Yes, it’s Monday! Merely stating a fact. In other news, Harvard Business Review reports that business leaders can help employee morale and lighten the work mood simply through emoji and GIFs. So, from HR Brew to you, we hope your day is .
In today’s edition:
HR tech check
Hot desks
Musk’s must RTO
—Sam Blum, Kristen Parisi
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Francis Scialabba
Despite a recent slowdown in global VC tech investment, money is still flowing into HR tech, according to a recent analysis of investor data provided exclusively to HR Brew.
As we previously reported, the industry reached an investment milestone of $16.8 billion worldwide in 2021. And investments in HR tech continue to make headlines, with companies such as Velocity Global, which offers a software platform that handles onboarding, payroll, and other HR needs, and Rippling, an employee management platform, raising $400 million and $250 million in single funding rounds, respectively.
HR tech is a broad field, encompassing everything from employee-engagement platforms and online job marketplaces to AI-enabled burnout detection tools and beyond. To zoom in on where the investment money is flowing, we asked Pitchbook Data, a venture capital, private equity, and M&A analyst, which sectors of the HR tech space investors seem most bullish about.
Engagement is paramount. Pitchbook crunched numbers from the last six years, across seven categories of businesses: employee-engagement platforms, IT consulting services, management-consulting services, online job marketplaces, project-management software, recruitment platforms, and talent management.
The data, which analyzed investments from 2016 through May 27, 2022, shows that among US HR tech firms, employee-engagement platforms, recruitment platforms, and project-management software are leading the way, respectively. (The report was compiled by Pitchbook’s machine learning tools, which scan the Web for “regulatory filings, news sources, websites, press releases, and more for publicly available data,” according to the company.)
VC investment in US-based HR tech companies, in billions. (Pitchbook Data)
With one exception, investment totals in 2021 for every category were the highest of the last six years, according to Pitchbook’s data, with employee-engagement platforms accruing over $1.4 billion and management-consulting services netting over $2.1 billion. (Overall investment in IT consulting-service tech was higher in 2018 than in 2021.)
Sarah White, CEO and principal of Aspect43, an HR tech research and advisory firm that works with both investors and vendors, explained that employee-engagement tech is attracting a lot of investor interest due to advancements in technology in a category that’s lagged behind. Keep reading here.—SB
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.
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Netflix/Seinfeld via Giphy
As employers hesitantly summon workers back to offices amid yet another Covid wave in the US, some employees are returning to find that their home-away-from-home-slash-personal-junk-storage area—aka their permanent desk—is now a bygone relic of the Before Times.
According to a February survey from Steelcase, a furniture and design company, assigned desks have decreased since the start of the pandemic. “Globally, 15% of employees working for large organizations (10,000+ employees) have lost their assigned desk; overall, regardless of the size of the organization, 10% of employees have lost their assigned desk, compared to pre-pandemic,” the survey found.
While hot-desking has been around since the 1980s and employers can now leverage technology to make the model more appealing, some organizational psychologists say employees still want a consistent workspace.
Hot-desking can be a headache. Hot-desking today (or hoteling, as some call it) is often more structured than the pre-2020 model, which was based on a military concept called “hot-bunking,” where soldiers slept in shifts, rotating in and out of shared bunks.
In February 2020, right before Covid shuttered offices worldwide, Wired reported on the trend’s rise and attitudes toward it from UK-based workers. Jess Baker, a business psychologist, told Wired at the time that the model could cause employees undue stress. “It can adversely affect the many staff who have to be on-site and need to know they’ve got everything they need where they need it.”
Alison Hirst, director of research students at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, told HR Brew via email that hot-desking was harder when offices were busier. “People could potentially have to wander over a very large area full of relative strangers looking for a free desk, and then have to sit among strangers, which can be quite uncomfortable.”
Indeed, some employees have expressed frustration over losing their assigned desk…Keep reading here.—KP
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.
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Changing work models have been going around recently and affecting employees’ health, well-being, and overall engagement—so much so that business culture and performance are being affected too.
We get it. Many organizations are proactively experimenting with new work models that pose challenges to both orgs and their employees. That’s why Workday is putting on an employee well-being webinar.
