HR STRATEGY

Total softies

The days are getting longer, the weather is getting warmer, and summer Fridays are getting closer.

Summer Fridays, a seasonal perk allowing employees to get a jumpstart on their weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day, are on the rise. The number of job listings mentioning summer Fridays increased by 56% in 2022, ZipRecruiter found. Now, one company is considering making summer Fridays eternal.

Codeword, a communication design agency, launched an open-ended pilot program in January for “soft Fridays,” an initiative through which its roughly 100 employees can, along with their managers, decide if and how they work on Fridays. “Soft Fridays [mean] that we are trusting each other to get our work done and log off when we can on Friday,” Alli Ray, the firm’s chief of staff, told HR Brew.

Ray and her colleague Liv Allen, a VP on Codeword’s PR team, shared how soft Fridays have helped the firm’s employees be more productive and have more flexibility.

Keep reading.—MC

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RECRUITMENT & RETENTION

Skills, skills, skills

Jay-Z may have 99 problems, but so does HR, and according to a new report, many center around a single theme: skills.

Whether in relation to a skills shortage, upskilling, reskilling, or skills-based hiring, skills was a recurring theme in Randstad’s 2024 Talent Trends report.

The report surveyed 1,076 C-suite and human capital leaders across 21 global markets and found that 72% believe the skills gap will cause business problems this year, up 8% from 2023. Furthermore, talent leaders expect increased competition for hard-to-find skills (34%) and scarcity of specialty skills (32%) to be among their top challenges this year. These issues aren’t new, thanks to the growing demand for technology skills across sectors, the Financial Times reported last year.

Additionally, 80% of companies are shifting to a skills-based hiring model, and plan to place more emphasis on skill development in the coming year. For many employers, that’s meant removing traditional success markers, like years of experience or degree requirements, from their hiring process.

Keep reading.—KP

SOCIAL MEDIA

Resounding resignations

Employees aren’t just quitting their jobs—they’re filming themselves quitting, and posting the videos on TikTok.

The trend, dubbed “QuitTok,” has resulted in over 2,500 videos with 82 million views. Some videos are creator’s covert recordings of conversations with their managers, while others are post-resignation reflections. Most show that when workers are fed up with their employment experience, they’re not afraid to go public.

“Quitting is this really uncomfortable thing that happens in organizations…and, like all good social media, [QuitTok] is exposing the things that we don’t often talk about or that are in the shadows of what happens in organizations,” said Hannah Yardley, CHRO at software company Achievers.

Yardley shared with HR Brew what people leaders can learn from QuitTok.

Keep reading.—MC

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