In the year since the PUMP Act took effect, the share of organizations offering an “onsite lactation/mother’s” room has risen to 73%, up 19 percentage points from 2023, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) 2024 employee benefits survey.

The federal legislation, which requires employers to provide nursing employees with breaks, as well a private space free from intrusion, prompted an uptick in interest from potential customers for lactation pods, Sascha Mayer, Mamava’s co-founder and chief experience officer, told HR Brew.

Pumping pain points. Mamava installed its first lactation pod, in the Burlington International Airport, in 2013. Mayer and her co-founder, Christine Dodson, wanted to solve a “pain point” they’d encountered in their careers while working for a brand design agency, “which was loving our jobs, wanting to go back to work, but having no dignified place to use a breast pump,” Mayer said.

Soon after launching in the airport, Mamava started working with employers, installing lactation pods in a couple of colleges and in back-of-house at a grocery store. As of August 2022, the company had installed about 2,000 pods across the US and Canada, according to a newsletter from Fresh Tracks Capital, a Vermont-based early-stage venture capital firm investing in Mamava. Mamava has raised nearly $7 million in seed funding to date, according to Pitchbook data.

Keep reading here.—CV

For the first time in modern history, up to five generations are working side by side in today’s workforce. This evolving talent landscape is due in part to influences like COVID-19, inflation, and social movements—aka a whole bunch of status-quo shakers.

Flexible leadership and tailored employee experiences are crucial. Protiviti explores this robust topic in their white paper: Motivating the Multigenerational Workforce of 2030.

With millennials and Gen Z comprising a large chunk of the workforce, it’s important to understand and leverage every generation’s unique contributions (without falling for generational stereotypes).

Equally valuing and elevating the potential of each generation is a key determinant of success for organizations today—and tomorrow.

Read all about it.

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.

Cynthia McEwen oversees DE&I at the fertility, family-building, and women’s health benefits company Progyny. The HR leader joined the organization in 2022, and although she wears “a number of hats,” she signed up to help direct its work bolstering employee resource groups (ERGs) to make sure leadership at the company shares the responsibility of growing in its DE&I work their employees.

McEwen comes to DE&I leadership with more than two decades of experience in the HR function, primarily in law offices, and as a consultant. She now works across departments with HR colleagues and beyond to spearhead initiatives and make sure the employee voice is heard in the C-suite.

For McEwen and Progyny, ERGs are vehicles for employees to “have a voice in the equity and inclusion space,” and “connect the goals and strategies of our leadership team and the needs and desires of our employees.”

DE&I work hits across the organization at Progyny, but especially in the benefits space, according to McEwen, who said the company is eyeing equity when it comes to what benefits to offer employees and prioritizing meeting them where they are at in life.

“There’s sort of a checkbox of benefits that you have to offer and so you do as a company, but when you’re in this space, when you are a benefits company, it is, I feel, much more important that you are ahead of the game when it comes to your total rewards package and what you offer to employees,” she said.

Keep reading here.—AD

Like college students who skip assigned reading, generative AI chatbots have a reputation for confidently spouting wrong answers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to curb that habit with a new tool that will force the AI to show its work.

The tech giant’s cloud arm is rolling out a new option called a “contextual grounding check” that will compel large language models (LLMs) to back up output with a reference text. Enterprise AI users can set the confidence level of accuracy they demand, and Amazon claims the tool can cut down on as much as 75% of hallucinations on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and summarization tasks.

The tool joins other customizable guardrails that Amazon’s generative AI Bedrock platform already has in place to allow users to filter out objectionable content, such as offensive words, personally identifiable information, or simply irrelevant topics. AWS also announced that these guardrails, first made widely available in April, will now be offered as a standalone API.

The trustworthiness of AI generation continues to be an obstacle as companies scramble to develop LLM tools.

Keep reading on Tech Brew.—PK

Pass AI the mic. Conversational AI has lots to say, especially when it comes to the recruiting process. Get the scoop on Josh Bersin’s recent podcast episode where he talks with Adam Godson, CEO of Paradox, about how technology is radically changing recruiting for job seekers, recruiters, and hiring managers. Tune in.

Great convos are the key to great hiring. A solid chat leads to better insight, connection, and understanding. Paradox, a leader in conversational recruiting software, digs into how generative AI can help add pivotal context within a candidate experience to make for these great conversations. Tune in for their insights.