From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Adam DeRose

hr-brew.com

This anti-racist workplace guide can help HR meet the diverse needs of marginalized workers

A small group of professionals set out to ‘center the humanity in HR’ with the Anti-Racist HR Guidebook. 

How to start thinking about anti-racist workplaces policies

keyboard with a key that says survey with an arrow pointing to another key labeled feedback

Great Place to Work employee engagement surveys help businesses

 How employee engagement surveying can empower HR to help create better workplaces with better business outcomes.

Be a great place to work, see great business outcomes

Kristen Parisi

Lego business people standing at a water cooler made out of Legos

Water cooler talk at work

Inventor Luther Haws unknowingly changed the workplace forever.

A brief history of the water cooler

Two coworkers at a laptop with coffee mug and analytics graphics

Culture

Mikaela Cohen

Employees want work-life balance, but it might be a fool’s errand.

A majority of employees (83%) view work-life balance as the top motivator for staying with their current job or finding a new one, according to 

 from staffing agency Randstad earlier this year. It’s the first time employees reported work-life balance as a bigger job motivator than compensation in the 22 years since the report was first published.

But some workplace experts caution HR pros against pushing work-life balance too strongly on employees because that balance might be impossible to achieve. Shark Tank entrepreneur and business leader Barbara Corcoran, for instance, 

Work-life balance emerged in the ‘70s and ‘80s as employees sought both professional and personal success, especially women who wanted careers without sacrificing personal goals like starting a family. Work-life balance then gained traction into the 21st century as more employers offered maternity leave and wellness benefits, and established norms around a 40-hour workweek.

But, since the pandemic, the lines between work and life have blurred, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of 

, and employees now have “a persistent, constant inability to bifurcate” the two.

While Covid-19 prompted more flexibility in the workplace, Moss told HR Brew there’s also been a corrosion in how employees view their work and personal lives.

“We’re finding this increase in…pajama hours, where people can’t get work done in the day, and so they look at this as this ‘fun’ work in the evening,” she said. “When we think about that as harmonious, then it’s dangerous because we’re not actually doing fun work. We’re still working.”

Before the pandemic, and especially now with return-to-office mandates, Moss said there are more “unrealized hours” lost to the workplace. From commuting, taking kids to and from childcare, waking up earlier, and getting ready in the morning, she said it takes time away from living.

Work-life balance might not be working because many employees see their personal and professional lives as a “contrast” or in “competition” with one another, Moss said. She recommends instead focusing on work-life harmony.

“Harmony, which means that both things are working in a way that is healthy, and fluid, and supporting each other and with an approach to well-being,” she said. “When I see people that really have that healthy harmony between work and life, they’re so high performing…They don’t feel like one is stealing from the other.”

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, author, and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert, agrees with Moss that there’s a need for a harmonious relationship between work and life. He suggests HR pros learn the differences and benefits between work-life integration and segmentation.

Work-life integration, Grant told HR Brew, is often demonstrated by employees who don’t mind work being a larger part of their lives. “They tend to have pictures of their kids at their desk. They talk about their work at home. They invite their colleagues over for dinner,” he said. “Segmenters want none of that.”

Employees who want work-life segmentation value strict boundaries, reserve relationships and emotions for outside of work, and tend to be more task-focused while at work, he said. By contrast, segmenters are typically more satisfied with their jobs, report higher well-being, feel less stressed, and are less likely to burnout, Grant said.

While there are benefits to work-life integration, like happy hour with coworkers and work friendships, Grant said most US companies lean too far into work-life integration, so HR could help promote more segmentation.

“If we moved a little bit more in the segmentation direction and said, ‘Yeah, harmony is maybe a better way to talk about it because what that signals to me is my job is not going to interfere with my family, my friends, my health or my hobbies,’” he explained.

Another way HR pros can promote harmony, Grant said, is by offering benefits that align with both work-life integration and segmentation, so segmenters can still thrive in a more integrated workplace and vice versa. For instance, he said if your company has an on-site gym for employees, they could offer stipends for off-site gym memberships, too.

“When we use the term harmony,” Moss said, “It’s about not just integrating both [work and life], but actually striving for something better.”

Animated gif of a laptop showing a notification and a woman relaxing on a chair, both on a balancing beam.

Work-life balance isn’t working. Here’s what HR needs to know

HR can stop pushing balance and instead help employees form a harmonious relationship with work.

Has the traditional workday gone the way of the Edsel?

