MOD Pizza, a quick-service restaurant chain with over 500 locations, made the decision to eliminate background checks for entry-level roles, CHRO Dayna Eberhardt explained to the audience at this year’s HR Retail conference in Seattle.

“We were doing tens of thousands of background checks, [spending] tens of thousands of dollars, and less than 0.04% had an impact rate coming back,” she told the crowd. “We’re spending all this money, creating stress, not just for our team…but for those individuals applying. We want to make it as easy as possible to come and join us.”

The decision is part of a larger effort that Eberhardt said grew organically, by having an inclusive and open culture that has led to a focus on working with justice-involved individuals and those with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

“We hired our first justice-involved employee many years ago,” Eberhardt said. “He now has a job in our support center and has grown his career over time and reacquainted with his family. And he really taught us a lot about this population.”

She adds that MOD’s goal is “to be the leading employer of individuals who face barriers to employment.”

“This could be anything from homelessness, incarceration, reform incarceration, addiction, transportation, childcare, all of those things that many of us in the US face,” she explained, adding that “40% of that population self-discloses that they face barriers.”

The company’s four pillars for its approach to the in-store employee experience are: opportunity, stability, mobility, and advocacy.

Keep reading.—AK

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Here’s another edition of our Coworking series, where we schedule 1:1s with HR Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Katie Sanders was working for her father’s manufacturing company when she realized that with nearly 50 employees, the business needed an HR function. Sanders took it upon herself to spearhead people policies and best practices and build out an HR department and safety function for the family business before moving onto other challenges. That was nearly 13 years ago. Now, Sanders is an HR director at merchandising company Winston Retail in New York, after years consulting with payroll services firm Paychex for companies of all sizes and capacities and wearing some of the many HR hats.

Sanders is a self-taught HR pro who trained in childhood education, and now she has taken her knack for lessons from the chalkboard to the boardroom. “Every situation that comes up with a manager and employee can be a learning opportunity, whether you’re dealing with the C-suite or you’re dealing with frontline managers in the field,” she said of her role teaching and coaching colleagues on how to support their employees at work.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

I created an HR department for my family’s manufacturing business (it’s where I got my start in HR), and I developed and implemented a performance review system where there had never been one before. The employees were so grateful to have structured feedback on a regular basis.

Keep reading.—AD

The global fertility services industry was worth $29.9 billion in 2021, and with recent data from the World Health Organization showing that one in six people globally experience infertility, it’s likely to continue growing.

But fertility services—like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg freezing—can be very costly, and many employers don’t offer coverage.

In 2020, about 61% of large employers offered some sort of fertility coverage, though just 27% covered IVF, according to 2021 data from consulting firm Mercer. Among small employers (with 50–499 employees), about 32% offered some sort of fertility coverage in 2020, and 14% covered IVF.

Employers that do offer fertility benefits allocate $36,000 per employee on average, according to data from FertilityIQ, an online fertility data platform. But the average cost of one IVF cycle is more than $23,000, and it takes an average of 2.3–2.7 cycles to get pregnant. That means the average person would need around $50,000 to cover the cost.

“Often, in the absence of having a fertility benefit, people end up spending tens of thousands, and sometimes even upwards of hundreds of thousands out of pocket,” Neel Shah, CMO at virtual care platform Maven Clinic, told Healthcare Brew.

There’s a “clear business case” for employers and payers to cover fertility services, Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven Clinic, said in a news release.

Keep reading on Healthcare Brew.—MA

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: The most productive employees are 242% more likely than their colleagues to be using AI and automations. (Slack)

Quote: “When high performers are leaving and I am a high performer as well, I might think, ‘There are other, potentially better opportunities. Maybe I should leave, too.’”—Sima Sajjadiani, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, on the ripple effects of departing employees (Quartz)

Read: As injectable weight-loss drugs gain popularity, employers must figure out how and when to cover the expensive treatment. (Axios)