While sunbathing with your colleagues by a pool may not sound like the most fun way to spend a vacation, it sure beats sitting in a stodgy conference room all day, right?

HR Brew caught up with one company that is giving new meaning to the growing trend of workcations.

Chillax with your colleagues. A workcation could just mean working while you’re on vacation, but if the boss is planning it, a workcation could become a souped-up off-site.

Ben Aston, founder of Black & White Zebra, a media technology company, took his 40-person team for a workcation in Mexico. “We need to interact with our colleagues outside of transactional settings. That’s where a well-organized team workcation can greatly benefit,” he wrote in an article for Fast Company.

A growing trend? Companies including financial services firm Citigroup, photo editing app PhotoAiD, and software company Doist are all offering versions of this type of workcation. We personally prefer the term “offsitecation,” but nobody asked us.

Lisa Sholkin, VP of people at Teampay, an expense platform, told HR Brew about the company’s workcation and the employee response. While Sholkin oversees the HR team, she admits that the workcation is part of what enticed her to join the company a few months ago. The concept happened organically, she explained—it was an idea that CEO Andrew Hoag had as a way to connect some of the company’s remote workforce. But employees were so receptive that he decided to make it a recurring event.

Keep reading.—KP

Benita Flucker is the chief equity and inclusion officer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), the education publishing and technology company. In an interview with HR Brew, she discussed her approach to the job and the importance of DE&I for a company’s products and services.

How do you approach your role as chief equity and inclusion officer for an education company?

My focus is on ensuring that at HMH we build a culture that is inclusive and that is full of really diverse and broad representation…The other key piece for me is to support HMH’s customers and our business on the equity and inclusion side, so that means making sure that our content, our programs, our services, all reflect the diverse populations that we serve in the education space.

Why is it important for HMH’s products and services to be part of your DE&I mission?

[All children] deserve the right to have an education that is equitable, that is inclusive, and that allows them to see not only themselves today, but also have an opportunity to see what they could become, what their futures could look like, etcetera. When I talk about “inclusion” and “equity,” they mean very specific things for us, and for me. Diversity is all about absolute representation. That could be our ethnicity [or] our heritages. It could also be about our interests, and the things that we preference, and our lived experiences.

Inclusion, to me, is about making sure, especially for students, that when they enter a classroom…they feel like they belong. They feel respected, they feel they have agency, they feel people can see them, and educators are meeting students where they are. So, students don’t feel like they have to assimilate. They can come in as they are and feel like they are welcome.

Equity is…if I’m in a classroom and I have a a visual need or I happen to speak a different language or I need some other kind of support, that those supports are available, that educators understand how to provide those supports.

Keep reading.—AK

“Mom, I am a rich man,” Cher famously said when her mother told her to settle down and find a wealthy husband. But after looking at pay disparity reports, it seems that many women still don’t have the financial power of their male counterparts.

Gender pay disparities are a persistent conundrum around the world, according to Quartz. As debate about the best way to rectify the problem rages on, some countries are enacting new legislation to mandate better transparency.

Where in the world? Down under, where giant spiders reign supreme, the Australian Parliament passed new legislation aimed at reducing gender pay disparities.

For those of you thinking, “Wait, doesn’t Australia already do this?” you’re sort of correct. The new legislation is an update to the 2012 Workplace Gender Equality Act, which required employers to submit pay information to the government. That information is distilled based on industry, and made publicly available. But the progress on pay has stalled, and currently sits at 13.3%, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The new Workplace Gender Equality Amendment Bill 2023 will publicize previously private company data. Starting in early 2024, gender pay gaps will be published via the government website. Furthermore, employers will be required to report on sexual harassment and gender discrimination. “These reforms will improve transparency, accountability, and motivate action to accelerate progress on gender equality in workplaces,” according to the government site.

Workers and job-seekers will be able to examine how companies are progressing towards pay equity, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. “Publishing employer gender pay gaps will provide [workers] deeper insights on their employer’s progress, while job-seekers can get a clearer indication of a prospective employer’s commitment to ensuring the contributions of all employees are equally valued and rewarded,” Mary Wooldridge, chief executive at the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, told the paper.

Keep reading.—KP

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Social Security may run out as early as 2033, according to new estimates, and may only be able to pay out 77% of benefits to retirees beyond that point. (Yahoo)

Quote: “We’ve never had this much vacancy in downtown San Francisco and a pandemic, followed by the work-from-home thing, followed by the banking thing started by Silicon Valley Bank and now sort of matriculating into the big banks, commercial loans, and all that…[is a] triple whammy.”—Michael Covarrubias, real estate developer and former head of a Bay Area business association, on the impacts of the pandemic, remote work, and SVB’s failure on the economic vitality of the nation’s tech hub (Bloomberg)

Read: Corporate execs and HR teams are experimenting with “the best” and most effective ways to lay off employees, including strategies like McDonald’s closing offices ahead of making cuts. (the Wall Street Journal)