Are you ready to Lock-In? Plus, the current state of emoji 📝

Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

TRENDS

The Great Lock-In is here. Are you ready to commit?

The viral trend reframes the fall season as a months-long grind to refocus, reset and commit to personal goals ahead of 2026

TRADITIONALLY, PEAK SEASON for personal optimization is early January. New Year’s resolutions, new year, new me — you know the drill. This year, though, New Year’s is apparently too long to wait, and social media has been buzzing with talk of something else: the Great Lock-In.

Conceptually, it’s simple. Well, sort of. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” said Tatiana Forbes, speaking to the New York Times. Another person added, “The Great Lock-In is really about you defining what moves the needle for you and giving yourself permission to pursue that in a way that’s sustainable and scalable over time.”

If you ask Fortune magazine, it’s “a rejection of millennials’ soft life and taking back power in this economy,” a term that “reveals the extraordinary pressure the young-adult generation feels to decipher a puzzle-like economy that barely rewards their best efforts.” You can lock-in at work or save your locking-in for other stuff.

“There is a lock-in for every key, it seems,” wrote Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover. “Whatever end game people have in mind, the process is a way to take control back from a chaotic world.”

The Great Lock-In is probably less interesting for what it will actually produce than for what it says about where people are at more broadly right now. Like other trends — 75 Hard, or that guy with the crazy morning routine — they are less about results and more about process.

There is something a bit rebellious about it, too. Locking-in rejects distraction in a world built on distraction; it seems to offer reward for productivity in an economy that does less and less of that. “Lock-in really came up in these last couple years where people were saying, ‘I have to make myself focus. I have to get into a state where I am free from distraction to accomplish, essentially, anything,’” said linguist Kelly Elizabeth Wright.

It is dialectic in real-time. The Great Lock-In doesn’t exist without quiet quitting or the lazy girl job, just like the ‘snail girl’ doesn’t exist without the girlboss before it.

“The answer isn’t to toggle back and forth between going all out and retreating into pastoral fantasies, but to recognize that for everything, there is a season,” wrote Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg. “Sometimes you have to choose your character and lock in, they may be saying, but the game will end at some point and you’ll have to lock into another gear, when the time comes.”

SOCIALS

Is the end in sight for LinkedIn?

OpenAI is muscling its way into the recruiting fray with a platform promising to reshape how professionals find jobs, showcase skills and navigate the AI-driven economy

LINKEDIN HAS HAD a stranglehold on the job-board-slash-social-media market for many years now; it is unique among social media platforms in that it really has never faced a serious competitor. That could be about to change, though — OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, have announced they are building an AI jobs platform. Could it be the LinkedIn killer?

Dubbed the OpenAI Jobs Platform (no points for the moniker), the teased job platform will do what other attempts at AI-powered job boards have attempted to do and use AI to match candidates to jobs. “The jobs platform won’t just be a way for big companies to attract more talent. It will have a track dedicated to helping local businesses compete, and local governments find the AI talent they need to better serve their constituents,” said OpenAI’s Fidji Simo in a company blog post.

There is a quiet arms race going on in the AI-powered recruiting space. Many interpreted OpenAI’s move to build a jobs platform as a direct challenge to LinkedIn, but it may be more about keeping up: LinkedIn, of its own accord, has been testing their AI Hiring Assistant tool with small groups of customers, and is set to roll it out more broadly as early as this month.

But it remains an open question whether this is where anyone wants hiring to go. Many agree that AI has effectively “broken” the hiring and recruitment process. Is the answer more AI? A lot of jobseekers say no: an April survey from Express Employment Professionals found that 62 per cent of candidates consider not applying to companies that use AI in their hiring process. A job board that revolves around it may not be that much of a draw for talent.

As broken as the process might be, companies like OpenAI believe it can be fixed. “OpenAI’s entry into recruitment feels less like an experiment and more like a deliberate step to shape how jobs are filled in the AI era,” wrote HRD Magazine’s Matthew Sellers. “OpenAI’s move ensures one thing: the business of hiring is becoming as much about technology adoption as it is about human judgment.