For many employees, the workday stretches beyond a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule, according to a Microsoft 

 from last month, as the average employee gets 50 work messages outside of business hours. That’s on top of 29% of employees checking their emails after 10:00pm and 20% of employees reading emails on Saturday and Sunday.

Working off-hours is nothing new for many corporate roles, according to Kim Seals, senior partner at consulting firm West Monroe, especially in industries like sales, accounting, or consulting where employees are often “rewarded” for working off-hours, she said.

But what’s evident in Microsoft’s findings, Seals told HR Brew, is that working off-hours has seeped into roles where it may not be required or rewarded to work late nights or early mornings.

“What Covid did was really just normalize [working off-hours] for other jobs where that was not always the case,” she said. “When we went to these hybrid jobs or remote-first jobs, then the trade-off that folks expected was, ‘Look, if you’re at home and you have more flexibility, then you don’t need to be tied to a core set of working hours.’”

Working outside normal hours can also be fueled by return-to-office mandates and fear from employees to appear more productive, Seals said.

“[It’s a] concern that I have to be visible online for people to see that I am working, and I am productive,” she said. “Did that drive some folks to say, ‘Let me show them that I’m still willing to work different hours, so that I don’t lose my privilege, if you will, to work from home or to work remotely?’”

Other employees might be working off-hours, Seals said, because they’re overwhelmed with meetings and in-person interactions in the office to complete tasks and working in the office means more time is spent commuting.

“If you put all that together, the commute, the caregiving, the meetings during the core working hours…the only time I have quiet time to actually answer emails and do the work is after dinner,” she said. “After all the other obligations are dealt with, now I have time to actually do my job.”

People leaders can use screen time monitoring tools, Seals said, in the same way that people use screen time monitoring on their phones to track how long they’ve spent on certain apps or social media. If HR notices employees spending consecutive late nights or early mornings working, she said, then there’s an opportunity for them or their managers to flag it and have a check-in conversation.

“We need to use the tech tools to flag for people leaders like, ‘Hey, Kim has been online four out of five nights this week. She’s been working eight to midnight in addition to her regular work schedule,” Seals said. “Give [their] manager some talking points to come to [them] and say, ‘Hey, Kim, I’ve noticed a lot of long nights like, what can we be doing? Can I help you prioritize? How can I help you set healthy boundaries?’”

HR pros should be aware that working off-hours is primarily a concern when it’s in addition to the eight-hour workday, Seals said, but if employees are taking time during the workday to pick up kids from school or take a parent to a doctor’s appointment, then working late hours might be the time to catch up.

“When you have that balance, and it’s not a true infinite workday where I don’t ever switch off, it’s not always a bad thing,” she said. “To give workers flexibility to say, ‘We’re not just going to tie you to a core set of hours of nine to five’...That way it benefits both parties.”

The nine-to-five workday is dead, a recent study finds

More employees are increasingly working at any time of day or night.

Speakers

Questions?

Burnout today extends beyond workload, fueled by the constant pressure of both personal and professional stress. Join HR Brew to explore the psychological effects of always being in crisis mode and the strategies HR leaders are using to build resilient teams.

When Everything is Urgent: HR Strategies for Workforce Resilience During Turbulent Times

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

HR pros seem to have hard feelings about “soft skills.”

Soft skills are generally understood to encompass non-technical, interpersonal job skills, including communication, critical thinking, and collaboration competencies. HR leaders say these capabilities are more important than ever as technological changes like AI or remote work reshape how jobs are performed.

But it’s hard to miss that HR leaders seldom 

 say the words “soft skills.” In fact, some want the people profession to stop using the term altogether.

The term “soft skills” first appeared in military training documents (created by the now-defunct United States Continental Army Command) in the early 1970s, initially describing any skills not involving using machinery or weapons. It emerged in the corporate lexicon in subsequent decades. Today, these skills are generally understood to encompass non-technical, interpersonal job skills, including communication, critical thinking, and collaboration competencies.

In recent years, interest in the term has skyrocketed, driven in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, when the corporate world quickly adopted remote work and suddenly the only human-to-human interactions were happening over Zoom. Leaders worried that workers, Gen Zers in particular, 

weren’t developing interpersonal competencies

 because they were missing out on social learning that occurs naturally in-person.

“There is that need for these skills, especially with the new generation that’s coming into the workforce,” said Carina Cortez, chief people officer at the talent experience platform Cornerstone.

“The Gen Z group did enter with video as their main interaction point. And there is something to be gained by entering into an office environment that’s very different than entering through a Zoom environment,” she told HR Brew.

