees were more satisfied and more inspired by the verbiage. Corporate jargon, some suggest, is a kind of security blanket that makes people feel warm when they are actually uncertain. “We use jargon when we’re feeling insecure, to try to help us feel like we have a higher status,” noted Columbia Business School’s Adam Galinsky.
The concern that researchers like Littrell arrive at is that the prevalence of all this corporate jargon (and it really is quite prevalent) creates a negative feedback loop. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell wrote. “Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.” How’s that for clear communication?
br-AI-n fr-AI
Loss of focus, more mistakes and a perennial sense of not getting enough done. Say hello to AI brain fry
If you’re in one of the sectors of work where daily AI use is becoming more commonplace, consider how one finance director, participating in a new study on the cognitive demands of AI use, described their mental state: “I had been back and forth with AI reframing ideas, synthesizing data, forming and organizing the flow of pillars and work,” the director wrote. “I couldn’t even comprehend if what I had created even made sense. I just couldn’t do anything else and had to revisit the next day, when I could think.”
New research released in the last couple weeks is attempting to put a name to this increasingly common sentiment: AI brain fry, they’re calling it.
According to research from Boston Consulting Group, 14 per cent of those using AI heavily at work are experiencing some form of what researchers say is a distinct type of cognitive exhaustion that is emerging alongside greater AI usage.
“Many participants used the words ‘fog’ or ‘buzzing,’ the researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “They described intensive back-and-forth with the tools, followed by an inability to think clearly, like a mental hangover, comprised of difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches, requiring several to physically step away from their computer to reset.”
That increased oversight demand — in which more cognitive resources are being put towards overseeing the AI agents — comes at a cost, the research suggests: 33 per cent more decision fatigue, 39 per cent more major errors and a 34 per cent higher desire to quit. In short, workers experiencing brain fry appear to be trying to achieve the output of a worker while managing the cognitive load of a manager.
This all jives well with something we wrote about a couple of weeks ago in the finding that heavy AI use has the effect of intensifying work, not making it any easier.
“You had thought that maybe oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less,” said one software engineer in the UC Berkeley-Haas study last month. “But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”
The new data on brain fry helps identify the why: you’re automating to a degree, but managing more.
The coverage of the study was extensive — Fortune, Axios, The Register and a large NY Mag piece all ran with it — mostly in the same register: AI bad, brains tired, companies beware. But while some of this is fair, the researchers themselves weren’t so quick to reach the same editorialized conclusions. To them, it is evidence that while AI can help on the burnout question, it definitely isn’t a panacea, and it creates as many new areas of concern as it ameliorates.
“While burnout has become a point of concern in many workplaces, mental fatigue is more likely to go undetected in existing workplace surveys,” they wrote. “Organizations should evolve people analytics measures to monitor cognitive load overall.”
