Conference Girl Summer Begins!

( image from Google Gemini)

I officially dive into Conference Girl Summer tomorrow!

To kick things off, MOBTS 2026 is happening right here in my very own backyard at the U of M, Michigan League. Of course, when it rains, it absolutely pours because I have not one, not two, but three different sessions on the schedule over the next two days!

MOBTS is a very vibrant conference, and it promises to be a deeply thoughtful, exciting couple of days and a very fun year ahead. So, I am getting my laptop, notebooks, and conference chucks (bright pink, thank you very much!) together, and ensuring there is plenty of iced coffee. This being Michigan, we have our obligatory heat advisory on for tomorrow!

If you are attending, here is a breakdown of what I am up to:

1. Brains and Bots in Action: Using Manual Coding andMachine Insights in Qualitative Analysis

When: Wednesday, June 10, 2026 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM

Where: Exercise in Henderson 3F

The Brew: I am presenting an experiential activity I created for my MGMT 610 course (yup, that one!) on using AI for qualitative analysis. I will lead the participants through the classroom activity, which involves manual coding, then co-coding with the AI, and finally synthesizing our results. Then, I will ask for feedback on the exercise and how it can be improved. And (fingers crossed, will hopefully be able to write it up for a journal).

2. Professional Pathways to Student Success: Developing aCareer-Ready Curriculum

When: Thursday, June 11, 2026 | 9:00 to 10:00 AM

Where: A PDW in Room D 3F

The Brew: I am teaming up with my partner in crime, Kim Barker, and our very fun DH, Joy Beatty, for an interactive Professional Development Workshop. We will be discussing tackling the persistent gap between students’ self-perceived readiness and actual employer evaluations. There will be action sheets, collaborative problem solving, concrete curriculum templates, and of course a lot of discussion.BYOC ( Bring your own Coffee!)

3. How Business Schools can Help with Higher Ed’s “ManProblem”

When: Thursday, June 11, 2026 | 3:00 to 4:30 PM

Where: A Panel Discussion in Ballroom 2F

The Brew: I am joining Joy Beatty, Amy Hietapelto, Kim Barker, John Ross, and Tim Peterson for a crucial panel discussion on higher ed's shifting demographics. With men now a minority in college overall, yet heavily drawn to business majors, management programs and by extension business schools are uniquely positioned to help improve male enrollment and retention. We will be sharing institutional ideas and brainstorming actionable strategies to engage male students through program design and recruitment messaging.

It is going to be a whirlwind of great ideas, brilliant colleagues, and plenty of caffeine. I cannot wait to learn, share, and co-create with everyone.

Let the Conference Girl Summer festivities begin!

Teaching Research Methods- one Fake Corporation at a Time.

 I have a complicated and deeply affectionate relationship with MGMT 610 (you can read my earlier post about how I fell in love with teaching Research Methods.  If you haven't read that post yet, go ahead -  I'll wait!).

The official course description of MGMT 610 calls it "the study and application of diagnostic and quantitative methods for problem diagnosis, implementation, and evaluation of the organizational development process and human resource management practices." Accurate, but sounds exactly like the kind of sentence that makes a student's eyes glaze over before the semester has even started.

In reality, beneath the verbiage, it is a course on how to figure out what is really going on in an organization using data! Data, carefully collected and honestly analyzed. It involves statistics, but goes well beyond statistics into the messier, more interesting territory of research design, data collection, and the art of presenting findings to decision-makers. And best of all, this is not a course about talking about using research and thinking about good research design; instead, students can actually get involved with doing real research.

Here is a problem I spent several semesters trying to solve. It is difficult to compress applied organizational research into a college semester. Doing real organizational research properly takes time that a semester simply does not have. One has to find a partner organization willing to be studied, identify a problem that is both meaningful and researchable, design a survey, gain Institutional Review Board approval (which takes more than a few weeks), collect data, and then actually analyze it. It would essentially be a full-time job. Something had to give, and I was not willing to let it be the learning.

