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

Mikaela Cohen

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How to conduct layoffs in a hybrid environment

HR Brew talks with two workplace experts about the dos and don’ts of hybrid layoffs.

An actor in a Saturday Night Live sketch saying she hates her job and needs to quit.

What HR should know about the TikTok workplace trend ‘QuitTok’

“Like all good social media, it is exposing the things that we don’t often talk about or that are in the shadows of what happens in organizations,” Hannah Yardley, CHRO at software company Achievers, tells HR Brew.

Finger pressing a "Friday" labeled enter button

This employer is experimenting with eternal summer Fridays

“Soft Fridays [mean] that we are trusting each other to get our work done and log off when we can on Friday,” Alli Ray, Codeword’s chief of staff, tells HR Brew.

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting HR strategy

HR Strategy

Kristen Parisi

While cities offer dancing until 2am, med spas on every block, and countless pigeons (obviously the best part), living in them can also feel exhausting and even suffocating.

Now, a village deep in the Himalayas is hoping to lure those workers who are ready to connect with nature and other digital nomads.

Yakten lies in India’s least populated Sikkim state, near Bhutan and Nepal. It claims to be the country’s first digital nomad village, India Today 

. The Nomad Sikkim project is being rolled out to bring more people to the remote area, and is in partnership with Sarvahitey, an NGO that wants to create destinations where remote workers can enjoy nature.

There are roughly 1.7 million Indian digital nomads, and the program hopes that encouraging them to move to Yakten will help the local economy.

The village has eight “homestays,” 18 rooms, and coworking space. Nomad Sikkim also boasts high-speed internet with backup generators, and organic meals. But in a country where many workers aged 25–34 don’t make more than 11,000 Indian rupees a year (USD $125), the 6,000 rupees a week price tag isn’t exactly affordable.

“What Nomad Sikkim is doing is connecting that cultural strength with the global digital economy,” the state’s member of parliament told India Today. “This is tourism with purpose, where visitors don’t just come and go, but become part of the local story, supporting livelihoods and preserving heritage.”

Some research suggests that the digital nomad lifestyle isn’t as prevalent among US workers today as it was during the Covid-19 pandemic, when there were plenty of remote roles, Business Insider 

. But in India, where more than one-in-four jobs are still hybrid or remote, the mountains may just be calling loudly enough for people to co-work in paradise.

First digital nomad community in India

The community hopes to attract remote workers to live in the mountains, in an effort to boost the region’s economy and notoriety.

World of HR: Small Himalayan village claims to be India’s first for digital nomads

The return-to-office (RTO) conversation is a lot like Russian nesting dolls: seemingly never-ending. Now, it appears the number of RTO holdouts is, like the dolls, getting smaller and smaller.

 32.2% compared to March 2019, a slight improvement from 35.9% in March 2024 and 37.9% in March 2023, according to 

. But last month, office visits reached new heights nationwide, and even more so in a few cities.

In July, visits to US offices were down 21.8% compared to July 2019. Office visits in New York City exceeded 2019 levels by 1.3%, while those in Miami were down 0.1% from its pre-pandemic norm, recent Placer.ai 

. Office traffic in Atlanta and Dallas were down just 14.8% and 18.3%, respectively.

“There’s certainly some seasonality at play here,” said R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai.

The change from March to July could be related to a tendency to go into the office more often in the warmer months, Hottovy told HR Brew. But there may be some larger trends at play unrelated to the weather.

 The cities that have seen office traffic improve, Hottovy said, have also seen RTO mandates. Many New York City 

 like tech and finance have pushed for an RTO, he said, as have some in cities like Atlanta and Dallas.

“Whether it’s tech, whether it’s consumer…office mandates have started to pick up. That’s probably what’s driving Atlanta and Dallas,” he said. “Those are two cities that have seen an increase in population in the last couple years too.”

While office visits have rebounded in Miami and New York City, they’ve lagged in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Office traffic in Denver is down 40%, while that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago is down 34.6%, 34.2%, and 34.1%, respectively.