With AI now poised to take over many of workers’ day-to-day tasks in certain jobs, leaders realize that 

these interpersonal skills are even more important

 because technology can’t replace them.

“The pace of change is so fast that we need to bring people along. And as we think about the role that AI is playing, it’s even more critical to engage, lead, help support, the people that are around us,” Sara Morales, SVP, people partner sales & marketing, country, and employee relations at Cisco, told HR Brew. “And there’s data that shows that employees who believe their managers care about them, have higher engagement and performance. We need them to help balance out everything we’re seeing from a technology and AI standpoint.”

That said, HR leaders interviewed by HR Brew say they dislike the term “soft skills.” And, as these competencies attract a greater focus amid several shifts in the nature of work, they think it’s time to retire the term.

“I’ve been doing talent management for 30 years, and I’'ve probably slipped once or twice, but I’ve never intentionally used the word soft skills in my career,” Chris Ernst, Workday’s chief learning officer, told HR Brew. “It’s time to put the soft skills, hard skills, completely to rest, I feel, because fundamentally the term soft skills unintentionally diminishes the perceived value of the essential skills that are needed, especially in the AI era.”

One large reason given for the pushback against the term is that “soft” often has a “negative perception,” as Morales said, in the business world. Just consider “soft market,” “softening demand,” or “soft management,” as a few examples.

“It mistakenly gives the appearance of diminished value in comparison to ‘hard skills,’ those skills commonly viewed as more technical and quantifiable,” Patricia Bravo, a leadership development consultant and former HR manager, said. “Soft skills have a perception problem. Their return on investment can be equitable, yet more hidden. Because their return is less visible, they are more easily discounted.”

Not all HR leaders dislike the term. While Ty Beasley, chief talent officer at audit, tax, and consulting firm RSM US, prefers to say “durable skills,” he doesn’t have a problem with “soft skills.”

“Maybe it’s because we’ve been saying it for so long, when I think of soft skills, I don’t look at the negative side of it,” he said.

Numerous terms have emerged as substitutes in place of “soft.” Common examples given by HR leaders interviewed by HR Brew include “core,” “durable,” “human,” or “interpersonal” skills.

But are there downsides to using a myriad of alternatives instead of "soft skills," which, despite its flaws, might be better recognized?

“While alternatives like ‘human skills’ or ‘real skills’ attempt to elevate the perception of soft skills, they can introduce ambiguity or perpetuate the same undervaluation issue,” Jelena Djordjevic, CPO at home services company Thumbtack, told HR Brew via email.

“I think language is important, so I’m hopeful we will land on a common term,” Cortez said. But what’s most important, she noted, is building up the skill sets that these terms actually encompass.

“What’s good, I think, is that the skill sets that make up this group, whatever you choose to call it… they’re the same group of skills, and I think people are understanding that,” she said. “So just to use the terminology consistently within your own organization will be the key.”

Other leaders echoed that sentiment. Workday, for example, uses “core skills,” and further defines the term as relating to the company’s six core values, Ernst said.

“There may be some risk of having different nomenclature, but the most important thing I would advise an organization to do is to organize your skills around your business strategy and your culture, and in a way that makes sense for your organization.”

Keyboard keys spelling "soft," with a mouse cursor placing the "T" key into a trash can, while a paper in front reads "skills." (Credit: Anna Kim)

HR leaders want to ditch ‘soft skills’

The term elicits negative connotations, and HR leaders think it’s time to ditch it.

HR leaders think soft skills are more important than ever—just don’t call them ‘soft’

Ashley Braband spent most of her career creating sports content, so leading a people and culture team, she says, sometimes brings out her “imposter syndrome.” But, what’s kept her going is knowing she excels at two of her job prerequisites: working hard and leading with kindness.

Braband joined Los Angeles-based sports media company, Omaha Productions, in 2021 as its first employee and head of development, shortly after it was founded by Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning and sports broadcasting executive Jamie Horowitz (who was 

 in 2017 following sexual harassment allegations, which his lawyer has denied).

Starting as employee zero, Braband told HR Brew she did everything, including run-of-the-mill HR tasks on top of her other responsibilities as head of development. But, in 2023, Braband was tasked with a new challenge—crafting and leading the company’s people and culture function.

Earlier experiences shaped her leadership. 

Like many women working in a male-dominated industry, Braband said she was frequently one of few women in the room. In a 40-person early career program at ESPN, she was one of only two women. Later, in a different ESPN role, she said she finally felt her voice mattered and that employees were treated equitably.

