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

Kristen Parisi

hr-brew.com

the top of a globe with a phone, notebook, laptop, glasses, iPad and coffee cup floating above it

right to disconnect legislation

Kenya is the latest country considering banning employers from contacting workers after hours.

Right to disconnect laws are becoming increasingly popular globally, but not in the US

Adam DeRose

How HR professionals conduct layoffs with care and compassion

Layoffs are difficult for everyone involved, here’s what HR can do to ease the burden on all.

How to develop a compassionate strategy for layoffs

graphic designed art of a box filled with ballots with on on top being stuffed into the box labeled employee survey

Designing for a good employee experience? Look no further than…your employees

Employee experience pros say the best way to cultivate a positive workplace culture is to design experiences with as much input from employees as possible.

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Work life

Mikaela Cohen

When was the last time you were productive for eight hours straight? (No need to lie, we’re all friends here! We know it’s probably been a long time…)

If it makes you feel any better, just 18% of global workers 

 by Kickresume in July said they’re productive for seven to eight hours a day. Another 39% reported being productive for five to six hours, while 29% said the same for three to four hours. Makes you wonder why the work day is still eight hours, right?

“The premise of the eight-hour workday itself is already kind of unrealistic, like people aren’t actually working for eight hours straight, non-stop, with no breaks, with no unfocused time,” said Ashley Janssen, a productivity consultant at her consulting firm.

After the Industrial Revolution, manual laborers often logged at least 12-hour shifts and 80-hour workweeks. But as the labor movement grew in the 1920s, the idea of the eight-hour workday was born and embraced.

But the challenge with the eight-hour workday, Janssen told HR Brew, is that it was designed for manual work and may not align with knowledge work, and the problem-solving and creativity required to do it productively.

“An organization has never really tried anything else…that’s the norm, and there’s never been any push to change it,” Janssen said. “Even though it actually doesn’t suit the kind of work that knowledge workers do.”

When Janssen consults on employee productivity, she said she has leaders and employees to “map out what an average week in their life looks like,” including tasks like getting dressed, cooking, commuting, running errands, and attending appointments.

“Most people are shocked, because they actually see a visual of what’s actually happening over the course of each day…and funny enough, it’s actually probably that five or six hours is where the gaps are,” Janssen said. “Their expectations that they’re going to be able to get all of these things done over the course of their ‘eight- or nine-hour day’ versus all the things they’re trying to jam in, which were actually not even possible to begin with.”

HR pros can help employees set reasonable expectations for their workday, she said, by thinking of juggling their personal and professional tasks like “juggling plastic and glass balls.”

“We’re all juggling 55 balls every day, and some of them are as simple as making lunch in the morning all the way to a big project that’s due for work, and sometimes you have to drop some balls,” she said. “What are the plastic balls? What are the ones that, if we drop them, it’s okay. They’re not going to break…versus the idea of the glass ball that if you drop that ball, something’s going to happen. It’s going to break. It’s going to hurt a relationship. It’s going to hurt a reputation.”

It all boils down to being intentional and thoughtful when prioritizing what can be achieved in a day, Janssen said.

Most employees aren’t productive the whole workday. HR can help them get the most out of it.

The eight-hour workday is so two millennia ago.

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.

 want to spend less time working and more time lounging poolside in the sweet, sweet summertime? According to one recent survey, it depends on who you ask—and maybe how old they are.

Some 49% of workers reported working less in the summer, according to a recent 

 released in June. Gen Z is leading the pack, as 64% of employees aged 21–25 and 56% of employees aged 26–29 said they are taking it easier, compared to 39% of employees over 45 years old (Gen X) who reported doing the same.

“People actually tend to be more productive and task focused when there’s nothing else to do [recreationally],” said Adam Grant, organization psychologist, author, and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert. “And it’s summer; there’s a lot more to do. The desire to relax is amplified. Sun’s out. It’s warm. People are excited to do activities.”

As a way to embrace this, HR can offer shortened workweeks or more flexibility in the summer. Some 59% of people leaders have already provided additional flexibility or time off this summer compared to the rest of the year, according to a recent 

Grant told HR Brew that US workers might be picking up on a “summer holiday” culture favored by many in Europe, where it’s common for employees to take several weeks off in the summer. “A lot of us have fond memories of summer in childhood, going to camp, being on the water, and there’s a desire to recapture that a little bit,” he added.