“It’s interesting looking at all the different markets. It really feels like there’s different dynamics in each city driving return to office,” Hottovy said.

He does, however, suspect that some cities may see the same rebounds currently in Miami and New York City.

“I don’t think we’re going to get there nationwide,” he said. “But it’s possible some of these other markets that have seen big population increases could get back or above what we were pre-pandemic.”

Split photo illustration of an in office worker and at home worker.

Office attendance returns to pre-pandemic levels in some cities

Just when you thought the RTO debate was over…

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

Paige McGlauflin

For HR pros inspired to author a book for fellow practitioners, Joey Price has some advice not too far off from Nora Ephron’s belief that everything is copy.

“Journal your wins and journal your losses, because they will help shape your story,” said Price, whose book, The Power of HR: How to Make an Organizational Impact as a People Professional, was published in March 2025. “The way that you write your book, and the stories that you tell in your book, should be based on experience and not just theory. That’s what’s going to help your book stand out from others.”

Price is president and CEO of Jumpstart HR, an HR outsourcing and consulting firm focused on supporting small businesses and startups. He founded Jumpstart HR at age 24 when he decided that he wanted to pursue outsourcing and have a “multiplier effect” working with multiple companies, versus pursuing HR leadership at one company internally. Today, the firm has grown to 15 employees (soon to be 16), after acquiring research firm Aspect43 in January.

His book focuses on demonstrating the importance of HR pros showing up as strategic partners to peers in other parts of the business. According to Price, the book has three audiences: mid-level HR professionals who aspire to leadership ranks but lack the mentor or network to help them learn how to get a seat at the table, HR leaders who may feel rusty in certain parts of their job and are looking for guidance, and for current students who aspire to HR leadership positions. It includes Price’s own learnings across a whole range of HR functions, from people analytics to DEI to recruitment.

“I always felt I had a book in me, but I didn’t know if it was the right time based on the experience that I had at that time,” Price said. “You have to go through some things before you write the book, so that you’re not just like a talking head, but you can say, ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I got the T-shirt. Now I’m writing the book about it.’”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

The best change I’ve made at a place I’ve worked is changing the norms and expectations of what people think it’s like to work with HR. People are used to HR being adversarial, risk-adverse and anti-employee. I believe that HR should be an empathetic diplomat who understands organizational culture well enough to know when to innovate and when to play it safe. As a consulting firm, our biggest compliments are referrals and repeat business. That happens often for us.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

The biggest misconception about HR consultants is that we exist to come into organizations and fire people at scale. I understand that media and big box consulting firms may have a lot to do with that, but it’s not true for all of us!

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

The most fulfilling aspect of my job is seeing a business leader go from careful to confident when we strategize about key next steps. In my book, The Power of HR, I talk about how HR should be part-coach and part-cheerleader. It’s rewarding to develop leaders who become strategic analysts but also courageous executors. Sometimes they just need a little help and outside counsel.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?

I’m most optimistic about HR’s role in strategic governance of an organization. I say this because technology is forcing business leaders to reimagine—very quickly—what it means to “buy, borrow, or bot” their workforce. Meaning, workforce planning isn’t just about hiring employees and contractors. It now means incorporating AI agents and technology that can augment core tasks.

Also, I’m optimistic because the winds of legal compliance are as volatile as ever and no one is poised to lead in this arena like HR. From immigration to diversity to compensation, it’s important for businesses to respond to what the courts and legislators are saying. I’m confident we can do that!

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?

I’m least optimistic about mass adoption of AI for HR leaders who refuse to acknowledge how important it is. The pace of AI innovation is far outpacing the pace of acceptance and awareness of what to do with it. For every HR leader at Big Tech, we can’t forget about the HR leaders who buy technology in rural areas and less tech savvy industries.

Joey Price for HR Brew's Coworking series

Read this HR leader’s advice for aspiring authors

“Journal your wins and journal your losses because they will help shape your story.”

HR leader and book author shares his advice for those with book-writing ambitions

An organization’s success can likely be measured by whether or not the CHRO is a strategic business partner to the CEO.