These early roles taught her about “unconscious biases” in hiring and promotion strategies and how important mentorship opportunities are for early career employees. This became the basis for how she would ultimately lead Omaha’s people and culture team.

“One of the women who is on [Omaha’s] leadership team with me is somebody that I mentored when she was under me at ESPN,” Braband said. “We used to have a weekly ‘women in sports media’ meeting, where we would just talk about experiences we had… I was really happy to mentor them, because I had a handful of people that mentored me.”

Braband worked in other roles at ESPN before joining Just Women’s Sports, but when Horowitz co-founded Omaha, Braband was one of the first people he called.

“It was like everything I had learned throughout my career coming together in this [chaotic] tornado of a startup, which was so fun, and exhilarating, and incredibly hard,” she said, adding that working at a startup meant doing “whatever needs to be done.” She recalls writing the company’s parental leave policy while nine months pregnant, so there was a protocol in place for her and future employees.

Coming out of companies where there were “departments and protocols for everything,” Braband said the buck stopped with her in those early months at Omaha, like crafting the company’s mission statement and onboarding its first 23 employees. But, after nearly a year, she moved back into the familiar zone of media production as the company’s head of current series before going on maternity leave in September 2022.

During her leave, Braband was asked to lead Omaha’s people and culture function upon her return in January 2023. From then until now, Braband said she’s created the department she wished other companies had earlier in her career.

Braband’s strategy included asking herself and existing employees: “Who are the best people you’ve ever worked with? It could be at any point in their careers and in any role,” she said, and those were the people Omaha recruited to build up its team to 50 full-time US employees.

The rest of the people function, Braband decided, would resemble her favorite parts of working at other companies and look nothing like her least favorite parts. For instance, she wanted to make Omaha’s parental leave policy “as uncomplicated as possible.” Starting with 12 weeks parental leave in 2022, she said the company has now extended that benefit to 15 weeks.

Omaha also has an unlimited PTO policy for employees. Braband remembers having to trade shifts and coordinate stressful schedules with former coworkers to take PTO for her wedding and honeymoon, and said she doesn’t want her employees to experience any stress when they should be enjoying their lives.

Constantly improving as a people leader. 

One powerful skill Braband has learned leading her team is “listening to people and hearing from them,” she said. In 2024, for instance, Braband received employee feedback that, while many employees wanted to take PTO, they felt unable to do so. Addressing that concern, she said Omaha now mandates that employees take a minimum of two weeks off, on top of unlimited time off.

“We want them to know we really value their mental health and their ability to reset and take a deep breath,” she said. “You don’t have to travel anywhere, but you need to just sit on the couch and watch a Netflix series.”

Braband concluded, “What’s so interesting about HR and people is something that wasn’t even on my board for a thing to do that week or that month can pop up and all of a sudden now be my biggest priority… It’s constantly evolving.”

How one people pro went from employee zero to key role at Peyton Manning’s company

Ashley Braband, of the sports media company Omaha Productions, shares how she created the company’s people and culture function.

Figuring out how to craft a company culture can sometimes feel like figuring out what to eat for dinner. What you have isn’t working (boo, leftovers), creating something from scratch is a lot of work (RIP, soggy bag of spinach), so you end up going with the quick-and-easy fix (looking at you, takeout).

Perhaps there’s a better solution for HR pros trying to build a company culture that sticks with employees (Sorry, we don’t have a fix for the dinner crisis).

During a panel at From Day One’s conference in Atlanta, Georgia on Jan. 28, HR leaders from SiriusXM, Fanatics, Aveanna Healthcare, and DailyPay shared their strategies for creating a strong company culture, especially during times of change and uncertainty.

Don’t try to duplicate what’s working at other companies, said Yulia Denisova, VP of talent and development at sports platform Fanatics. “We’re all looking for our own specific experiences and we want to be a part of that culture, included into the culture, [and] relate to that culture,” she said.

Instead, start with authenticity, said Lauren D. Williams, SVP of organizational culture and change management at audio entertainment company SiriusXM. Each organization is different, she said, suggesting grounding culture in the company’s values.

“It’s really important to stay true to your DNA as an organization and what you stand for, what you believe in, your values, in order to make sure that that culture is actually something that’s successful in your organization,” Williams said.

Then, create subcultures within the organization, said Ingrid Emmons, VP and head of DE&I at home healthcare provider Aveanna Healthcare. “There is no one macro culture. Culture exists on the micro level, on every team, no matter how big or small, and that’s ultimately our goal,” she said.

