Abby Mello directs the HR development masters program at Towson University, and she’s tired of the “hackneyed trope” of HR in television and film. And Mello knows a thing or two about what’s funny; she’s also a stand-up comic.

While many HR professionals are dynamic individuals interested in helping employees do their best work, references to the profession in pop culture tend to rely on stereotyping HR reps as sad, boring, paper-pushing agents for the company, often out to get employees.

“There’s no three-dimensional characters that do HR and are actually doing training and development or leadership coaching,” Mello said. “They’re all just the person who’s like, ‘Hey, guys, you can’t say that.’”

On the screen. She said the “us vs. them” mentality is showcased “to death” by branch manager Michael Scott and his workplace nemesis, Toby Flenderson.

“In a show like The Office, with an ensemble cast where everybody is either friends or frenemies…you’ve got Toby who’s just this island unto himself, and I think that is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of what a lot of people think of their own HR departments, as sort of this other group that’s not integrated with everybody else,” Mello said. “We have to have this training now because Toby said that we have to have this training now. We have to fill out this paperwork as Toby said we have to.”

Toby’s mannerisms in The Office also reflect the old chestnut of HR functionaries as “low energy, kind of sad, boring personalities,” Mello said. Consider Barbara in HBO’s Hacks—the fictional talent agency HR representative’s deadpan affect in her meetings with agent Jimmy LuSaque perfectly captures pop culture’s HR caricature.

Even HR at the fictional International Secret Intelligence Service in the animated show Archer relies on inverting those stereotypes to depict its HR director Pam.

“She’s the anti-Toby and Barbara. She’s very brash. She’s covered in tattoos. She does bare-knuckle boxing as a hobby. She’s constantly sexually harassing everyone,” Mello said. Keep reading.—AD

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has reverberated far beyond the tech world, spooking investors and triggering flashbacks to the financial crisis of 2008. The downfall of the country’s 16th-biggest bank—which provided financial services for many tech startups and VC funds—isn’t only a problem for people banking with SVB directly amid an historic bank run. The FDIC has stepped in as receiver for the bank, but in the immediate wake of the collapse, many companies were left in the predicament of struggling to make payroll on time.

Some payroll providers, including Gusto and Rippling, announced that they had intervened to help clients, using their own capital to fulfill payroll for companies that banked with SVB and were unable to access funds to pay employees before regulators stepped in. While there was no formal announcement, Remote co-founder and CEO Job van der Voort told HR Brew that his company, a provider of international compliance and payroll management software tools, assured clients their workforces would be paid, even though its traditional way of handling payroll for SVB clients went kaput overnight.

“We process payroll for thousands of companies,” he explained to us. “They actually wire us money to pay their employees, and then we pay out those employees.”

With SVB unable to process the wires when companies were supposed to be issuing paychecks, Remote fulfilled payroll out of its own pocket, van der Voort said. “We had enough cash in the bank to be able to fund payroll for all those customers. So, we decided to do that,” van der Voort told HR Brew.

Hiccups can happen with payroll, but not usually like this.

Keep reading.—SB

Male and pale. That’s the tech industry’s well-earned reputation for having an overwhelmingly white workforce. Well over half (62%) of tech workers are white, according to Zippia research, and that’s not projected to change substantially.

Some companies are taking steps to address the shortfall, largely through diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) policies. But those efforts are largely window dressing, according to critics like Per Scholas’s Chief Enterprise Solutions Officer Damien Howard.

Howard, in an interview with IT Brew, detailed what he sees as the problem with implementing DEIB at tech companies and the resistance faced by proponents—as well as the solution.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Barriers to entry into the tech workforce still exist for people of color and those of marginalized backgrounds in general. What is it about DEIB that isn’t clicking?

I like to focus on workforce, work model, and workplace because it still is a barrier. It’s a barrier, in my opinion, from many conversations that I’ve had with C-suite leaders, because of how it’s perceived. When leaders hear DEIB, they automatically begin to think that there’s something additional that they have to do, instead of just looking at it as a standard best practice for their business and how to move the business forward.

Is that what the challenge is, that it’s easy to say you’ll implement these policies but when it comes to doing the work, that’s more difficult? What are you hearing specifically about and from the C-suite on this?

The biggest challenge that I see with DEIB implementation inside of organizations is that you’ve had people who believed it was a lot of window dressing. So, they would agree, “Yes, we are about the DEIB, we want to do this.”

But then when you dig under the hood, the practical items are not there or the measurements when you start looking for it: What do you mean by DEIB? What’s your measurements? How are you measuring that?

Keep reading in IT Brew.—EH

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Only 19% of workers used their company’s mental healthcare benefits in 2022. (One Medical)

Quote: “Affordable childcare has been a big issue…Some people can’t afford it, it’s keeping lower earning workers at home.”—Anna Zhou, Bank of America Institute economist, on childcare’s stranglehold on workforce participation among some workers (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Google was once hailed as a model employer, but its handling of recent mass layoffs has stunned employees and champions alike. (CNN)

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