That’s according to Jenny Dearborn, chief people strategy officer at the Stockholm-based global consulting firm BTS and co-author of 

The Insight-Driven Leader: How High-Performing Companies are Using Analytics to Unlock Business Value

In her new book, which she wrote with talent development leader Kelly Rider, Dearborn highlights how companies can use talent analytics to navigate the future of work and why the partnership between a CHRO and CEO is crucial to business success.

Dearborn shared takeaways from the book with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the story behind writing this book?

This book is very much a journey from the other books that I’ve written. So, in 2015, I wrote a book called 

, which is about how to apply data, and analytics, and algorithms, looking at the different performance variables in a workplace to predict performance and productivity for sales reps…Then, in 2018, took the same approach and went broader in an organization and said, “Can you apply these same algorithms and models for leadership?”

Also I wanted to answer very specific questions…“Given the volatility in the world and all of the forces that are impacting the future of work, and the future of jobs, and AI…What really makes the best HR leaders different than the rest? And what really are the differentiators between how great HR executives lead?” And, it’s my belief that, given all the volatility, that HR is the most important organization in the company.

What are some of the answers to those questions?

The CEO sets the tone for the executive staff. The CEO basically decides in their operating model for a company, “Is HR going to be a strategic business partner, or is the role that I want HR to play [more] administrative?”

If that CEO says, whether deliberately or unconsciously, “I want to have a strategic HR business partner who is business first and HR second”...then HR has a seat at the table. HR is in every conversation. HR is consulted before major decisions get made…It’s really the point of view of that CEO.

We asked CHROs, “What could a CEO do differently to make you more successful in your role?” It was very clear in the feedback, that what’s holding the CHRO back, if they’re feeling held back, is the CEO. And the same thing to the CEOs, “What do you wish that you could have different from your CHRO?” And they said, “I’d love it if they’d be more strategic, and more impactful, and more of a business leader.”

How can a CHRO have more influence and impact if the CEO doesn’t already set that tone?

The challenge happens when one person has one set of expectations and a different person has a different set of expectations. It’s the misalignment, where the problems happen, and that’s where you get a CHRO saying, “Why don’t I have a seat at the table?” We’ve been hearing people say for 30 years of my whole career…and that really comes when one person wants something different, or has a different set of expectations or understanding what the role is.

The best thing to do upfront is to just have those conversations around clarity of what is the role? Where do you expect me to play? And, if the CEO says, “I want it all. I want you to be a strategic business partner and make sure that no balls are dropped”...then that CEO needs to recognize that they need to support the size of team, or the technology in place, or often it’s both, to manage all those details.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Jenny Dearborn, co-author of ‘The Insight-Driven Leader’

“If that CEO says, whether deliberately or unconsciously, ‘I want to have a strategic HR business partner who is business first and HR second’...then HR has a seat at the table.”

CEO and CHRO partnerships are key to success in the future of work

Any people pro who has wished for a Batphone-like service to call during an HR emergency is in luck.

Well, sort of. Batman won’t be on the other end of the line. But HR pros with SHRM memberships get access to a group of experts who can answer just about any question thrown at them. The service, called Ask an Advisor, is staffed by a team of 20 who boast an average of 18 years of experience in the profession. Each year, the service fields more than 50,000 inquiries. SHRM members can send in 15 inquiries per their 12-month membership subscription.

“I would say that the HR knowledge advisor service is more like an HR hotline,” said Liz Petersen, manager of SHRM’s HR Knowledge Center. Petersen leads a team that conducts HR-specific research, and compiles resources for SHRM’s 340,000-plus members. The Ask an Advisor service is a key part of her team’s work.

“It’s a contact center for our members, who are mostly HR professionals, to call us about anything work related, anything HR related, and we can help them with research, get them some data points, talk through an issue, just be another peer to them.”

Petersen served as an HR knowledge advisor at SHRM for more than 12 years, before stepping into her current role in 2017. Prior to her career at SHRM, she was an outsourced HR manager, serving several small- and medium-sized businesses across several industries. Her career in outsourcing proved invaluable for helping her frame her feedback based on more objective information rather than pulling only from her own experience as an HR pro, she told HR Brew.

