Four years ago, as the pandemic raged, Chipotle Mexican Grill leaders heard employees discuss their money woes and offered a financial counseling benefit to help them cope. This year, it expanded its financial wellness offerings to include student debt repayment, pay-on-demand, and a special debit card that helps users build a credit profile.

Daniel Banks, Chipotle’s director of global benefits, said that more than 73% of its roughly 125,000 global employees are members of Gen Z who are racking up credit card debt quickly and aren’t confident in their money-management skills.

“We knew folks in Gen Z are really experiencing significant financial challenges.… We were listening to our employees and hearing about all these concerns and on top of all the concerns that the pandemic was bringing about,” Banks said. “We knew we had to expand our offering again, to really focus on that holistic well-being and so offering up those financial well-being [benefits] was the right thing to do.”

Gen Z, single parents, and caregivers are in especially financially precarious positions, according to a report by The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Yet, overall workers are not happy with their financial situations.

Keep reading here.—TA

There’s no “all for one” approach to AI adoption, but many HR leaders seem to be trying to take one.

Just 7% of the 80 CHROs surveyed by The Conference Board last autumn said they’re implementing reskilling strategies for roles that are expected to be most impacted by AI. The top AI priority for HR leaders, according to 62% of the CHROs surveyed, is experimenting with pilots and use cases for the tech to assist in human capital management. While this is a small sample size for a survey, the findings may represent the priorities of employers in the US at large, as respondents came from a wide range of industries—including technology, healthcare and agriculture.

“We were actually surprised that CHROs were not as focused on the upskilling, reskilling aspects of [AI],” Diana Scott, center leader of the US Human Capital Center at The Conference Board, told HR Brew, noting prior research found reskilling to be critical in successfully engaging employees in AI usage and bridging AI literacy gaps. “It becomes sort of an ‘us versus them’ [mentality], and it creates a lack of equity in terms of adoption.”

It seems HR leaders are trying to understand what changes the novel technology will bring to their workplace before taking firm-wide action, Scott noted. But failing to address these other key priorities could ultimately backfire for CHROs.

Keep reading here.—PM

We chat 1:1 with HR pros about their career journeys. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to share your story with us.

A lot of HR pros learn people lessons in unlikely places.

Krystal Cooper, VP of people operations at logistics and supply chain company Vizion, held various roles at Thrift Drug in Allendale, New Jersey when she was 15–21 years old. After starting as a cashier, she ran the store’s photo lab, and later became a pharmacy technician. In these roles, she learned lessons she’d take into the people profession.

“You really learn how to read emotions, how to de-escalate situations really quickly, and how to just listen without talking,” Cooper told HR Brew. “All of those skills are actually things that you need now to be successful in people operations at any level.”

Cooper spoke with HR Brew about her journey to HR at corporations like Liz Claiborne, Duane Reade, and Tommy Hilfiger.

Keep reading here.—MC