HR leaders with frontline employees know just how difficult it can be to take them away from their jobs to participate in activities like trainings, surveys, or ERGs.

That was the case at Delta. The airline has more than 100,000 employees worldwide, over 90,000 of whom are frontline workers.

“Think about an airline employee at Delta,” Harsh Mathur, Delta’s director of employee listening and HR innovation, said during a panel at Qualtrics’ X4 conference in March. These employees, he said, often work early or odd hours, and have critical responsibilities, including supporting and ensuring the safety of Delta customers. At the end of the day, the last thing they want to do is fill out an employee engagement survey, Mathur said. “It’s just unrealistic. It’s not pragmatic.”

The airline wanted to improve participation in its listening efforts, to help ensure decisions regarding new programs or policy changes were made in the best interest of workers. So, Delta began tinkering with retooling its approach in 2023, in a way that has already led to success, including changes to some of the company’s benefits, according to Mathur.

For more on how employee listening helped Delta rethink its benefits, keep reading here.—PM

The second season of Prime Video’s Emmy-nominated sitcom Jury Duty is worth watching for many reasons, but will especially resonate with HR pros.

The ten episodes that make up Jury Duty Presents: Corporate Retreat follow Anthony Norman, who’s hired as a temporary assistant to the head of HR at Agoura, California-based Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauces. Norman’s job is to help organize and ensure the company’s annual retreat is a joyous, seamless occasion for its 10 full-time employees.

What Norman doesn’t know is that none of it is real.

The job, the company, the shenanigans that ensue during the weeklong retreat…they’re all scripted. But many of the seemingly outlandish scenarios are more realistic than you might think. “As you go, the scenarios get more and more far-fetched and outrageous. As they escalate during the series, I just was more and more ticking off, like ‘Yep, seen that. Yep, seen that,’” Rebecca Apostoli, a fractional head of people, told HR Brew.

For more on how the show captures the soul of HR, keep reading here.—MC

Skills, in the words of the late Gang Starr rapper Guru, are “top rank, point blank,” and “vital”—for IT workers, that especially applies to AI.

But there’s a noticeable gap between workers’ current level of AI skills and what’s needed by organizations. At the MIT CIO Symposium this May, IT Brew asked Jonathan Kleiman, Stack AI SVP of enterprise AI, about the skills gap and how to address the problem.

In Kleiman’s view, the issue is adaptability. Organizations that embrace implementation are going to see better results, he said, and incentivizing change is key.

For more on the AI skills gap, and how to address it, keep reading on IT Brew.—EH