So, I built GPV Inc.(If you're curious about GPV Inc., drop me a note -  I'm happy to share more.)

(image Generated by Gemini, 2026)

GPV Inc. (named after a little someone, the most significant person in my life) is a fictional multinational consulting firm, with organizationally messy problems. Not quite the firm you would want to work in, but definitely one that you want to study.  Rising turnover. A culture that worked beautifully when the company was small, but has become increasingly uneven as it has scaled. A workforce spanning four generational cohorts with very different relationships to work, flexibility, technology, and career development. And hovering over all of it, the specter of the Tech-Whose-Name-We-All-Dread.

The case is structured as a choose-your-own-adventure. Students read through the organizational context and then meet the HR analytics team. I designed these characters deliberately- reflecting the diversity students are likely to encounter in actual workplaces across gender, background, and professional orientation. And each one pushes against stereotype rather than confirming it. Each member of the team is investigating a different people management problem, and each problem becomes a potential research project. Students choose the one that genuinely interests them and spend the semester pursuing it.

I chose the contemporary tensions embedded in generational conflict, AI anxiety, questions of psychological safety, and manager effectiveness because these issues are showing up in real organizations right now. Students, with or without workplace experience, tend to recognize them immediately because they are not invented for pedagogical convenience.

The assignments of the course are also designed to scaffold the research process from beginning to end, so that by the time students sit down to write their final white paper, they have already done every component of it - defined their research question, conducted a literature review, built a survey instrument, collected and cleaned data, and run their analyses. The white paper is where it all comes together into something a decision-maker can read and act on. The fictional audience for that paper is Celia Hargrove, GPV's Chief People Officer, who wants findings grounded in data, not intuition, and recommendations specific enough to actually follow.

I wanted GPV Inc to deliver a consistent thread running through the entire semester in the form of a single organizational story that grows in complexity as students grow in capability. That way, every new technique they learn has some context. I hope my students learn about the process of research- in its messy, frustrating, annoying glory!

And I am hoping they also find GPV Inc. genuinely interesting, because exploring how organizations understand their own people and what it takes to get that understanding right is something I have never stopped finding fascinating myself. And I also hope they enjoy the course, even the assignments and research paper, because I certainly had a lot of fun building it.

Teaching with the Tech-Whose-Name-We-All-Dread

 A Year Ago, I Panicked. (Again.)

A year ago, I was deeply uneasy about the sheer ubiquity of the Tech-Whose-Name-We-All-Dread (TWNWAD). It was everywhere, dominating the news, colonizing our collective headspace, and creeping, rather insidiously, into my classroom.

Suddenly, students were submitting these beautiful looking, very mediocre assignments. Impeccable grammar. Endless em dashes. Polished prose. And the most painfully trite arguments imaginable, all delivered in response to carefully designed written prompts.

This, of course, triggered yet another existential crisis. (I get those when confronted with particularly bad papers.)

The horrifying thought: everything I had learned, everything I had taught so far, was slowly becoming useless. Obsolete.

And then came the second realization, arguably worse. TWNWAD was here. It wasn’t going away. And pretending it didn’t exist was no longer an option.

Enter the Sane Saviors

Thank the universe for sane, thoughtful guides, most notably Ethan Mollick, who operate in the same management education space but talk not about moral panic, but about embracing, learning, and evolving alongside TWNWAD. His book Co-Intelligence was, quite genuinely, a lifesaver.

So I asked myself:

How do I understand this thing and adapt it for the classroom so that it becomes a pedagogical tool rather than an academic menace?

That question eventually became AI in Action.

How AI in Action Was Born

AI in Action is a semester long project I designed for my graduate course, MGMT 628: Human Resource Development, first introduced in Winter 2026. The core idea is simple. If AI is reshaping Learning and Development, then students shouldn’t just talk about it. They should build with it.

In this project, students learn about artificial intelligence by creating their own AI powered tools. Specifically, they build a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) training bot designed to deliver HRD content.

