For Delta Air Lines, moving towards a skills-based talent strategy was something that the company’s HR leaders knew just wouldn’t fly by “winging it.”

The airline serves nearly 200 million travelers each year, servicing 275 destinations across 50 different countries, and it employs more than 100,000 associates across the globe to do so.

“What we’ve done so far for Delta Air Lines is really started to revolutionize a lot of skills-based hiring and development within our enterprise,” said Trevor Greer, a solutions partner for talent at Delta Air Lines, at SAP SuccessFactor’s annual customer event SuccessConnect in Lisbon, Portugal in October.

The airline eyed employee retention, upskilling, and equitable career growth opportunities within the organization, whether on the ramp, in the cockpit, or at a corporate office, Greer said. “There was a huge initiative,” he said of the effort which began in 2019. “We wanted to make sure that our employees felt like they had the full career opportunity here within Delta, that wasn’t just a stop on their career journey.”

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It’s not uncommon for HR pros to find themselves navigating sticky situations—it comes with the territory of a people-centric function—but some of these scenarios may be more easily avoided than others.

During a webinar hosted by compliance training platform Ethena on Oct. 24, Lisa Horgan, an employment lawyer at Littler Mendelson, shared a common trap she’s seen HR pros fall into—and how to avoid it.

Horgan told a story about an HR pro who had developed a friendship with a coworker. It was just like any other workplace friendship until the coworker confided in the people pro about experiencing harassment on the job—and asked them not to tell anyone. It created, Horgan said, a “perfect storm.”

“[The employee] told her friend, who was in HR, that she didn’t want HR to intervene. She was like, ‘Let me try to handle it by myself.’ And so, this HR person wasn’t thinking with their HR hat on, necessarily, and they [said] ‘Okay,’” Horgan said. “They never followed up with her even to check in and be like, ‘Hey, were you able to resolve that issue?’”

Keep reading here.—MC

SHRM launched its 1 Million Civil Conversations initiative this spring in the hope of increasing civility in workplaces. The organization claims there are 190 million acts of incivility in US workplaces each day, ranging from terse email exchanges, to workplace violence.

Workers cite political, social, and racial or ethnic differences as the main drivers of incivility, according to the Q3 SHRM Civility Index.

Yet, just 30% of workers say they have reported an uncivil act to an HR manager. That may be because “civility” can be a vague term that might be hard for workplaces to quantify.

HR Brew sat down with Jim Link, CHRO at SHRM, during the organization’s Inclusion 2024 conference earlier this month to discuss what civility really means, how politics shows up in the workplace, and why SHRM ads have been appearing on CNN.

Keep reading here.—KP