Rise Maple: 📓 your team is scared

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Surprised to see me in your inbox on a Thursday?! Well, here I am!

This is a ✨special edition deep dive✨ of I Hate it Here. Every now and then, you may get one of these from me! 👏

This special edition deep dive is sponsored by Aon.

What's a deep dive?

Deep dives are opportunities for me to collab with specific companies in the HR/People space on topics of joint interest to them, me, and even you! The sponsoring company provides invaluable input on the topic but this edition itself is written, edited, and published by your fave gal, me!

Today, I'm discussing the three broad global forces that are showing up as mental health crises inside your org, and what Aon's Human Capital Trends 2026 report says you should do about it.

Let's get into it!

I have a confession to make…I've spent an embarrassing amount of time lately doing homework on myself.

😵‍💫 What I mean is, I’ve been Googling research and going down rabbit holes at 11pm wondering why I feel the way I feel.

And every time I get to the end of one of those spirals, I think:

“The world is just a lot right now.”

That may as well be the clinical term for it: a lot.

We've got a lot on the menu:

Geopolitical conflicts are reshaping supply chains and dinner table conversations alike
Climate events that used to be called "once in a generation" are now happening twice before your annual performance review
Chaotic, everyone-has-a-hot-take AI, transforming jobs faster than most orgs can write a policy about it

And through all of this, your employees are still showing up to work.

They're sitting in meetings, answering emails, and operating in a business-as-usual sort of way…or at least, they're trying to!

👀 What I know from years of working in HR and watching orgs try to treat symptoms without ever diagnosing the actual problem is that the broad forces shaping the world don't stop at the office door, and they never have.

They come in with your employees every single morning.

They sit in the chair across from you during one-on-ones.

They show up in your attrition numbers and your engagement scores and that vague, collective exhaustion nobody can quite name.

And with that being said…Aon just dropped their Human Capital Trends 2026 report that tells this story in undeniable detail, and I got to dig into it.

Fair warning: I have a degree that lets me nerd out over this stuff, and I absolutely did!

What stood out to me were a few things that connect the world's biggest disruptions directly to your workforce's mental health, and most orgs aren't even asking the right questions yet!

So have a seat and let’s go over some of the data, shall we?

🤓 Class is in session.

⚡ Okay, stay with me here because I know "women's health benefits" sounds like a checkbox your benefits broker told you to tick during open enrollment.

But this isn't about adding a line item to your benefits guide and calling it a day.

This is about the fact that half your workforce (!!!!) has health needs that are actively being ignored and most of them have stopped expecting anything different...

📣 The data is somewhat wild: 88% of employers believe they should support women's health. Only 7% of employees say they actually receive it.

Let me say that again. 88% to 7%. Woof.

👀 Wanna know what that looks like in real life?

Maybe it's the employee quietly managing a fertility treatment cycle while her manager wonders why her energy seems "off" lately.

Or maybe it's the woman who's been navigating perimenopause symptoms for two years, the brain fog, the sleep disruption, the anxiety, who has never once mentioned it at work because she doesn't believe anyone would know what to do with that information anyway.

Women's health isn't niche. It's not a "nice to have." It's the lived reality of the majority of your workforce, and the silence around it is costing you in ways that don't show up in your benefits utilization report.

And the financial piece? Because women’s health is FAR MORE than just having basic access to healthcare.

The U.S. is 10% behind the global average when it comes to addressing the gender retirement savings gap and only 11% of employers are putting initiatives in place to fix it.

⚾ That's two swings and two misses!

So my question to you is, when did you last actually ask your employees whether their benefits work for them?

Not a survey with pre-set answers. An actual conversation about whether they feel supported, or whether they've just gotten really good at pretending they are.

What This Means for HR:

The gap here is enormous, and the window to act is closing!

Women's health is becoming a talent and retention conversation, whether orgs are ready or not.

1️⃣ Start by auditing your current benefits for real women's health coverage. We're talking fertility, menopause, hormonal health, mental health, not just an OB-GYN copay.

Look at your parental leave policies with fresh eyes and think about who's actually using the leave and who's afraid to.

