The November election is fueling anxiety among US adults, and such trends have implications for employee health and well-being. HR leaders are still figuring out how to navigate a challenging political environment in their workplaces.

Mental health platform Headspace is hoping to see employers address this by sharing resources the company developed with When We All Vote, a nonpartisan organization seeking to increase voter registration, ahead of the election. The toolkit Headspace developed features a quiz users can take to assess their stress levels regarding the current political landscape, as well as a series of meditations and exercises aimed at helping them “worry less about the news, navigate uncertainty, manage relationships and set healthy boundaries, and process tough emotions.”

While this may all sound easier said than done, the ultimate goal of the partnership is to help voters feel empowered to take action, said Beth Lynk, executive director of When We All Vote. The hope, she said, is that “struggling to navigate that election anxiety isn’t paralyzing and shouldn’t deter voters.”

Taboo no more. While politics used to be considered a taboo workplace topic, this is starting to change, particularly as issues like abortion and the climate crisis are increasingly seen as falling within the purview of HR departments.

Keep reading here.—CV

But to make that future a reality, a simpler, faster, and more human approach to hiring needs to happen today.

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Here’s this week’s edition of our Coworking series. Each week, we chat 1:1 with an HR Brew reader. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

For Kassy Schimkaitis, HR runs in the family. Her late grandfather helped convince the now VP of people strategy at Colorado-based telecom company Commnet Broadband to pursue the function when she was a college student.

“[We] talked through what I was learning in school and what I wanted to focus on, what I was passionate about,” she said. “We started talking about HR, and the people being the heart of a business, and [that] what creates a good place to work is the culture.”

Schimkaitis’s grandfather worked in the “personnel department,” a term used to describe the function in the early 20th century. Her grandfather eventually became a lawyer, but the conversation about HR and employees stuck with Schimkaitis, especially the evolution of HR and its important place in business.

“He actually passed away a few weeks later, and so I was inspired to follow in his footsteps and ended up deciding I was going to major in HR,” she said.

Keep reading here.—AD

From the murderous HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the menacing AUTO in Pixar’s masterpiece WALL-E, AI has been a bogeyman in popular culture for decades.

And while we don’t live in a fictional, AI-driven apocalypse like in The Terminator (at least not yet), the anxiety that many workers have of the technology being a job-stealer is real.

Employment anxiety is just one of the many impediments organizations face with AI implementation, according to consultants and finance leaders. These experts, who either gave presentations or spoke directly with CFO Brew at Gartner’s CFO & Finance Executive Conference in May, said that buy-in from employees is as important as the technology itself for AI implementation to succeed.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—AZ

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