Blog

FlexTal
In Sales & Growth

The Do Not Call Registry: Is it a List Nobody Reads?

illustration of phone with "do not" circle over it - representing the National Do Not Call Registryy

Do you remember signing up for the National Do Not Call Registry? I do. For me it was years ago. It felt great. One short form. Simply enter up to three phone numbers, and just like that, the robocalls will finally go away. Problem solved. Government efficiency at its finest. Time to go enjoy a quiet dinner.

That was the promise. However, since I submitted that one-list-to-rule-them-all form, my phone continues to buzz – early mornings, on my drive home, during those meant-to-be-quiet dinners. “Possible Spam” and “Scam Likely” appear on my call history so often it looks like we’re BFFs. Sometimes I even get a number that looks suspiciously like my own, which is a special kind of insult.

If the registry is working, it’s working the way a “Please Don’t Feed the Seagulls” sign works on a boardwalk.

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FlexTal
In Strategy & Business

Finish Line Staffing

illustration of a person running through a finish line

Every year around the first week of November, the same thing happens. Somebody on the team opens the project list, sighs the sigh of a person who has seen things, and says the quiet part out loud: there’s no way we’re going to get all of this done before the end of the year. If you want to finish Q4 strong, that moment is actually a gift. There are still six to eight weeks on the calendar, which is plenty of runway to close a lot of loops. The trick is to stop asking the same tired team to close them all.

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FlexTal
In Contingent Workforce

Out of Office, Not Out of Luck

Employee leave coverage. Image shows a tidy desk with an "out of office" sign, a coffee mug, and a neat stack of labeled folders, with a coat draped over the empty chair.

Every team has a spreadsheet only one person understands. Color-coded tabs. A macro nobody has ever seen run. One cell near the bottom that must never, under any circumstances, be touched. Ever. You’re pretty sure the person who built it knows why. Then that person goes on leave, and the spreadsheet becomes everyone’s problem. That’s the real test of employee leave coverage: not who’s out, but what walks out the door with them.

Good news: this is fixable. Even better news: you have about a month. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, December is right behind it, and time off is no rare event on your team.The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 80 percent of private industry workers have access to paid vacation, and 49 percent to paid family and medical leave. Leave is built into the year. The question is whether the work is built to survive it.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy

December Is Already Booked

photo depicting year-end contingent workforce benefit. Image shows a female manager staring at a December planning calendar, the calendar is already full of tasks. The words on the image state "December is already booked"

The annual ball-drop in Times Square is still about 12 weeks away, but, for many on your team, several December “to dos” are already done. Flights for the 23rd are already booked. Out-of-office replies are written and scheduled for the extended holiday weekend. Someone has finalized the Secret Santa plan, and the potluck sign-up sheet is printed and ready to hang in the breakroom. Senior employees have already gotten the last 10 days of the month approved as time off. What nobody has focused on is planning for the work that doesn’t take time off – even when employees do. Those gaps are where you can lean on a year-end contingent workforce, and October is the month to decide on one.

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FlexTal
In Strategy & Business

Budget Season Is a Capacity Question

to depict the flex layer of a budget, it is an illustration of a piggy bank with a coin dropping into it. Behind the piggy bank is an icon symbolizing a budget spreadsheet.

Somewhere right now, a finance partner is sending a calendar invite titled “FY27 Planning: Quick Sync.” It will not be quick; it won’t result in synchronicity. By the end of that meeting, most leaders will have picked a side in the oldest argument in budgeting: add the headcount or hold the line. Both sides tend to skip the line item that lets a plan survive contact with March. It’s the center of flexible workforce planning, and it’s refreshingly simple. Set aside money for capacity you can’t name yet, and decide in advance what releases it.

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FlexTal
In Workplace Trends

Workslop: It Looks Done. It Isn’t.

photograph showing the concept of workslop. A business woman presents to coworkers with a slide presentation displayed behind her that has typos and gibberish.

It’s probably happened to you – maybe even this week. A coworker sent you a presentation for review. When you opened the deck, it looked finished – clean formatting, confident bullet points, a chart that appeared to prove something. Ten minutes later, you still can’t say what it’s proving, let alone what it’s arguing. Neither can the person who sent it. Researchers at Stanford and the workplace coaching platform BetterUp gave this rising trend a name last year: workslop. It’s AI-generated work that looks complete on the surface and falls apart the moment someone actually tries to use it.

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FlexTal
In Workplace Trends

The Art of Looking Busy (And Why It’s Exhausting Everyone)

task-masking illustrated as a person running with laptop under their arm. The person is an outline in orange with a light blue laptop.

There’s a particular walk people do at the office. Laptop tucked under one arm, expression set to purposeful, pace just fast enough to suggest somewhere important to be. Nobody asks where. Nobody has to. That walk is basically the whole point. Workplace watchers now have a name for it: task masking, the practice of looking productive instead of being productive, and it has shown up often enough in 2025 and 2026 that HR teams are writing formal guidance around it.

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FlexTal
In Leadership

Does Nobody Want the Corner Office?

a woman in a business suit stands on a sidewalk outside an office building. She is leaning against a ladder labeled "Corporate Ladder." She holds a coffee and looks disinterested.

Ask a room full of twenty-five-year-olds if they picture themselves running a team in five years, and watch the energy in the room shift. Gen Z has a name for this hesitation now: conscious unbossing, the deliberate decision to stay off the management ladder and keep doing the work they’re actually good at.

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Chris Koens
In The Back Burner

If There’s a Tire in Your Cup

open palm leadership represented by an illustration of a tire; from the title "tire in your cup"

If you’ve been following this feed, you know how this goes by now: CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly talk, one local creative, one theme shared with hundreds of chapters around the world, no pitch, no agenda. I show up most months, notebook in hand, ready to get talked out of whatever I thought I understood walking in. This month did that within the first five minutes – and the speaker had me thinking about something I’m going to call open palm leadership.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy

Nobody Gets Promoted for Not Hiring

Org chart illustration showing unchecked headcount growth beneath a single leadership node.

Ask a manager how their year went, and headcount often comes up before revenue does. Not because it’s the most important number – because it’s the easiest one to defend in a room full of people who don’t have time to dig into anything more complicated. Team of six grew to team of eleven? That reads as momentum, even if the actual output barely moved. Team of six stayed a team of six because six was exactly what the work required? That reads as stagnant, even when it’s the smartest call anyone made all year. Somewhere along the way, headcount growth became the scorecard nobody agreed to, and everybody plays by anyway.

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