The project unfolds in stages:

• Students author professional training documents on a chosen HRD topic 

• They design the bot’s persona and system prompt 

• They upload and curate content.

• They test the bot extensively.

• Finally, they produce an analytical report examining bias, data security, hallucination risks, trust, and regulatory compliance.

Students critically engage with bias amplification, data security, hallucinations, and ethical risk. They grapple with transparency and accountability in AI driven training systems and explore how regulation plays out in corporate Learning and Development contexts. These ideas surface in the term paper and classroom debates, so the technical and societal dimensions of AI stay tightly linked.

In designing the project, I followed AACSB’s guidance for teaching AI across three key domains: understanding the technology, using the tools, and evaluating their impact.

And honestly, Learning and Development is the perfect test bed. SHRM keeps reminding us that AI is rapidly reshaping L&D, so where else should we experiment?

Building the Bot (and Loving My Students even more)

Armed with an EMU e Fellows grant (which covered a Claude Pro license) and more than a little optimism, I set out this semester.

The results exceeded expectations.

My students were skeptical, which I loved. Overly compliant people don’t question assumptions, and they certainly don’t help with exploration. We started by developing training materials on metrics used in Learning and Development. Our textbooks mention these, but never consistently. Worst case scenario, we’d at least walk away with a solid glossary of T&D metrics.

Then we defined the learner persona and the training bot persona, because, training without a persona is just depressing.

Finally, we built a no code RAG bot using Claude Pro.

Click here to access our Training Bot

There are moments when I absolutely adore my students. Our bot turned out to be mean. Unkind. Sarcastic. Possibly a little too much. But mercifully, it wasn’t the cloying, aggressively encouraging creature we initially imagined.

And somehow, it worked. Really well.

What This Project Actually Did

This project wasn’t just about wrestling with a new technology. Sure, we could have coded more elegantly. We could have reduced bias further. We could have refined the language.

But it forced me to think deeply about what I teach and why. I found myself becoming philosophical about the nature of work and what parts of it are genuinely human versus purely mechanical.

Designing this experience pushed me to reflect on training design, content creation, evaluation, and most crucially, the learner experience itself. I learned far more about Learning and Development by trying to teach it through AI than I ever expected.

Taking It Public

At the Gen AI Spring Summit 2026 at Eastern Michigan University, I had the privilege of sharing this journey during a panel discussion alongside one of my students. Reflecting together on how the project challenged both our technical abilities and our professional assumptions was deeply rewarding.

The audience response was phenomenal.

Yes, we had the usual code checkers telling us all the ways we were “wrong” (useful, actually). But we also had incredibly thoughtful conversations about what the bot was, what it did, and how its architecture shaped the interaction itself. Watching people engage so seriously, and curiously, with the project reminded me why I do this work.

Because sometimes, confronting the TWNWAD doesn’t mean surrendering to it.

It means learning how to argue back, thoughtfully, critically, and maybe with a little sarcasm. And always the coffee!

(image generated by Google's Nano Banana 2 model)

Smells like a Brand New Semester!

Fall: mellow days, pumpkin spice, and a brand new semester. There’s really no other profession that promises renewal and excitement with such regularity—while still keeping so many things the same.

I love the process of recrafting each new learning term, starting with the syllabus. Over the years, I’ve worked to make mine more visually appealing, and for a while now, I’ve been creating one-page graphic syllabi. But this year? The creative bug bit harder.

My undergrad HR graphic syllabus got a full pirate-themed makeover.

And I even made an intro video for the training and development class!

Naturally, the long-form versions couldn’t just be plain Word documents anymore. So back I went to Canva, where I designed colorful, fun syllabi that (hopefully) spark curiosity.

Here is the link to the Grad Training and Development Syllabus

And here is the link to the Undergrad  HRM Syllabus 

But of course I did not stop there.

An interesting-looking syllabus deserves fun content! So I gave the topics a little more personality. Why not make the students think AND smile!