“Having that experience of dealing with so many different industries and so many different work cultures allowed me to really see past the ‘this is the only way to do things’ mentality,” she said. “Which sometimes, if you go to one organization or in one industry, that’s all you know, which is great, and you really know it well. But in this position, you have to look at things not necessarily by, ‘What have I done in the past?’ We have to look at it from: What’s the compliance concern? What are the risk issues?”

The Ask an Advisor service fields questions from members across all industries and sizes, but the service receives the most inquiries from HR practitioners on small teams, including some who are their company’s sole HR representative or professionals who are in remote jobs and may feel uncomfortable approaching a colleague. The most common questions asked via the service, according to Petersen, typically revolve around compensation and compliance, including the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and ever-changing 

Petersen’s team also has to provide speedy guidance about world events while, or soon after, they happen.

“It just depends on what’s going on in the world right now,” she said, adding that “as soon as an Executive Order happens, everybody’s like: ‘What does this mean to me?’ And so we need to quickly figure out, what does it mean to employers, and find resources to help them as soon as they’re created.”

When responding to inquiries, Petersen’s team must balance providing relevant, tailored guidance while steering clear of offering legal advice. The team often focuses on sharing common practices by employers in similar situations, including the pros and cons of a specific approach, and ensuring that their answers are backed up by research and resources. As an example, if an inquirer asks about handling an employee who broke their arm, an advisor would respond with resources about laws that cover workplace injuries.

“So we’re still helping. We’re just not going to be able to interpret it to that member’s specific scenario,” Petersen explained.

The service has significantly evolved from when Petersen first joined SHRM. “When I first started, we were faxing responses to members and taking photocopies from books from the library,” she said, adding that it was considered impressive when advisors could respond to an inquiry that same day.

Now, as tools like AI search engines can provide answers to questions at near lightning speed (even if the accuracy of those answers is questionable), Petersen feels the pressure for her team to keep up. The team leverages a myriad of ways to support members, from live chat, phone calls, email, and more. While it might use AI to assist with research, the team isn’t using the technology when responding to inquiries.

That said, there’s also an advantage to being a human on the other end of the line, Petersen notes.

“The biggest thing they need right now is that human touch of information,” she said. “Just communicating and having somebody who’s maybe experienced a similar situation, or has heard of a similar situation, is really helpful.”

Liz Petersen, manager of SHRM's HR knowledge center

Inside the HR expert hotline fielding 50,000 questions from pros each year

Never fear, SHRM’s advisor service is here.

Inside SHRM’s expert hotline service answering 50,000-plus questions from HR pros each year

The Chinese government has imposed travel restrictions for public employees as the country tries to limit potential foreign interference.

Most public employees, including teachers and nurses, are not allowed to travel abroad without express permission from officials, the New York Times 

 on Aug. 3. The government told workers that the rules are to protect national security and fight corruption, but it seems that it’s part of a larger strategy to reduce overall interaction with foreigners. Some workers have had to hand over their passports to the government and may not get them back until two years after retirement.

Additionally, some employees must alert their employer if they leave the city; business trips are largely prohibited, according to the Times.

New workers in China who previously studied abroad may not be eligible for public positions, and most provinces no longer recruit workers from foreign universities for the most highly coveted positions.

“Because of US-China relations, because of the competition, I think it’s fair to say that Chinese society in general has become more sensitive to foreign countries,” Dongshu Liu, a professor at City University of Hong Kong, told the Times.

It doesn’t stop there. Appliance manufacturer Gree Electric won’t hire people educated outside of China. “Among them are spies,” the company’s president, Dong Mingzhu, 

As China tries to maintain control of its talent, many of the country’s students seek opportunities outside their borders. The US has promised to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas since President Trump returned to office in January, over potential national security concerns. However, critics believe this isolationist approach could hurt US companies’ ability to hire top-tier talent.

“[President] Xi is pushing many of the best and the brightest to leave China,” Thomas E. Kellogg, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Asian Law, 

 New York Times. “The US should be taking advantage of this historic brain drain, not shutting the door to many talented Chinese young people.”

