Five years before the pandemic upended the office as a universally recognized place of business, Jill Duffy was working from home—wherever she was. Duffy is a journalist and has worked virtually across a multitude of time zones—including from the UK, India, Guatemala, and New York—and she’s now harnessing her wealth of experience as an itinerant writer with a new book, The Everything Guide to Remote Work: The Ultimate Resource for Remote Employees, Hybrid Workers, and Digital Nomads.

HR Brew recently spoke with Duffy about what HR leaders can do to make sure hybrid and remote setups are as successful as possible.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So, big question: Why did you decide to write this book? One of the things I’d like to point out to people is that there are a lot of different ways to do remote work. And being in the pandemic is not the first way, and being hybrid because of the pandemic is not the first time people were hybrid either. We have a lot of history of people choosing to work from home when they need to, for reasons of productivity, childcare, and their own health. A lot of what motivated me to be interested in the topic was thinking about how [remote work] works and seeing other people do it. I had coworkers going back to 2001, 2002, who were remote, and there just didn’t seem to be any reason why we couldn’t make it work. So, more recently, I’ve been remote full-time since about 2015. My partner has a job that sort of moves us around a lot. And I said, “I kind of want to make that work for myself, so, let’s do that.”

Given that the pandemic kind of mainstreamed remote work, what do you think the broader lesson is for HR people as we accept this new reality? In this particular case of thinking about remote work, we should have relied a little bit more on disaster-preparedness plans. If we all had to go remote, what would that look like? Do people have a clear understanding of how to do it? Do they know the equipment they need? Do they have people’s contact information?

So moving forward, HR people should absolutely be involved in the process of having disaster preparedness built into their idea of dealing with pandemic situations. Aside from that, what they can do now, going forward, is to start saying, “What do we do to make remote work work?” And that may require tearing down a lot of assumptions that they have about how business used to work and how organizational culture used to work. Keep reading here. —SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

Nearly half (49%) of transgender employees in the US have reported discrimination—“being fired or not hired”—based on their gender identity, compared to 28% of cisgender LGB employees, according to a 2021 UCLA study. And despite a 2020 Supreme Court decision asserting that gay, lesbian, and transgender employees are protected from discrimination based on sex, transgender people in the US continue to face a high risk of unemployment or poverty, according to recent polling from the Center for American Progress.

So what can an HR leader intent on creating an inclusive workplace do about it? The National Center for Transgender Equality is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the understanding and acceptance of transgender people throughout the US. HR Brew recently spoke with Olivia Hunt, the center’s policy director, to hear her thoughts on how HR departments can cultivate a workplace that’s truly inclusive for current and future transgender employees.

People talk. Hunt says employers should be “bold and proud about what they do to make their trans employees welcome within the organization” if they want to recruit more transgender employees. “Trans people talk to each other,” Hunt explained. “And when an employer is particularly good for trans people, a trans employee will go on Twitter or Facebook and talk about fantastic benefits they’re getting from their employer.”

Hunt pointed to Salesforce as a model for other employers because of the benefits the company offers to transgender talent. In November 2021, the company announced a commitment to transgender inclusion through a slate of new gender-inclusive benefits for its trans employees.

While more than 600 major companies offer gender-affirming health care, Salesforce offers several benefits in addition to gender-affirming health care, including new wardrobe reimbursement, partial payment for the fees associated with changing government IDs, and specialized mental-health services and counseling.

Manu Erwin, a transgender employee at Salesforce, told the Financial Review in November, “It’s life-changing from a financial perspective…The biggest benefit is the fact that it exists at all.” 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.

On March 30, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed, once again, an amendment to its injury and illness recordkeeping regulation that would require certain employers to report how many employees are getting sick or hurt at work.

Currently, employers with 250 or more employees, or employers with 20–249 employees in “certain designated industries” are required by OSHA to electronically report illness and injury data in aggregate annually through the Form 300A (Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses). Under the proposed regulations, published in the Federal Register:

• Smaller establishments would have to report. OSHA proposed slashing the reporting threshold from employers with 250 employees to employers with 100 or more employees in “high-hazard industries,” such as warehousing, hospitals and health care establishments, and “wholesalers of many types.”
• …And it would be public. Establishments would have to “include their company name” in their reports, and OSHA confirmed that it intends to make some of that data publicly available.

Under the Obama administration, OSHA issued a similar rule in 2016; in 2019, under the Trump administration, OSHA rolled it back, and now, OSHA is back for another bite at the apple.

In the preamble to the 2019 rule, OSHA listed the reasons it rescinded most of the Obama-era rule’s regulations, including concerns about violating worker privacy through “routine government collection of information that may be quite sensitive” and that the data collected for OSHA enforcement and compliance would be an “incremental benefit.”

Privacy, please? Brian Hendrix, partner at Husch Blackwell, has similar concerns about the 2022 regulation-remix. He told HR Brew that the new regulation could “impact [employee] willingness to report injuries” if employees do not trust OSHA to protect their privacy.

Jordan Barab, the former deputy assistant secretary at OSHA during the Obama administration, said concerns about confidentiality are, in his view, “kind of a red herring.”

“We spent an enormous amount [of time] when we developed the standard the first time…[working] within OSHA and within the White House technology office to ensure that there was no possible way that any confidential information would be released to the public,” Barab told HR Brew.

The more you know...Barab went on to say that any data collected by the proposed regulations could help OSHA identify how workplace injuries and deaths occur and be a jumping off point for establishing programs to prevent such occurrences—a “treasure of information.”

“That kind of information can inform OSHA as to whether the current standards are working and where they’re not working, why they’re not working, and also how to develop much more effective standards that will not only protect workers, but also be able to be implemented easily by employers,” Barab said.—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.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Financial-services platform Robinhood is laying off 9% of its full-time workforce. (TechCrunch)

Quote: “[Workers] have been in the driver’s seat for at least a year, if not longer, but that won’t last forever.”—Karin Kimbrough, LinkedIn’s chief economist, on workers struggling to find remote jobs (BBC WorkLife)

Read: An interview with Eyal Press, author of Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, explores the grim realities endured by a variety of employees in the US, such as slaughterhouse workers and military drone operators. (Vox)

Work perks go a long way: Perks are one of the top three factors millennials consider when deciding on an employer, according to a poll by Robin. Learn how employee views on company benefits have changed in a hybrid workplace.*

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