The Human Resource Management topic list transformed from this 

• Introduction
• EEO and Human Resource Management
• Job Analysis
• Recruitment
• Selection
• Training
• Performance Appraisal
• Compensation
• Benefits
• Employee Safety
• Employee Rights
• Unions
• High Performance Work Systems

to 

• HRM 101: Because Managing People Is Harder Than Herding Cats
• The Rules That Keep the Workplace from Turning into a Lawsuit
• What the Heck Do You Actually Do Here?
• Swipe Right on Talent
• The Resume Hunger Games: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
• Teaching Adults Stuff They’ll Forget by Friday
• The Annual "Awkward Conversation"
• Because "The Joy of Work" Doesn't Pay the Rent
• Perks, Pizza, and Health Insurance
• From "Oops" to "OSHA" in Three Easy Steps
• Boundaries, Breaks, and Basic Decency
• We're All in This Together (Whether You Like It or Not)
• More Work, Better Results, Probably Same Pay

while the Training and development topic list transformed from 

• Introduction
• Strategic Training
• Needs Assessment
• Learning and Transfer of Training
• Program Design
• Training Evaluation
• Training Methods
• Training Metrics
• AI in Training and Development
• Career Management and Development

to

• The Human Upgrade
• Because Winging it isn’t Strategic
• Find the Training Gap (Before it finds you)
• Cooking up Training : Mix Learning, Add Motivation, Serve Performance
• Because Boring is Not an Option
• Report Card Day: Grading Your Training's Performance
• Training Methods Buffet: All You Can Learn!
• The Hunger Games: May the Metrics Be Ever in Your Favor
• Bot to Be Wild: the AI Revolution in Training & Development
• Employee Development: Making Career Dreams Come True

These changes seem surface-level cosmetic. And it took a while to actually enact them! 

But the process made me think more deeply about the content—and how to better engage my students. It reminded me that creativity isn’t just decoration, but a tool for connection.

So here’s to a new semester: full of fresh starts, bold ideas, and maybe even a few pirates.

Research Girl Season

Jillian and I share a love for cats, coffee, tchotchkes, and research—not necessarily in that order. There’s something special about working on research with a close friend. I feel so much more at ease tossing around early ideas, even when they’re half-baked or sound a little out there. The comfort of collaboration makes the creative process feel less intimidating and a lot more fun.

What makes our partnership even more interesting is how different our academic backgrounds are. I come from the world of management, while Jillian’s expertise lies in social work. Both are rooted in the social sciences and deal with people in organizational settings, but our lenses are quite distinct. In management, I focus on optimizing organizational outcomes. Jillian, on the other hand, is deeply invested in individual mental health and well-being. Despite these differences, our fields complement each other beautifully. Both emphasize collaboration, communication, and navigating human systems—whether at the level of organizations or individuals.

Our research training reflects this complementarity. Jillian brings depth and nuance through qualitative methods like thematic coding and grounded theory. I contribute with survey research and quantitative analysis. Together, we’re able to integrate both approaches for a richer, more comprehensive understanding of the phenomena we study.

Our work has spanned a versatile range of topics—from caregiving to the post-pandemic experiences of grocery store employees. We’ve presented at conferences, participated in roundtables, and published together. Currently, we’re developing a unique class exercise based on inter-professional education. The goal is to help students from our respective disciplines collaborate on complex, real-world problems—just like we do.

And the best part? 

It is always Research Girl Season. 

Some of our work:

Caregiving research

Pandey, A., Graves, J.  Marsack-Topolewski, C. (2025). Connections Amid Caregiving Stress; Informal Caregiver Employee Stress, Work Outcomes and the Role of Relational Coordination. Journal of Managerial Issues. XXXVI(4), 273-291.

Pandey, A. & Graves, J. (2022). Relational Coordination as a Resource for Caregivers. Relational Coordination Collective Roundtable, Boston, Massachusetts, November.

Pandey, A., Graves, J. M., & Endres, M. L. (2022). Caregiver employee stress outcomes and moderators.  Midwest Academy of Management, Detroit, Michigan, October.