Terry Talk: Free speech in the workplace

Controversial political activist Charlie Kirk’s story sparks a vital question: How much free speech should exist in our organizations? In this Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis explores the power of responsible speech — where bold voices are encouraged, but accountability is critical. Silence breeds stagnation, but reckless words can fracture culture. Terry discusses how healthy workplaces balance freedom and inclusion to build trust, innovation and resilience.

WATCH HERE

WORKPLACE

When everyone shows up at once

Return to office also means a return to parking

BACK IN FEBRUARY, the roof of a parking garage in Ottawa collapsed under the weight of some heavy snow. It was bad news for the 50 or so vehicles that were trapped in the rubble, of course, but amid a push by both private sector employers and the federal government to see more workers back in the office, it simply added to a problem that is being replicated in just about every city in the country: you get to RTO, but your car has nowhere to go.

The remote work rates of the last five years have taken pressure off parking infrastructure in many downtown cores — but the return of workers to many offices has meant that pressure has returned.

“We are anticipating issues with capacity,” Ross Frangos, president of AuditPark, a parking lot operator in Toronto, told the Financial Post. “The issue is that all of a sudden we have an influx of people who want a parking pass. That’s great, but then we get another request, and then another. Where will it end?”

For workers heading back to downtown offices, parking is becoming perhaps the biggest logistical headache of RTO. Urban parking lots are now often requiring $200 monthly passes, and eliminating daily parking rates entirely. Those that offer daily parking are often full; some have started offering valet parking in order to more tightly pack cars in. On-street parking is snapped up quickly, and side streets are packed. It’s not just in public servant-heavy cities either. At Amazon’s corporate headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, 11,000 workers were ordered back earlier this year, and parking was one of the first issues. “Someone failed on the math here,” one employee told the Financial Times. Another told FT that “I am left wondering who organized this return-to-office plan without the proper planning.”

But if you’re a parking lot owner, well, these are the good times — all the more welcome since so many of them struggled during Covid. “I think people coming back to the office will be like the first week of school. Bedlam. People will be driving around looking for space, and eventually people settle into a routine, and they will find their routes,” said Carole Whitehorne. But she also predicts it will be one more way that the little guy gets the shaft.

“There is going to be a ranking where the CEOs and presidents get reserved spots and the peons are looking.”

COMMUNICATIONS

Beyond the smile: The current state of emoji

They’re fun, cute and save on sentences, but are they acceptable in workplace exchanges?

WE’VE SAID IT before: at work, using emojis is playing with fire. If you’re older, some of the emojis do not mean what you might think they mean, if you’re trying to come across as hip and with it. “Had some great 🍆 at lunch!” is extremely not the way to say you had a great eggplant parmesan sandwich, for instance. “Saw some great 🍑 at the grocery store this weekend” is probably equally offside, even if Ontario peaches have been objectively great this year.

And yet, it’ll be no surprise that every day people are blundering their way through emoji use on Slack and Microsoft Teams — so much so that nearly half of all workers (47 per cent) surveyed by Lokalise say they should be banned entirely.

“Our research found wide variation in what’s acceptable, what’s confusing and what’s outright inappropriate on the job,” the Lokalise survey said. At the heart of it all is a deep level of misunderstanding — between generations, cultures, genders, you name it. Even which platform you’re using seems to make a difference: workers in workplaces that work on Microsoft Teams were 71 per cent more likely to say their emoji use is often misunderstood.

"For younger generations, emojis are shorthand to soften a difficult message or show empathy," Lokalise’s Etgar Bonar said in the report. "But for others, the same emoji can come across as dismissive or unprofessional. That disconnect can create real tension."

So, is banning them the answer? That’s hard to say, and workplace leaders have different perspectives on it. The pro-emoji camp sees them as inevitable. “We need to adapt and be flexible and how we convey thoughts and ideas,” said Design by Structure CEO Nicole Clemens. “It just depends on the nature of the relationship and the content of the message as to whether these are appropriate.”

Most agree the toothpaste is already out of the tube on this one, but there are many who urge employees against using emojis. “We are all busy people, and I would prefer people make their points clearly with words rather than by using emojis or pictures,” said Dave Chaplin, founder of IR35 Shield. “I also cannot imagine two CEOs using emojis to communicate — it would seem totally unprofessional and inappropriate.”