A coworker crawled under her desk to fix a power strip. She slipped her heels off, got down on the floor, and made herself vulnerable for two seconds. And that's when the coworker behind her reached over, wrapped an arm around her ankles, and started tickling her feet.

Yes. At work. In 2026. We have questions too.

In this Reacting to Reddit at Work episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Bree Bartos brings Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee a Best of Redditor Updates story so strange the original poster used Friends character names to tell it. Rachel got tickled. Monica did the tickling. Phoebe is the hands-off manager who walked Monica to HR and then never really resolved anything. And five months later, nobody got closure and everybody got punished.

It's a story about workplace boundaries, about what makes a mistake termination-worthy versus a conversation, and about what happens when management avoids the hard conversation entirely and lets a situation rot.

In this episode, they discuss:
• Where the line actually is on workplace physical boundaries, and why "we're all human at work" doesn't mean there aren't any
• The difference between a one-time lapse in judgment and a pattern of disrespect
• Why the real failure here was management never bringing everyone together for a resolution
• Whether the reaction would have been different if it were Joey instead of Monica
• Pinaki on running toward conflict instead of away from it, and the Local Wisdom Nerf gun incident
• Why Monica never actually apologized, and how much that one missing piece mattered
• The mantra: companies come and go, but the relationship is what stays
• An ending where everyone got what they wanted and nobody felt good about it

How would you have handled this one? Because we're still not totally sure.

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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.

Last week Ellen Griley gave us the framework. This week she gets personal.

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined again by Ellen Griley, founder of Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms, to dig deeper into what it actually looks like to be human at work when everything around you is already on edge.

Ellen gets vulnerable — about the meeting where she cried advocating for thoughtful AI adoption, about the privilege that lets her show up that way, about learning to co-regulate in real time. Chris names the thing about corporate comms that nobody says out loud: the relentless pursuit of perfection is actually making everything less psychologically safe. And Pinaki closes with a story about sitting next to a professor who researches horrific things for a living and asking: how do you stay positive?

The answer: we're just humans. We're just here.

In this episode, they discuss:

• Why assuming employees open your email with 100% cognitive and emotional capacity is the root of most communication failures

• The New York Times tells you it's a daily paper — why doesn't your internal newsletter do the same?

• Ellen on being human at work when not everyone has the same permission to show up that way

• Code switching is exhausting — even for the best of us

• The power of awkward silence in a room that's about to derail

• How to give people agency when everything feels like a 'because I said so' world

• High school, kindergarten, and the corporate ecosystem — why they're all the same social experiment

• Pinaki on the base layer of relationships that has to exist before strategy can land

• Bree's advice: find one moment of joy each day. Just one.

We're all just four-year-olds with tablets trying to figure it out. This one's the reminder you didn't know you needed.

Check out Ellen's work: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/
Read Shifting Ground: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/sh...
Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/internal-calms/

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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.

Your employees are arriving at work already on edge. Not because of anything you did. Because of everything else — the news, the economy, the climate, the layoffs, the AI uncertainty, the 6 a.m. email they checked before they even got out of bed. They walk in already in threat mode. And then you send an urgent Slack with an exclamation point.

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined by producer Bree Bartos and Ellen Griley, founder of Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms, for a conversation about mental health, polycrisis, and what it actually looks like to communicate with people who are carrying more than you know.

Ellen just published Shifting Ground: Internal Communications in an Age of Polycrisis — her first research report under Equilibrious, released the morning this episode was recorded. And she brought the framework, the data, and a lot of hard-won wisdom from her own experience as both a communicator and a person.

In this episode, they discuss:

• What polycrisis actually means — and why it's indistinguishable from the environment your employees walk into every day

• The amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and why chronic stress works the same way trauma does on the brain

• Why the individual onus to "set better boundaries" isn't a solution — it's an abdication

• Ellen on how her own anxiety was showing up for her employees before she understood what was happening

• The schedule send as an act of respect

• Why work communication flows one way — into the home — but employees can't always bring what they're carrying back into the workplace

• The STEADY framework: Safety, Trust, Environment, Agency, Dialogue, and You

• What Ellen found when she surveyed 24 senior IC practitioners: 100% had managed through at least three crises in 18 months

It's Mental Health Awareness Month. And this episode is a good place to start.

Check out Ellen's Links:

internal-calms.com
Read Shifting Ground
Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn
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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.