Pandey, A., Graves, J.M.  Marsack-Topolewski, C.N. (2023, August) CARING FOR CAREGIVERS: How Caregiving Stress Impacts Work Outcomes for Informal Caregiver Employees and how Flexible Work and Relational Coordination Can Help—Academy of Management Conference, Boston, Massachusetts.

Pandey, A. & Graves, J. (2022, November). Relational Coordination as a Resource for Caregivers. Relational Coordination Collective Roundtable, Boston, Massachusetts.

Pandey, A., Graves, J. M., & Endres, M. L. (2022, October). Caregiver employee stress outcomes and moderators. Midwest Academy of Management, Detroit, Michigan.

Pandey, A. & Graves, J. M. (2021, November). The Role of Relationships: How COVID 19 at the workplace impacted our understanding about factors influencing stress and wellbeing. Relational Coordination Collective Roundtable, Ann Arbor, Mi, Virtual.

Grocery Store Research

Pandey, A., Graves, J, Newell, S. & Avanigadda, E. ( 2024, November)Collaboration and Safety: Grocery Stores and Their Employees During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Relational Coordination Collective Roundtable, Berkely, California 

Newell, S., Pandey, A., & Graves, J. (2024  July). Disconnected Narratives: Perceptions of Workplace Safety.  Conference on Organizational Discourse, Bristol, United Kingdom.

Newell, S. E., Pandey, A., & Graves, J. (2024 June). The impact of perceptions of workplace safety on workplace outcomes.  Strategic Management Society Conference, Washington, District of Columbia.

In the Classroom

Graves, J. M. & Pandey, A. (2022). Using IPE Simulation for Social Work and Business Students in Non-healthcare Settings in the Era of COVID. Nexus Summit, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August.

Graves, J. M. & Pandey, A. (2022, August). Using IPE Simulation for Social Work and Business Students in Non-healthcare Settings in the Era of COVID. Nexus Summit, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

More on the Classroom Exercise

NOT a Statistics Course: How I fell in love with teaching Research Methods

    As the professor, I am technically not supposed to have favorites, but Diagnostic Techniques and Research Methods (MGMT 610) is one of mine. Every semester, it teaches me something new. 

  Funny thing is, I wasn’t even sure I’d like it when I first got assigned the course. I was a brand-new Assistant Professor, there wasn’t a single textbook that wasn’t drowning in statistics, and everyone who’d taught it before had their own take. So I did what made the most sense: I taught it the way I wish research methods had been taught to me. 

    I mapped it out like a research study- process and application. The course scaffolds across the semester: starting with the business case for research and the literature review, then moves into research design, variable selection, hypotheses development, codebook set up, sample size analysis, survey creation, data collection and finally data analysis. Only the basics for the last part- SPSS only with t-test, ANOVA, and simple regression. No Moderators. No mediators (Alas!)

    I almost got "THIS IS NOT A STATS COURSE" tattooed on my forehead! I placed the message everywhere- on the syllabus, on the LMS, and in emails. 

    Designing the course was the easy part (as if!). Teaching it was where the learning curve hit! I ran headfirst into the tension of teaching for evaluation and teaching for learning. It's hard for students to focus on learning when every mistake costs them points. So I introduced a "resubmit with changes to improve your grade" policy. 

    Then came the online version. Then the qualitative research component, and then managing group dynamics. Then, helping students find parsimonious, research-worthy problems.  And now? AI!

    Always a learning curve, always a new challenge!

Work in Progress

Armed with multiple terrible first drafts, countless syllabi, tangles of new ideas, scores of students, and many, many first days of the semester, here I am still trying to make sense of it. 

With appointment, tenure, and promotion behind me, it is no longer a frantic scramble for a job, then security and advancement. Now it is more of a gentle stroll towards becoming the academic I always wanted to be,- the seeker of new knowledge, the un-boring and quirky teacher, thinking, trying, learning.

Always with a good cup of coffee!