monday.com’s take on the latest work trends - sent on Tuesdays.
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Inside this issue
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- Workplace trends
- The AI corner
- Growing skilled storytellers
- Question of the week
- Just for laughs
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Follow the monday.com weekly on LinkedIn
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Workplace trends
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Leadership
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CEOs are ditching the corporate playbook
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More CEOs are rejecting rigid corporate norms and running companies on their own terms. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky no longer uses email and bans all meetings before 10 a.m. because he works best late at night, according to Fortune. His advice to other leaders is simple: don't apologize for how you want to run your company. The philosophy is spreading. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang scrapped one-on-one meetings entirely, while Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel uses all his paid time off each year. As leaders write their own rules, the message is clear: ditching the traditional playbook might be the path to sustainable success.
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Wellness
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Office beehives become a workplace wellness trend
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UK employers are installing beehives on rooftops and car parks to ease workplace stress and build community, according to The Guardian. Professional beekeeping providers report surging demand as companies use beekeeping to reconnect workers with nature. One provider now serves 24 UK clients and over 10 international ones. Workers suit up with 10,000 bees flying around them during lunch breaks. Employees have expressed that the environment creates a shared sense of purpose and a physical break from the daily grind, and that typical perks can't match.
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The AI corner
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Infrastructure
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Big Tech's historic AI spending spree
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Four tech giants are planning to spend up to $670 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet's combined spending represents 2.1% of US GDP - surpassing the Apollo moon program and the US interstate highway system build-out. Meta's AI costs could exceed 50% of its annual revenue for the first time, while Amazon plans to boost capital spending by nearly 60% to $200 billion this year, according to analyst projections. While Meta's investors approved the spending following the company's strong AI-driven earnings throughout 2025, Amazon lost $124 billion in market value when it announced its plans. As companies pour unprecedented resources into AI infrastructure, the investment represents one of the largest capital projects in corporate history.
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Healthcare
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AI chatbots are becoming dangerous doctors
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Nearly 30% of British respondents now get medical advice from AI chatbots, with 40 million people worldwide using ChatGPT for health guidance, according to The Economist. Medical experts warn that patients are arriving at doctors’ appointments armed with hours of AI-generated advice and bogus test results, forcing doctors to waste time ruling out nonexistent diseases. As AI learns from unreliable internet sources and tailors advice to anxious users, journalist and physician Deborah Cohen warns it's creating a feedback loop where worried patients receive increasingly personalized reasons to worry - making it nearly impossible to distinguish legitimate health concerns from AI-amplified anxiety, according to The Economist.
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Growing skilled storytellers
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Storytelling isn’t just for marketing — it’s a skill that can elevate every single department, and a mindset that can drive the company’s most ambitious strategies. Especially in the age of AI.
Across teams, storytelling helps turn big, abstract goals into narratives that stakeholders can understand, align around, and act on. This is true whether you’re on a product team defining real-life customer pain points and how your solution can make a difference, a finance team using narratives to frame trade-offs and priorities, or an HR team telling stories that connect people to company culture and drive organizational change.
In short, the human ability to add context, empathy, and perspective is what makes messages resonate. And leaders who help their employees build storytelling skills don’t just improve communication — they strengthen alignment, influence, and cross-functional collaboration. When more people can clearly articulate the impact of their work, strategy becomes visible, and momentum can grow across an entire department or company.
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So how can you help your team become powerhouse storytellers?
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Start with story significance
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Many employees are used to describing the work they’ve done, but not why it mattered. Maybe you’ve seen a team share a list of accomplished tasks, milestones, or metrics, but skip the part about how it supports the company’s goals. Storytelling can make a major impact on these reports by rooting them in significance to the company. The next time your team prepares a presentation, encourage them to answer questions like: What problem are we solving? Who does it impact? What would have happened if the work hadn’t been done? When your employees can anchor their communication in significance, their message becomes more memorable and easier to follow. Over time, this habit helps your team see their work as part of a larger narrative, not just a to-do list.
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Key question: “Do your employees clearly understand and articulate why their work matters beyond the task itself?”
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Build an emotionally-driven narrative structure
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Strong stories have movement. And they’re even more powerful when emotion is part of the journey. Something was true, something changed, and now things are different. The missing piece in many workplace updates is how that change felt or why it mattered to real people. Without that middle step, communication jumps from activity to outcome, leaving listeners unclear on how the result was achieved or why it made an impact. You can help your team tell better stories by introducing a simple structure they can use regularly: define the situation, the challenge, the action taken, and the impact. Encourage them to highlight the human side. Perhaps a product improvement reduced the time users spent on a task, allowing them to focus more on strategic work. Or maybe a well-planned marketing initiative made sales conversations smoother, leading to more big wins. This kind of storytelling engages and moves an audience, leading to stronger alignment, buy-in, and action.
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Key question: “Can your employees explain their work as a clear before-during-and-after story?”
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Build audience awareness
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One reason storytelling is so powerful is that it centers on the listener, not just the speaker. A great story meets the audience where they are and connects the message to what they care about. With this in mind, try to encourage your team to think about who will hear or read their update before they craft it. Consider questions like: What does that audience already know? What are they worried about? What decisions do they need to make? From here, your employees can tailor their presentations to specific stakeholders – be it their peers, leadership, or customers – and adjust their pitch to those perspectives. This mindset shift, from reporting information to fostering understanding, dramatically improves communication and deepens connection to the material.
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Key question: “How can your employees tell stories that audiences see themselves in?”
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Make reflection part of the process
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Stories don’t only live in big presentations; they’re also how people make sense of their own progress. After a project wraps or a milestone is reached, include moments for reflection in your retros. Ask your team what surprised them, what obstacles they faced, and what they’d do differently next time. These conversations help employees move beyond surface-level reporting and start identifying the turning points and lessons that make stories meaningful. You might even record both the presentation and the retrospective meeting, then run both transcripts through AI and ask for story-improvement tips, such as which parts of the story could be clearer, where more emotional context is needed, or how to make the ending more impactful.
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Key question: “Do you give your employees space to reflect on their projects?”
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Encourage low-stakes storytelling practice
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For many people, storytelling feels intimidating because they associate it with high-pressure moments, like executive presentations. You want to build a storytelling muscle in your employees, readying them for any situation, so try giving them regular, low-stakes practice and opportunities. This might mean starting a team meeting with a quick “win story,” inviting team members to explain how they solved a tricky problem, or even a story of an initiative that failed, grounded in humor, resilience, and learnings for next time. These informal reps help storytelling feel like a normal part of work, not a special event. As confidence grows, employees become more comfortable bringing stories into bigger settings.
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Key question: “Where can you create more opportunities for your team to practice sharing the story behind their work?”
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Water cooler chatter
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Apple's call-screening feature gives everyone a virtual assistant to filter calls. Launched as part of iOS 26, the tool asks unknown callers their name and reason for calling before you pick up. It's tackling America's spam problem - over 2 billion robocalls monthly - but frustrating those who expect immediate answers.
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"Calling people you don't know on the phone in 2026 is as bad as randomly knocking on a friend's door unannounced in 1995."
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Jason Calacanis, Angel Investor and Podcast Host
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Defense tech startup Anduril ditch résumés for an AI drone racing competition. The $30 billion company invites anyone to prove their coding skills by building autonomous racing algorithms - no degree needed. Winners split $500,000, and the top performer skips straight to job interviews, says Fortune.
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"When I hire people at Anduril, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do."
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Palmer Luckey, Founder of Anduril
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Question of the week
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Last week’s answer: 45%
This week’s question: What is the global average percentage of workers who say they have a good work-life balance?
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Just for laughs
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