If I’ve learned anything from watching The Bear, it’s that working in a restaurant is hard—maybe even as hard as it is for talent pros to staff service roles.

Quit and turnover rates in the service sector remain higher than those in all other industries, according to data from the US Chamber of Commerce. To help fill the gaps, some companies are tapping their corporate workers. Home Depot, for example, requires its corporate employees to work one 8-hour retail shift per quarter, Bloomberg reported.

And this strategy isn’t groundbreaking, at least not to Illinois-based restaurant chain Portillo’s. It has required its roughly 140 corporate employees to work in its restaurants during the holiday season since 2020, CPO Jill Waite, told HR Brew. The program started as a way to address pandemic-related staffing shortages, Waite said, but has since become a holiday tradition and part of the company’s culture.

“It’s a great best practice for [corporate] team members to get closer to our guests and team members, and understanding what’s working, what’s not, and actually do the work themselves,” she said.

Keep reading here.—MC

IVF providers and patients in Alabama were thrown into chaos in February after the state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos were considered humans, making their destruction a crime. At least two clinics in the state stopped performing IVF procedures, and many women traveled out of the state to get their treatments, according to multiple news reports.

“We saw some benefits providers that offered transport for embryos across state lines actually halting that offering, as they were looking into legality,” said Kayla Velnoskey, director of research for Gartner’s HR practice.

The panic subsided after Alabama’s governor signed a law protecting IVF providers and patients from any legal liability stemming from the court’s ruling. However, there’ve been multiple efforts across the country to limit or end IVF, and some worry that there will be more initiatives when Republicans take control of all three branches of government next year.

A question popping up is whether IVF benefits will follow the same trajectory as abortion benefits after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2022.

Keep reading here.—TA

When times get tough, a phone call with a friend can work wonders. But, when times get tough at work, many employees don’t know who to turn to for help.

Only 43% of US employees with first-hand knowledge of “unethical behavior” at work in the past year reported it, according to a recent Gallup report. And 22% of those employees said they didn’t think their company would do anything about the complaint if they had.

Many companies don’t realize the importance of an anonymous, confidential hotline to employees, Ashley Herd, co-host of the HR Besties podcast and founder of Manager Method, said during a webinar hosted by compliance training platform Ethena on Nov. 13. “How do you convince leadership that there is this channel that should be a last resort, but that may be exactly the only resort that people feel comfortable with?” Herd said to Roxanne Petraeus, co-founder and CEO of Ethena, and Colin Slade, VP of people at Cloudbeds.

It can be harder for HR teams at smaller companies to convince leadership to purchase a hotline tool, Petraeus said. But she recommended that people pros advocate for it, emphasizing to their senior leaders that having a safe space for employees is crucial, even for a scaling company.

Keep reading here.—MC