Consider how your benefits address the full arc of women's health across career stages, not just the childbearing years.

And for the love of everything, if you're asking women to bring their whole selves to work, that includes the part of them that has a body with specific, valid, and largely unsupported health needs.

📣 Leaders need to wake up and finally accept the fact that you cannot retain top talent with a compensation strategy you built two years ago and never looked at again!!!

I said what I said.

The idea that someone is going to stay loyal, engaged, and high-performing while quietly wondering if they're being paid fairly, or worse, finding out they're not, and just... keep hitting their KPIs?

That's not retention. That's borrowed time. And you and I both know it.

The data here is genuinely wild.

Only 22% of organizations globally rate their pay transparency practices as mature or very mature. And 26% haven't benchmarked their compensation in the last year.

More than one in four employers have essentially decided to skip the part where they check if what they're paying people makes any sense anymore.

👀 And here's where it gets interesting… the U.S. isn't doing much better. 23% of U.S. orgs rate their pay transparency as mature, and 16% haven't benchmarked recently.

So we're all failing at this roughly equally! (Cool cool cool.)

Meanwhile, the number one Total Rewards objective globally? Retain high performers.

Number two? Attract top talent.

You want to retain and attract but you're not benchmarking and you're not being transparent. Make that make sense!

TBH: that's not a strategy.

What This Means for HR:

➡️ Compensation isn't just a finance conversation anymore, it's a trust exchange with employees and potential candidates.

Start with an honest audit: when did you last benchmark? Are managers equipped to have pay conversations, or are they winging it and hoping nobody asks?

❤️ BTW: Pay transparency doesn't mean posting everyone's salary on a whiteboard. It means employees understand how pay decisions get made.

That clarity alone can change how safe and valued someone feels at work.

To be honest, I have massive AI fatigue right now. 🫩

The unlimited think pieces, the doomsday predictions, the utopian counter-predictions…I'm tired of all of it.

➡️ But the thing that cuts through all of that noise for me, every time is the actual human beings sitting in orgs right now, wondering if they're becoming obsolete.

Aon's data is striking in its contradictions. 88% of orgs globally agree that AI will create new opportunities and require new skills and yet, only 24% say they can actually recruit and retain enough talent with AI skills!

Meanwhile, Only 18% of organizations have seen the majority of their workforce participate in AI reskilling/upskilling programs in the past 12 months.

Yep, you read that right.

We're deploying AI at scale (44% of orgs are already there) while leaving nearly half our workforce completely untouched by any preparation for that shift!

The mental health angle here is important to keep in mind.

Uncertainty about job security is one of the most documented drivers of chronic stress and anxiety.

👀 When employees watch their orgs enthusiastically adopt AI while receiving no training whatsover, and no clear signal about what it means for their role, they fill the silence with fear.

And fear is exhausting.

It degrades performance and eventually walks right out the door.

The good news is that 86% agree AI will automate some tasks, but existing roles will still be necessary.

The problem is that belief isn't making it down to the people who need to hear it the most!

What This Means for HR:

AI strategy is people strategy, and you cannot separate them.

If your org has an AI roadmap and no corresponding communication and reskilling plan, you are creating a much bigger problem.

Audit where your employees sit on the AI reskilling chart and treat the 47% at zero as an urgent priority.

Transparency here is medicine, so be specific about what AI means for roles, what the timeline looks like, and what support is available. Ambiguity is the enemy.

The problem is that most orgs are managing their people risks in silos.

👀 You’ve got benefits over here, wellbeing over there, and AI strategy in a completely different building, talking to a completely different team.

Meanwhile, your employees are living at the intersection of geopolitical stress and technological disruption…all at once, all the time.

That's what makes this moment so incredibly difficult.

These connected forces producing connected consequences in your workforce.

Aon understands this completely. Their Human Capital Trends 2026 report treats human capital like what it actually is, which is one of the most complex, interconnected risk landscapes any org faces right now.

They're connecting the dots between broad world forces and the real, measurable impact on your people.

If you're an HR leader trying to build a business case for why any of this matters: