The National Weather Service reminded us this week that we’re still months away from clearing hurricane season, which runs through the end of November. The agency announced Monday it is monitoring a tropical wave over a section of the Atlantic ocean (between the western coast of Africa and the Caribbean) with an 80% chance of forming into a tropical storm, which would be named Gabrielle.

Don’t worry, it’s not “Threat Level Midnight.” But natural disasters and severe weather events cause multibillions in damages each year and were responsible for “568 direct or indirect fatalities” last year alone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Ahead of, and during, these events, HR teams and leaders could maximize internal comms tools and strategy to support both employees and the business.

“I think that transparency, honesty, integrity, even vulnerability, are really important for HR leaders and communicators together in these times, because it’s what creates or breaks the trust between the employee and that business,” said David Maffei, VP and GM at employee communications and experience platform Staffbase.

For more on how HR can leverage internal comms to create culture and trust, keep reading here.—AD

Leave management software platform Tilt announced Tuesday a shift in thinking when it comes to managing leaves of absence with its new leave experience management platform, powered by AI.

The move introduces an entirely new category of HR tech: leave experience management, according to the startup, reimagining the approach companies take to administering and managing leaves of absence with more transparency and hands-on control by companies and their HR teams.

“The problem isn’t that HR doesn’t want to be involved in leave at all. The problem is they’ve never had the right tools to be involved in the right way,” said CEO Jen Henderson, who founded Tilt in 2017. “The long held belief was that you had to outsource the entire function, but the real job to be done was to eliminate the administrative burden like complex math, the endless forms, the broken data streams. No one ever wanted to be fully removed from the human connection.”

Leave can be an important strategic and cultural asset for companies when it comes to retention, Henderson added during a demo at the HR Technology conference this week in Las Vegas, NV.

For more on Tilt’s leave experience management platform, keep reading here.—AD

Time to say “out with the old and in with the new,” not just to last season’s styles, but to your approach to people analytics, too.

People analytics are good for more than just “creating facts”—they can help inform strategies and drive innovation, according to Cole Napper, VP of research at labor market research firm Lightcast and author of People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset.

“I’d say 80% to 90% of what is people analytics today is just creating facts. ‘How many people do we have? How many people left? How many people did we hire? What are the demographic characteristics?’ and not much beyond that,” Napper said. “We’ve invested in a space as an HR function to be more data-driven for 10, 15, 20 years, and they don’t have much to show for it.”

Napper chatted with HR Brew about how to get the most out of people analytics, especially in the age of AI.

For more from our conversation with Napper, keep reading here.—MC