US tech workers working in companies with toxic cultures are most likely to point to leadership and senior management as the driving force behind toxicity in the workplace, according to recent research.

Talent training company TalentLMS and CultureAmp, an employee experience platform, conducted a survey of 1,000 US full-time tech industry employees who reported working at companies with toxic work cultures. The organizations determined if respondents were working for companies with toxic cultures by asking a set of screening questions, according to Ana Casic, media relations manager with Epignosis, parent company for TalentLMS, via email. Those who responded that employees at their companies were “treated with disrespect, discrimination, and hostility at most times” were included in the survey.

Leadership sets the tone. Twenty percent of respondents said leadership and senior management was “mostly responsible” for creating a toxic culture at their company. The tech workers surveyed were least likely to blame HR for their toxic work culture, with just 14% pointing to this department, preceded by colleagues on their team (15%) and those on other teams (16%).

Keep reading.—CV

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Executives have had a lot to say about flexible working arrangements in recent weeks.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said he believes one of the tech industry’s “worst mistakes” was believing they could be fully remote forever.

“I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full [sic] remote forever, particularly on startups,” the CEO said at an event hosted by financial tech firm Stripe on May 3.

Two weeks later, Twitter owner Elon Musk had stronger words to say on the matter, deriding tech workers as “laptop classes living in la-la land,” and calling work-from-home arrangements “morally wrong” in an interview with CNBC. The billionaire argued that if service workers have to show up to their jobs IRL, other employees should, too.

Meanwhile, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky suggested in a podcast that many of the CEOs pushing return-to-office in New York City are “going away to the Hamptons for the summer or going to Europe in August.” (Airbnb went fully remote last year.)

What do folks in the HR world, who are often tasked with developing and enforcing workplace attendance policies, think about all this?

Keep reading.—CV

This content was not created with the assistance of generative AI.

Could that sentence (or its inverse) stamp the bottom of a pitch presentation to clients, a draft memo to your boss, or the final slide of a deck presented to shareholders? As ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies provide a helping hand to employees, HR teams are grappling with policies regarding its use, including disclosure.

Some companies have banned or restricted employees from the tech. Others are embracing the possibilities the tech can offer to employee productivity and see it as a tool to boost productivity.

As HR teams develop company policies governing generative AI use, they need to consider whether employees need to come clean about the assist.

“Over the next couple years, I think every single organization in every industry is going to have to come to a crossroads as to how their organization is really going to standardize…the use of generative AI…depending on the type of work they do for their clients,” Christie Lindor, Bentley University professor and CEO of DE&I firm Tessi Consulting, said. “One of the biggest questions is around, ‘Should I disclose or not disclose?’”

Keep reading.—AD

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: First Republic Bank paid employees an average of $310,000, more than double the average compensation at JPMorgan Chase, the company that acquired it. First Republic also reportedly paid dozens of employees over $10 million each. (Bloomberg)

Quote: “When she started to collect the data, it was kind of incredible…This wasn’t a vague feeling anymore. You couldn’t claim this was just some feminist rant. It was like, ‘Look at these numbers.’”—Hillary Hallett, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, discussing the advocacy efforts of actress Geena Davis, who has collected hard data on the state of gender equality in Hollywood (the New York Times)

Read: Northwestern management professor Joel Shapiro discusses the opportunity to open company data to all employees in order to enable “citizen data scientists” internally. (Harvard Business Review)

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