And remember, building a company culture is a “long journey,” said Jon Lowe, chief people officer at DailyPay. “A lot of people pander to this idea of who they strive to be, but aren’t really going in with their eyes open.”

, Williams said it’s important for HR leaders to listen to their employees from a place of understanding. Leaders who listen can build stronger cultures.

“Inclusion means different things to different people. It’s very nuanced,” Emmons said. “When you’re trying to have this understanding of what’s happening in a particular team…You find that access to information on one team is as important as, on another team, trying to understand, ‘Are we remote? Are we hybrid?’ […] Understand how to unpack what inclusion means to that particular person is key.”

How to build a company culture that sticks

“There is no one macro culture. Culture exists on the micro level, on every team, no matter how big or small, and that’s ultimately our goal,” says Ingrid Emmons, VP and head of DE&I at home healthcare provider Aveanna Healthcare.

Anyone here remember the struggle of searching for a radio station and only hearing static? Talk about some frustrating feedback you never want to hear again. And that just pales in comparison to the feedback problem facing HR pros right now.

Some 39% of employees don’t feel comfortable giving honest feedback, and 44% don’t give honest feedback because they don’t think it’ll amount to anything, according to a September Survey Monkey 

. And efforts to encourage employees’ honest feedback can be further thwarted when leaders remove venues for it.

After some JPMorgan employees expressed outrage via the comment section of an internal platform announcing the financial services firm’s full-time return-to-office, the feature was disabled, 

. And earlier this month, Meta removed comments from employees critical of the social media giant’s changing content moderation guidelines and fact-checking system from its internal server, 

“If you see comments and complaints as a form of feedback, they missed the opportunity to gather really helpful feedback and improve their implementation,” said Deborah Grayson Riegel, a leadership and communication expert who’s taught Wharton and Columbia business schools. “I think they really missed the mark on this, and it’s doubling back to hurt them more than help them.”

A JPMorgan spokesperson told HR Brew that the company turns off comments when there is a “significantly high volume,” and that this is not the first time it’s done so. They also said the comments left prior to the feature being shut down weren’t deleted. A Meta spokesperson previously 

 HR Brew that “there have also been internal posts/comments that offered criticism and support as well that have not been removed.”

What happens when employee feedback is restricted?

 Limiting feedback is “the opposite of psychological safety,” Grayson Riegel told HR Brew, and can make employees feel resentful, powerless, and less engaged.

“It can increase turnover. It can decrease productivity. It certainly impacts morale,” she added. “I can’t tell you how often something like this happens, and then I have a client call me and say, like, ‘Will you do a training session?’...I was like, ‘I’m not touching this with a training session. No, this is a morale problem.’”

When employees don’t feel heard, it “reinforces the fact that leaders don’t care,” said John Frehse, senior managing director and global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura.

“If I’m blocking comments, I’m telling you, I’m signaling, that we don’t want your opinion, and we don’t need to hear from you,” Frehse told HR Brew. “As an individual contributor, who is experiencing something negative, they have a lot that they need to share to feel better about their work environment, and if they can’t do it, most likely they’re going to leave, or just decrease their productivity.”

Employees may do one of three things when they feel silenced, Frehse said: Stay with their company and continue to feel resentment, take their frustrations to the press to generate awareness, or go to a union organizer.

“When you look at some of the big banks right now, there’s an unprecedented conversation about unionizing, not because they have unfair benefits and pay,” he said. “But because they don’t have a mouthpiece in the culture, and to get a voice, they need to find somebody who will listen.”

People pros should set up guidelines or standards for what’s acceptable in communication channels, said Chris Treadwell, senior partner and head of executive consulting at leadership consulting firm RHR International.

“There needs to be some intentionality…[and] guidelines on how people should use them, and then when people step out of those guidelines, you’re on solid footing to say, ‘Hey, that’s not what it’s intended for…If you want to share those comments, there’s places outside of this channel,’” Treadwell said.

Addressing the deeper issue—that employees feel leaving a comment is the only way to have their voices heard—will take more legwork. “That’s the job of HR,” Frehse said, to listen to “the good, the bad, the indifferent” from employees.

“Great HR leaders spend less than 50% of their time in the office, and they’re actively on the shop floor in the company locations, asking questions, and learning directly from the employees,” he said. “That kind of leadership is what stabilizes a culture, decreases turnover, and drives performance.”

A woman on a monitor screen being hushed by a large hand.

HR has an employee feedback problem

When employees don’t feel heard, it “reinforces the fact that leaders don’t care,” John Frehse, senior managing director and global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura, tells HR Brew.