On June 22 at 1pm ET, attend the Workday webinar How HR Can Measure and Improve Employee Wellbeing and learn how to:
- reduce employee burnout
- improve employee well-being with active listening
- turn customer and employee complaints into innovation with culture hacking
Whether you’re fully remote or completely onsite (or anything in between), this Workday webinar will help you address your employees’ needs as your workplace changes.
Register here.
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Musk's utopia. (United Artists Digital Studios/The Apartment)
Elon Musk has entered the RTO chat. In leaked emails Musk sent last week, the EV maker’s CEO detailed a mandatory in-office work policy, writing that “everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week.”
Failing to meet this standard will presumably result in termination for Tesla employees, with Musk writing: “If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.” One of the two emails was tweeted by Sam Nissim, whose Twitter bio says he’s a Tesla shareholder, on Wednesday, generating the kind of polarizing buzz so commonly associated with the tycoon, who was recently accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant working for his aerospace company, SpaceX. (Musk denies the allegations.)
Musk’s memo catapulted throughout Twitter, sparking debate among the pro-office and WFH camps cluttering Nissim’s mentions and beyond. Musk also tweeted more, surprising no one, and noting that people who think coming into an office for work is an antiquated concept should “pretend to work somewhere else.”
The HR world, naturally, had some feedback on Musk’s new policy.
Evil HR Lady: “Senior leadership should be there when employees of any level need to be on-site. I don’t know who Musk includes in his ExecStaff…but I doubt he’s referring to a junior analyst. These are likely the decision-makers and people making big bucks. These people decide when the factory workers work, where they work, and how long they work. They can’t claim to support and lead when they aren’t there.”—Suzanne Lucas (AKA Evil HR Lady), writing for Inc. magazine, in response to Musk writing in his email: “The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence.”
Headhunters get ahead. “The true winners will be headhunters, who will have no problem poaching talent from Tesla and placing these people elsewhere.”—Roberta Matuson, president of Matuson Consulting, predicted on LinkedIn.
Authoritarian, much? “This authoritarian, top-down approach rooted in mistrust and false assumptions goes against best practices and reflects an illusion of control that will undermine employee productivity, engagement, innovation, retention, and recruitment at Tesla.”—Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, wrote in an opinion column for the New York Daily News.
Poaching (on Twitter): “hey @elonmusk- saw your letter! We’d be happy to hire any of your team who don’t want to count 40hrs in the office. Wanna intro me to your HR?”—Sachin Dev Duggal, chief wizard at AI app developer Builder.ai, tweeted.
And General Motors. The automotive giant did donuts around Musk on Friday. Keep reading here.—SB
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.
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TOGETHER WITH THE PREDICTIVE INDEX
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Today’s top HR reads.
Stat: The US economy added 390,000 jobs in May, about 60,000 more than was projected, with President Biden saying that the latest numbers are “a sign of a healthy economy with steady growth.” (MarketWatch)
Quote: “A lot of the work that I do is very creative…so I think having a brain that’s feeling light and limber and open in that way is certainly a benefit to work.”—Jordan Chiu, director of brand experience and innovation at mushroom-based coffee-alternative company MUD\WTR, on the benefits of microdosing at work (Fast Company)
Read: Some organizations, including Amazon and the California Farm Bureau Federation, are helping workers apply for citizenship and other immigration benefits in an effort to bring more immigrant talent to the US. (Bloomberg Law)
Right candidate, right role: Using behavioral data and custom interview Qs, The Predictive Index’s hiring software clarifies your candidate pool to drive well-informed hiring. And when your recruiting process is tight, top talent notices. Start for free here.*
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More than 4,000 Salesforce employees signed a letter to the company requesting that Salesforce end its “customer relationship with the National Rifle Association.”
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White House interns will start getting paid for their work starting this fall, at a rate “equal to $750 per week.”
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Ford announced plans to create 6,200 union jobs in the Midwest and turn 3,000 temporary workers into full-time employees.
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Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is set to sign a bill that would permit school districts to arm school employees after “up to 24 hours of initial training.”
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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:
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