Toby from The Office may have impressed on the world the idea that HR leaders spend their days sitting quietly behind closed doors, but a lot has changed since the aughts, especially for people professionals. The CHRO role, for one, has become more forward-facing. No more hiding in the backroom at Dunder Mifflin.

HR Brew checked in with Ola Snow, CHRO of Cardinal Health, and Pablo Brizi, CHRO of Hilton Grand Vacations, about how the role of HR leaders has changed and why having a deep understanding of the business overall is important for long-term success.

Zoom in. The role of the CHRO has evolved considerably in recent years, thanks, in part, to the Covid-19 pandemic. As worker safety and remote work became companies’ top priorities, CEOs and CFOs started, for the first time, to rely heavily on HR teams, and have continued to work in close concert with them on business decisions.

“Not only are we HR leaders, we’re really business leaders. We are in strategy conversations, not just talking about HR and people strategies,” Snow told HR Brew. Conversations, she added, went beyond Covid safety and into how to ensure “our people have the skills to bring our business strategy forward”—discussions that HR likely wouldn’t have been a part of 20 years ago.

In some companies, it’s now the norm for CEOs to rely on HR professionals to understand what employees need and how to implement organizational changes, according to executives interviewed by Insider last year. With a seat at the table, HR’s decisions and insights can have a “ripple effect” across organizations, resulting in, for example, the onboarding of new top talent. Keep reading here.—KP

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Consider this equal-parts radical and not-so-crazy question: What would happen if the work week were cut from five days to four? Would markets crash, giving rise to a dystopian landscape of once-diligent workers who now flout all responsibility, brazenly doing crossword puzzles with 20% more free time at their disposal?

If the UK’s four-day workweek trial is any indication, the paradigm may prove more serene than cataclysmic for workers: The six-month pilot, which began in June, involves 3,300 workers across 70 companies and is being conducted in conjunction with 4 Day Week Global, the UK’s 4 Day Week campaign, think-tank Autonomy, and researchers at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and Boston College. All workers are being paid their full wages and are required to maintain their typical productivity levels.

So far, it has produced many positives for participants: Lisa Gilbert, a lending services manager at Charity Bank, told CNN Business that the extra day provides ample space for caretaking duties: “I can really enjoy my weekend now because I’ve got my Friday for my chores and my other bits and pieces, or...if I just want to take my mum out for a walk, I can do that now without feeling guilty.”

The reduced week has induced growing pains for some—London PR agency Unity was “genuinely chaotic” during the first two weeks of the trial, the firm’s managing director, Samantha Losey, told CNN Business. But the company learned to navigate the new setup by cutting down on meetings, among other strategies.

Oh, yes, there’s a mental health dimension, too. Keep reading here.—SB

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The labor shortage has companies scrambling to retain workers like a sad John Cusack serenading an empty office plaza with his trademark boombox. Though job openings decreased slightly from 11.3 million in May to 10.7 million in June, according to the latest BLS JOLTS data, retention woes persist: 4.2 million US employees quit their jobs in June, basically unchanged from 4.3 million in May.

Some companies have wagered that cutting college-degree requirements could help their efforts to reverse the revolving door. Advocates of nixing degree requirements include corporate titans such as Elon Musk, who said in April that having a degree doesn’t indicate “exceptional ability.”

The trend predates the current labor shortage. A study conducted by Harvard Business School and labor market research firm the Burning Glass Institute that analyzed over 51 million online job postings from 2017 to 2020 found that “Employers are resetting degree requirements in a wide range of roles, dropping the requirement for a bachelor’s degree in many middle-skill and even some higher-skill roles.”

Nixing the requirement can also allow HR pros to relax their shoulders and expand their candidate pool. “You can open your talent pipeline, and really home in and get specific on what’s going to be a good fit for [the] company and for the role,” Lara Bach, associate director of advisory services at recruitment consultancy Grads of Life, told HR Brew in January.

Last week, HR Brew polled readers on whether they’re getting rid of degree requirements for entry-level roles, to which 129 respondents answered yes, 109 said no, and 208 said that it depends on the role.

The poll seems to reflect, or at least sync with, the recent decisions of a certain Mid-Atlantic state government: In April, Maryland eliminated college-degree requirements for thousands of government jobs.—SB

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: The number of US job openings shrunk 6.6% from 11.3 million in May to 10.7 million in June. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Quote: “Collaboration has been the buzzword of the return to the office conversation, but it’s not as simple as just opening up the floorplan—it’s about understanding what types of collaboration happen between teams and building the space around that.”—Laura Stephens, a junior designer at UK office-design firm Interaction, on how design affects workplace relationships (WorkLife)

Read: Amid a series of tech-industry layoffs, it’s imperative that companies begin to break the boom-and-bust cycle by making more intentional hiring and managerial decisions, argued Tigran Sloyan, co-founder and CEO of skills-based assessment platform CodeSignal. (Fast Company)

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