Happy Monday! There must be a reason there's so many songs about Mondays. But the Mamas & the Papas said it best—Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.
In today’s edition:
Slack SVP
CEO Pay
World of HR
—Aman Kidwai, Sam Blum, Kristen Parisi
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Slack
In 2012, Ali Rayl found herself at a crossroads, but she did know one thing.
“I was pretty much done with enterprise software,” she told HR Brew. “Nobody cares about what we’re building. The person that we’re selling to isn’t the person that’s going to use it…[it] just isn’t fun.”
She was working as a quality assurance engineer at Tiny Speck, a Vancouver-based company that made video games, but the business was about to shut down. When Tiny Speck’s leadership, which included Slack co-founder and former CEO Stewart Butterfield, asked her to stay with them in their new venture, Rayl said she “took a moment” when she heard that the product would be a communications tool for the workplace.
She ended up staying because she liked working with the people there.
“I’ll work with them on anything. So, that’s why I decided to stick around. It wasn’t that it was a messaging product. It was that I liked the people I was working with,” she explained.
She joined Slack and took on the task of handling customer service for the new company. A little over 10 years and 200,000 paying customers later, Slack has created one of the most popular and widely-used workplace tools in the world, which in 2021 was acquired for $27.7 billion by Salesforce.
The product’s success was perhaps a testament to a company culture that seemed different from the rest of Silicon Valley, and created a gentler, dare we say enjoyable, enterprise software that was easier to adopt than the MS-DOS-style applications that most people at work had been using.
Keep reading.—AK
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Life is sweeter with fewer limits, especially when it comes to dessert, wi-fi, and your company’s hiring pool. But international hiring can be costly, confusing, and unapproachable.
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top compliance matters to look out for
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Find, hire, and pay international talent with Deel—and start out with a crash course on all things international hiring.
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Thos Robinson/Getty Images
Amid a period of turbulence for tech giants, some of the industry’s foremost CEOs—like Apple’s Tim Cook and Zoom’s Eric Yuan—have seen their compensation slashed to ward off mass layoffs.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is the latest executive to see compensation cut. Last year, Jassy earned just under $1.3 million, with a base salary of $317,500 and $981,223 in other compensation, according to an annual proxy statement filed in March. In 2021, the year of his appointment as CEO, Jassy was paid $212.7 million, Insider reported. Amazon cut a further 9,000 jobs in March, after laying off almost 18,000 employees at the end of 2022.
Just as “layoff contagion” has become shorthand for staff reductions across tech, a similar logic may apply to executive pay cuts as a means to avoid or mitigate layoffs, Tony Guadagni, senior principal at Gartner, previously explained to HR Brew.
Trending. When Apple announced that Cook had recommended his compensation be reduced by 40% this January, Guadagni told HR Brew that a trend was likely afoot. “We see someone like Apple setting the tone…I think it’s likely that we’ll see more of it,” he said.
Keep reading.—SB
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Francis Scialabba
The South Korean government is hoping that a new financial incentive will persuade its isolated young people to get outside.
The South Korean Ministry refers to them as hikikomori, people who avoid friends, school, and work for months or years. The condition is more likely to show up in people who are financially or socially disadvantaged, according to Fortune, and was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The program is a temporary way to bring more people into the workforce, Time reported.
Where in the world? Young people in South Korea are struggling with socializing, and the country itself is dealing with the lowest birthrate in the world and an increasing worker shortage.
So, the government is trying to convince young people ages nine to 24 to get outside by offering a $500-per-month incentive to leave their homes. The Youth Welfare Support Act offers additional funds for school tuition and fees, job support, mental health coverage, legal fees, and even cultural experiences, Insider reported. Despite the program’s goal, payment recipients won’t need to prove they’re actually leaving their homes.
“While it’s good to try various approaches to boost [the] working-age population, it cannot be seen as a long-term solution to fix the population problem here,” Shin Yul, a political science professor at Myongji University, told Time.
Satellite view. But South Koreans aren’t alone in social isolation: Young people globally have grown more isolated in recent years, “in conjunction with the rise of smartphone access and increased internet use,” per a recent study in the Journal of Adolescence. That can seep into work-life as well, so experts say that employers should get involved to help alleviate worker loneliness and isolation, according to multiple studies. “We found that loneliness [costs] employers approximately $154 billion annually, substantially contributes to worker job-withdrawal and has negative implications for organizational effectiveness and costs,” Anne Bowers, senior health-services researcher at Cigna, told Marketplace.—KP
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Today’s top HR reads.
Stat: 71% of US workers don’t want AI to decide who gets hired. (Pew Research)
Quote: “I am more of an advocate for building a team of thoughtful and accountable people, instead of singular perks that I think act as Band-Aids without addressing underlying potentially toxic working environments that create stress.”—Ashleigh Hinde, founder and CEO of Waldo, on how to foster a healthy workplace (Fortune)
Read: Businesses and workers are on opposite sides of the non-compete contract debate. (NBC News)
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Workers are using specialized wellness retreats to manage burnout.
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The Texas State Senate approved a bill that would bar all diversity hiring and training programs in public universities and colleges.
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James Clarke, CEO of a marketing company, is under fire for suggesting primary caregivers aren’t being “fair” to their employers.
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Amazon’s headquarters plans in Arlington, Virginia, remain in limbo.
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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:
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