China limits travel for public employees

Workers at all levels have handed over their passports to the government and must get approval before traveling overseas.

World of HR: China limits travel for public employees

Employee engagement strategies have long been a talking point for companies, but might be more useless than you think.

That’s because many companies are implementing strategies to gauge employee engagement in the wrong way, according to Mark C. Crowley, author of 

The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement to Build Flourishing Teams

, which will be published in late September. In his book, Crowley suggests how HR teams can reframe their attention to improving employee well-being instead.

“It’s time to stop talking about engagement,” Crowley told HR Brew. “Like nobody’s calling it out, and we still go through the exercise of focusing on engagement, talking about engagement, and there’s just no reason to continue to do that.”

Crowley shared more insights from his book in an interview with HR Brew.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

Measuring engagement has always been really super complicated, because there’s 

 has always asked. So, if you get bad scores, you have to isolate one of 12 different things. So, you could say, “Well, we don’t know whether people feel that they have a friend at work, or we don’t know whether people feel that they have clarity on what the job expectations are. We don’t know that people feel valued.” So, it’s Whac-a-Mole…[Engagement] simply boils down to how people feel at work, and you don’t have to ask them 12 different questions.

You just have to ask them, “How do you feel at work this week?” And, you can ask them some specific questions, like how do you feel about your benefits, or do you feel that you work for a manager who cares about you and supports your growth? You could ask those narrow questions in pulse surveys, and you can get that feedback immediately.

Why are employee engagement strategies not working?

No one’s ever taken it sincerely. Wall Street never took it sincerely. CEOs never took it sincerely. It’s always been a check-the-box activity. You do surveys once or twice a year. By the time the feedback gets out, it’s stale. 

Employees feel that it’s insincere, so they think engagement is a joke. And on top of that, no one’s ever been held accountable for it ever. So, most managers just think, “Oh, this is just an HR activity.” So, if you’ve got a toxic manager, or somebody’s not caring about their people and supporting them and doing the things that we know are highly effective for…[representing] highly effective leaders, then what you end up with is…an act of disrespect.

You’re asking people, “Tell me how we can make things better,” and then you never do anything with the feedback, and people end up really resenting that. So with pulse surveys, you can ask people specifically, “How do you feel?” And, then management can get together and say, “Hey, is this just a rough period right now, or do we need to make some adjustments?” Because the evidence is clear that how people feel at work drives their, no pun intended, their engagement, their commitment, their loyalty, their productivity, and it’s just this enormous win-win for organizations.

When we’ve always focused on engagement, that’s only something that companies cared about. Like, I’m an employee of a company, and they’re like, “We’re trying to elevate engagement.” It’s like, “I don’t care. There’s no win for me in that.” Whereas, if you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.

Should HR pros avoid using the term employee engagement and focus on terms like well-being, productivity, etc.?

To be fair to some organizations that have really taken this seriously, I’m not criticizing that. I think that’s fine. If you have high engagement in your organization and you’ve committed to it, people validate it. In other words, employees say, “This is a really great place for me to work,” nobody should be changing. I’m not advocating for that.

A lot of times what organizations do is that they blend the four and the five scores. So, for example…on a scale of one to five, how caring and supportive is your manager to you personally? 

Well, there’s a big difference between a four and a five. If you give it a five, it’s like you’ve got a fantastic manager who genuinely cares about you. If you give it a four, you have some hesitation. There’s something missing there. It’s not a perfect score, but what happens is: a lot of cases that managers or companies that are putting these surveys together, they’ll take the fours and the fives and they’ll go, “Wow. 90% of our people are engaged.” That’s not really the case.

We know that well-being is something that’s really important to employees, whereas engagement has never been important to them. There’s no reason for them to be concerned about engagement. So, if you have something that is proven to have a direct correlation to organizational success, i.e. employee well-being, why wouldn’t you just focus on that? It’s simpler, and it’s a win-win for people.

An interview with Mark C. Crowley, author of ‘The Power of Employee Well-Being’

“If you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.”