When Liz Fuchs, CPO at Farmer Focus in western Virginia, started her role with the organic chicken company, she was tasked by its founder and CEO to find a way to provide more resources for its nearly 1,000 employees with a focus on “serving the whole person and not just the person that shows up to work.”

“[In] the Shenandoah Valley area, there are six poultry operations within a 20-minute drive of where we are, so people have to want to be here. There’s other options for them,” she said. “How do we differentiate ourselves? The way that we really strive to do that is taking the care of our people to the next level.”

The company originally looked to hire more staff to support employee needs, but with multiple plants and multiple shifts, there just weren’t the resources to do it right.

Instead, Fuchs turned to Marketplace Chaplains, one of the largest and oldest workplace chaplaincy programs in the US, which has more than 2,200 chaplains “going out on tugboats” or visiting auto dealerships, miners, and manufacturing plants to serve employees.

“We call it a personalized and proactive employee care service,” Marketplace Chaplains CEO Jason Brown said. “It’s not church at work. It’s not about setting up chapels and prayer rooms. It’s not a religious program.”

While workplace chaplaincy programs might sound like your boss is bringing religion to work, they’re designed to foster consistent relationship-building between chaplains and employees, who might at some point want to take advantage of a shoulder to cry on or an ear to listen—and one that’s not on the company payroll.

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CHROs are known to be change makers and trailblazers, but when extreme disruption becomes the backdrop, it feels more like a mad dash than an evolution.

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Only one-half of HR teams monitor their AI tools for bias and evaluate their efficacy, according to a new survey from hiring platform Greenhouse.

The survey comes as AI tools rapidly infiltrate HR systems, and platforms race to add AI capacity to their tools.

“If half of HR professionals don’t feel like they have the tools to evaluate the efficacy and potential bias of AI tools in their hiring process,” said Mona Khalil, Greenhouse’s manager of data science, “it’s a coin flip as to whether or not [candidates] may end up applying for jobs where the company…doesn’t have what they need to understand…whether or not they’re actually qualified for the job.”

The survey of 100 HR professionals found that 50% of respondents reported no monitoring or evaluating of their AI tools. Of the remaining respondents, it found that:

• 20% of HR leaders manually review and check AI’s performance
• 10% use random spot-checks
• 8% use another tool to aid in performance monitoring
• 12% don’t use AI tools in hiring

While AI tools and automation can offer HR professionals time-saving assistance and replace routine tasks performed by people pros—especially in the hiring process—HR leaders and candidates both worry about AI’s ability to limit bias and promote DE&I, according to the survey.

Keep reading here.—AD

President Biden and leaders of seven companies in the process of developing AI tools committed on July 21 to develop the technology responsibly and protect society from its potential harm.

The companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—agreed to prioritize assessing technology for safety before releasing it to the public, securing it against cyber threats and bad actors, and developing it transparently. The commitments were voluntary, and there is no enforcement mechanism.

The commitments to transparency aim to build the public’s trust, according to the White House. The companies working with the administration on the commitments agreed to explore watermarking or other signals that content was generated by AI, devote resources to understanding bias in their models, and use AI to address some of society’s biggest challenges, including cancer and climate change.

The move comes as companies and their HR teams figure out how AI (specifically generative AI tools like ChatGPT) will be used at work, such as whether to ban ChatGPT for work purposes, when and if using generative AI should be disclosed, and how AI tools in hiring systems might contain biases.

Keep reading here.—AD

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Workers’ heat exposure cost the US agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service industries more than $2.5 billion in 2021. (the New York Times)

Quote: “They’re looking at me for guidance and direction, when typically in a non-business setting, I’d be looking to somebody older than me and saying ‘hey, how should I do this?’...It’s having that confidence to say ‘nope, this is the plan.’”—Clayton Taylor, CEO of ESP Pros, a private security company, on dealing with imposter syndrome as a Gen Z executive (WorkLife)

Read: Think twice before asking a job candidate, “What would you do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?” Quirky interview questions may not help find top talent after all. (the Wall Street Journal)

HR Innovation: See how your org can manage both at the Gartner ReimagineHR Conference 2023 from Oct. 23–25 in Orlando. Join fellow HR leaders and evolve your HR strategy. See the full topic list.*

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