Imagine being cold and alone in a foreign city, away from your loved ones on a significant day. Not the ideal scenario for finding human connection or “spontaneous joy,” but that’s exactly where Mark Stelzner found himself this Valentine’s Day, alone and wandering the chilly streets of Stockholm before warming up to complete strangers at a karaoke bar.

Stelzner is the founder and managing principal of the management consulting firm IA, and he travels frequently for work, helping companies across the globe with people transformation projects. Generally, the downtime on work trips doesn’t make a profound impression on him. On this trip, it did.

“I’m thousands of miles away from home. I’m not with my wife….so it can be lonely,” he told HR Brew, about deciding to walk into the bar advertising “Stranger’s Night” in Swedish (which he doesn’t speak). “It was near freezing…[I thought] I’m just gonna pop in for a beer and a little respite and see the local scene.”

When he entered, he was instructed to take up a pseudonym and sign up for karaoke. He did. Everyone did. What followed was a “very cool, spontaneous, really engaging, joyful experience.”

“What was really striking about it is just this great amalgam of different people and personalities, introverts and extroverts alike, who all walked in,” he said.

Is this a story about HR or a bar? Once he discovered that human connection, it reminded him of what we’ve all been missing for the past three years at work.

Keep reading.—AD

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For HR leaders looking to evolve their tech tools and lead their companies into a brave, new automated frontier, ChatGPT is a tantalizing prospect. Bloomberg cited a recent Gartner survey that indicated that almost half of HR leaders are plugging away at implementing usage guidelines for the tool at work, and two HR leaders who spoke with HR Brew expressed excitement at the possibility of adopting ChatGPT for their teams.

But before hitting send on a company-wide directive, they’re exercising caution.

Yinka Opaneye, chief people officer at the blockchain platform Nethermind, told HR Brew he believes the emergence and accessibility of ChatGPT compels leaders to ponder big questions about HR’s future, like: “How do we encourage the use of this tool, this technology that’s going to be making such a huge difference in all facets of the people function?”

As curiosity and excitement about generative AI courses through HR departments, leaders need to first understand how different generative AI products work, said Cara Brennan Allamano, chief people officer of people management platform Lattice. “Right now, we’re in the listening and data gathering phase,” before implementing internal usage guidelines, she said. According to both leaders, asking targeted questions prior to diving into the generative AI waters will allow their organizations to craft guidelines without succumbing to some of its pitfalls.

Questions first. In HR leadership circles, there is a seeming inevitability about the use of ChatGPT and its myriad capabilities for HR departments. “We know that people are using this tool already, and we’re just going to assume that this is now part of our business,” Brennan Allamano said.

Keep reading.—SB

Tired: outsourcing manufacturing. Wired: outsourcing corporate roles.

According to the Wall Street Journal, employers are increasingly finding cost-savings by hiring remote workers from other countries for roles in payroll, finance, and other jobs that had previously been confined to the company headquarters. Johnny Taylor, CEO of SHRM, told the newspaper that he’s saving 40% in labor costs by hiring tech workers in India.

“There’s very little reason to think, from a cost and benefit standpoint, there wouldn’t be a rather sizable opportunity to offshore [corporate] service jobs in a similar way to where we had offshoring of manufacturing,” Jason Schloetzer, associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told HR Brew.

Evidence is mounting that office jobs are being outsourced.

• The Wall Street Journal spoke with a programmer in Mexico City who doubled her salary with a job from IBM, a McKinsey partner in India who has noticed “Western firms” hiring more accountants and risk analysts, and Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, who said that around 10%–20% of US service support jobs including HR and payroll could move overseas in the next decade.
• Also from WSJ: A firm in Austin, Texas, outsourced 90 roles across engineering, product design, project management to Mexico in the last year, reaching 20% employee presence outside the US, and expects that figure to grow.

Keep reading.—AK

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Some 62% of employees report that they’ve participated in an employee resource group if their employer offers them. (Benevity)

Quote: “Companies wonder why employees are no longer loyal…Well, it's a two-way street—when you treat people like expendable commodities, it’s hard to feel loyal.”—Francine Gordon, a management lecturer at Santa Clara University, on the problem with conducting layoffs via email (Insider)

Read: The Nigerian government is funding startups to support the struggling local tech scene. (Rest of World)