Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

EVERY YEAR IN November, the moustache makes its triumphant return to the upper lips of many men (it’s now mid-Movember, so even the most hair-growth challenged participants are probably sporting something up there…). What started as an awareness campaign for men’s cancer health has broadened over the years and is now a catch-all fundraising and awareness effort for men’s mental and physical health, and it’s often something that is organized within professional networks.

These are places where, while men have often dominated the scene, men’s issues have long gone underdiscussed in the opinions of some — and that’s leading to a rise in popularity of men’s groups in the workplace.

Bloomberg recently reported that several large firms have (quietly) started organizing men’s groups. One organizer at the British Channel 4, Tafadzwa Muchenje, said the response to a group he co-runs was a surprise: “The biggest surprise I had was how desperate men were to talk and learn,” he told Bloomberg. “There was so much desire and appetite.”

Men’s groups can be tricky to navigate in the workplace, in part because work has long been seen as an old boy’s club already. Advocates of this kind of support network understand that view.

“The misconception is that men have lots of spaces for them already: the board room; the golf club; the private members’ club,” wrote James Routledge. “A small minority of men, perhaps, are involved in these traditional networks, [but] the majority of men are lacking in communities where they can show up wholeheartedly with all their vulnerabilities and speak openly.”

Advocates for men’s mental health say it’s an issue that crosses social and class lines. “Beneath the sharp suits and confident demeanors of Canadian finance and accounting professionals often lies an unspoken struggle: the impact on men's health,” wrote Kassen Recruitment, offering their tips on how to organize such a group. One all-gender support group in the UK called GENts, said the response they get from participants is “they feel they can open up without any fear of judgment or ridicule, which is exactly what we I aimed for when we set GENts up.”

There is data that bears the need for this out. Men’s labour force participation rate has been on a downward trend for two decades, and men have seen their social isolation rates increase at a faster rate than other groups. “Women tend to have larger support networks and are in many cases more likely to share their feelings with family and friends,” said Bloomberg reporters Jeff Green and Saijel Kishan. “Men, on the other hand, are living increasingly isolated lives, especially amid the decline in civic and religious communities.”

The aim of many involved in this movement is not to recreate any type of stereotypical men’s network of the past, but to introduce change in ways that allow men to feel healthier and more themselves at work.

“Men’s groups can allow for men to change the typical male culture that holds so many people back,” summed up Routledge. “The truth is stereotypical male culture — quips about football or misogynistic jokes — make lots of men feel uncomfortable, too. Men too want typical male culture and norms to change for the better.” 

ECONOMY

Small business, big problems

No one wants to say it, but we’re probably in a small business recession

SEEMS EVERYWHERE YOU look in the business press nowadays, there’s fear of a recession — even if nobody dares utter the R-word right now. But the hiring data doesn’t lie, and analysts are pointing to the gap between small and large business hiring practices as perhaps the strongest recession indicator out there.

According to recent numbers from BMO Capital Markets, large companies in Canada (more than 500 employees) have added nearly 600,000 jobs since the start of 2025, while small businesses have shed more than 300,000 jobs. “This means nearly all net job creation is now coming from large employers, a reversal of Canada’s traditional reliance on small business as the primary job engine in the country,” reads a report in HR Reporter.

“Given that small- and medium-sized employers with fewer than 500 workers have traditionally accounted for roughly 80 per cent of the job market, it’s extremely rare for larger employers to be adding more jobs on a year-over-year basis,” wrote The Globe and Mail’s Jason Kirby.

“Going back to 1997, when Statistics Canada’s records begin, almost every such instance has accompanied a crisis such as the Great Recession, the 20215 collapse in oil prices, and the pandemic.”

Analysts aren’t entirely surprised by it, saying it mostly reflects larger firms’ greater ability to weather the trade war. But they do believe it ultimately amplifies the risks to the Canadian economy if small businesses don’t ramp up hiring.

“This divergence by firm size raises a downside risk,” said BMO senior economist Sal Guatieri. “So, unless they keep punching above their weight — or smaller companies ramp up hiring — overall job growth could weaken.”

GOVERNANCE

The rise of SKAI: From algorithm to decision-maker

When science fiction quietly turns into boardroom reality, the world takes notice. In Kazakhstan, that moment has arrived

SOME VERY INTERESTING things are happening out in the proud nation of Kazakhstan, where the country’s sovereign wealth fund did something interesting last month: it became one of the first organizations to put an AI on its board of directors and give it voting rights.

The artificial intelligence named SKAI (it gets an attractive AI-generated persona, too) “analyzes internal and external regulations, board decisions dating back to 2008 and other corporate documentation,” wrote The Times of Central Asia, noting that the goal is to “improve transparency and the quality of corporate governance” over the fund. What could go wrong?

Maybe the better question is what could go right? A group of researchers at the Mack Institute for Innovation Management recently put that question to the test to assess how well an AI system would perform if put on a board of directors. Noting that 94 per cent of CEOs polled believed AI could offer better counsel than their fellow board members, “LLMs look appealing in this context,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “They can absorb vast amounts of information, generate deeply researched outputs, work around the clock without getting tired and harbor no personal ambitions.”

What they found was that an all-AI board of directors could often function well. The LLM-powered boards often came to sound decisions in highly structured, data-driven ways. On the other hand, while AI boards “excelled in structure and detail,” the researchers noted they fell short in the “relational dynamics that shape human interaction” and struggled with encouragement and trust-building.

“AI boards may arrive at seemingly sound decisions, but they do so in ways that diverge from human practice,” the researchers wrote. “So, the real question becomes: should they? Do we want boards that optimize for every explicit metric, yet remain blind to the tacit, emotional and relational undercurrents that shape judgment and trust?”

The researchers suggest that AI use at the leadership and corporate governance level has a lot of headroom to grow, and that even if companies are now only beginning to dabble with it that AI tools are likely to become a fixture in the boardroom at some point.

For now, it’s all eyes on Kazakhstan. “Technology and people are beginning to make decisions together,” said the human chair of the nation’s sovereign fund. “Digitalization is moving beyond processes; it’s becoming part of leadership philosophy.” 

TECHNOLOGY

‘Sent from my iPhone’

Could you work entirely from your phone? And should you?

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