Happy Election Day! While Americans across the country are slapping on “I voted” stickers, you, brave HR pro, will be donning your diplomat hat as you broker peace between employees who try to turn the break room into the debate stage. Lucky for you, we’ve got just the thing for that scenario.
In today’s edition:
🗳 Ballot benefits
Baby boom bump
Starting up
—Susanna Vogel, Kristen Parisi, Sam Blum
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Robyn Beck/Getty Images
When Ally and Scott Svenson founded MOD pizza in 2008, they wanted their pizza place to be a people place. As MOD has expanded to 29 states, so too has the Svensons’ dream, from hiring workers with barriers to employment to, more recently, teaching employees about their civic rights and giving them time off to exercise them.
“We want our squad to have a voice. We want them to feel heard and feel valued. And I think voting is a way that people can be heard,” Dayna Eberhardt, MOD’s chief people officer, told HR Brew. “The last thing you want…is to have [them] not getting time off to go and vote.”
Her concern isn’t unfounded. Many Americans who haven’t voted in recent years reported to the Pew Research Center that structural barriers, including an inability to take time off work, were their main reason for skipping the polls. To get people there, over 2,000 companies have joined Time to Vote, a coalition dedicated to turning out the vote through education and paid time off.
HR Brew chatted with coalition members about the steps they’ve taken to help their employees exercise their right to vote.
Education for the nation. Some companies have introduced websites to educate employees and inspire them to turn out.
Macy’s has a website, in partnership with Rock the Vote, where employees can check their voter registration status and deadlines, and pledge to vote. Outdoor recreation brand REI took a different approach to encourage turnout. In addition to highlighting key dates for voters, a page on its website includes information on how the midterms might impact the company’s environmental preservation mission and features employee testimonials on the importance of voting.
At MOD, it took a village to create a website that teaches employees to request absentee ballots and find polling locations. Keep reading here.—SV
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.
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From holidays to work anniversaries, it’s the perfect time to share gifts and gratitude. Snappy’s free employee recognition guide shares best practices and useful tips for employee appreciation. Because memorable gifts are one of the best ways to show appreciation, you’ll also get a holiday gift guide.
Snappy is an all-in-one gifting platform that makes it easy for organizations to recognize employees with gifts that delight, letting recipients pick the gift they love. Snappy’s expert-curated collections feature the best brands. Unlike a gift card, Snappy sprinkles on some magic with digital gift wrapping, personalized branding and messaging, and more.
Leaders at more than 40 of the Fortune 100 love how Snappy makes it easy to send hundreds of gifts in seconds. Snappy handles all of the details, including collecting employee addresses, and sends you detailed reporting on every gift.
Learn more at Snappy.com or get started for free.
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Fatcamera/Getty Images
Remote workers were busy during the pandemic, often logging longer hours while taking fewer vacation days. But, according to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), they made more time for love.
After a decline in births in 2020, the US experienced a mini baby boom in 2021, when the fertility rate increased by about 6.2%, or 46,000 babies, to 3.67 million, according to the NBER. However, more babies means more employees using parental leave, and that can leave HR scrambling. HR Brew spoke to an organizational planner who explained how HR departments can prepare for an extended leave.
Baby bump. The report refers to the uptick in births as a “bump,” a small boom for fertility rates among those born in the US, which declined from 2.1 to 1.6 overall between 2007 and 2020 in the wake of the Great Recession, according to the paper. Those aged under 25, between 30 and 34, and with a college education experienced the biggest increase in births.
And it wasn’t just remote work that fueled the increase. The paper also pointed to more flexible work schedules and income gains due to pandemic support programs as reasons why Americans may have felt more comfortable having a child in 2021.
Preparing for leave. Smaller businesses are more likely to struggle when someone is out on parental leave, said Kelly Harris Perin, founder of Little Bites Coaching, which helps organizations and employees expecting to navigate parental leave. No matter how challenging preparations may be, she explained that it’s important to consistently communicate to all employees that those who use their parental leave will be supported. 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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Derek Belch is the co-founder and CEO of STRIVR, a VR company that seeks to make on-the-job training tactile with interactive, simulated experiences, rather than ho-hum videos and PowerPoint presentations. Since its founding in 2015, it has raised $86 million from a variety of investors, including Workday Ventures and Accenture Ventures. We talked to Belch about how STRIVR’s VR tech works, and his thoughts on the future of vocational training.
What product or service does your company offer? At the highest level, STRIVR provides virtual reality-based simulations and solutions for employee training and the enterprise...At a more specific, granular level, we have built a very robust software platform that enables the content creation, content distribution, data and analytic collection, and enterprise-grade security and compliance to do VR at scale in the enterprise. Big picture: VR training. More specifically...we’re selling the content services and software that is necessary to pull that off.
How does the service work? There’s so many nuances here, but from a basic perspective, in order to do VR training, a company needs VR headsets. We do not make hardware, but we work with the hardware manufacturers and the customers to figure out what the best hardware is for them. We procure and provision that hardware on their behalf. They need content to go in the hardware…There’s the software required to pull this off—it’s one thing to sideload an app onto a headset, it’s a whole other thing to get on a company’s network and have employees enter their idea and get through their security and IP process….So, the organization purchases a software license, not unlike how they would buy Salesforce, Workday, SAP, or Microsoft Word.
What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve? Keep reading here.
Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Starting Up? Click here to introduce yourself.
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Positive employee experiences matter more than ever. In The Engagement Edge in the Real World, Workday Peakon Employee Voice dives into real-world customer success stories built on improving engagement across the employee lifecycle. Hear about big wins from companies like Kentucky Fried Chicken, whose employee engagement increased by 12%. Get the ebook here.
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Today’s top HR reads.
Stat: 70% of US workers have either supplemented or considered supplementing their income with gig work in the past year. (Prudential)
Quote: “Employer flip-flopping demonstrates the lack of a cohesive employee engagement and retention plan and only serves to fuel the feeling that employers don’t care.”—Monica Bourgeau, a future of work consultant, on the ramifications of ever-changing RTO policies (WorkLife)
Read: The positive effects of New York City’s pay transparency law will likely be felt by workers across the country, experts say. (CNBC)
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Amazon announced a months-long hiring freeze that will affect its corporate workforce.
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Apple has also paused hiring, specifically for positions outside R&D.
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Gannett employees went on a daylong strike to protest recent layoffs and furloughs, among other things.
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Exxon may lease or sell unused office space at its Houston campus as part of a sweeping cost-cutting initiative.
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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:
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