Decreased productivity during the summer doesn’t necessarily mean employees are less dedicated or loyal to their roles, Grant cautioned. Instead, it’s a reflection of a trend towards a “seasonality” to how work gets done, he said.

“It’s not something we ever saw people talk about when I started in this field, and now it’s a pretty common refrain,” Grant said. “‘I’m going to be as productive as I can during the winter, and then in summer, I’m going to embrace the fact that it’s a different season.’ There’s more freedom and flexibility to have fun and relax.’”

Palm trees and a pool emerging from a computer screen 

Employees work less in the summer. Workplace expert Adam Grant wants HR to get used to it

Automatic reply: Hello! I’ll be slow to reply to emails from now until Labor Day. I’ll respond to your email as soon as I’m more productive this fall. Thanks!

Millennials might’ve been promised a more stable future and workplace than will exist for them.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers likely remember a time when a one-company tenure was the norm. Gen Z workers shudder at the thought of that. Older generations also know what it’s like to buy a house for a fraction of its current market value, while many younger professionals probably don’t put home ownership on their vision boards anymore. So, where does that leave millennials? Perhaps, stuck somewhere between the promise of what their parents had and the reality that their kids are born into.

This pressure could be causing higher rates of burnout, as 66% of millennials say they feel “moderate” or “high” levels of burnout compared to 60% of Gen Xers, 56% of Gen Zers, and 39% of Baby Boomers, according to a recent 

Millennials are going through “a perfect storm of professional and personal stress,” said Leah Phifer Buck, an employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm WhyWork. These employees, those roughly between 29 and 44 years old, are commonly slammed with caregiving responsibilities for kids and/or aging parents while navigating the growing demands of their careers, Buck told HR Brew, which can exacerbate stress and increase their likelihood of burnout.

Millennials might be asking themselves the same question. This generation has gone through multiple economic recessions before even reaching a mid-life crisis. From the dot-com bubble bust in 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic, and now the current administration’s foreign tariff policies, millennials could be wrapped into yet another chilling economic downturn.

“We might never achieve the level of economic stability that the Baby Boomer generation, our parents, did, but I think that a lot of millennials are starting to reconcile with that,” Buck said. “As they make peace with the economic reality that they face, they’re starting to lean into, ‘How can I still do what I love? How can I still do things that light me up and find joy in my job?’

Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and corporate services executive at Aflac, agrees that millennials have gone through many unstable times, and it could have taken away the workplace they had hoped to be working in. But he told HR Brew that another big contributor to their higher rates of burnout is the lack of work-life balance exhibited by many company executives.

“Leaders need to be aware that they’re controlling the pace of the work for their workforce,” he said. “A lot of this burnout [and] a lot of the experience that employees are having, millennial and otherwise, are directly related to leadership or the lack thereof.”

 As a millennial herself, Buck said there’s a desire among her generation to “improve the system,” which increases pressure to do better and be better workers, leaders, parents, etc. Sometimes millennials “beat our heads against a wall,” she said, trying to help everyone else so much that they’ve burned themselves out. She suggests a solution lies somewhere between companies making structural changes and employees taking on responsibility.

Starting with mental healthcare coverage, Buck noted, it’s important for HR to effectively communicate available benefits and resources for tackling burnout, but it then becomes incumbent on employees to utilize them.

“I work with clients all the time who say, ‘We don’t know why our employees are so stressed or burned out, because we offer this great mental healthcare coverage.’ But then when I dig deeper and I ask them, ‘Well, how are you communicating the coverage to employees?’” Buck said. “That’s often where the disconnect lies. It’s not that the employers aren’t offering these things, it’s that maybe employees don’t know about it or aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Helping millennial employees tackle burnout boils down to basic communications, expectation setting, and leadership modeling work-life balance, Owenby said.

“It’s fun to talk about work-life balance. It’s another thing to achieve it, and then it’s another thing to encourage it, and encourage leaders to encourage that,” he said. “There has to be a higher standard when it comes to educating leaders, and I think there has to be specific programs in place within corporations to deal with the nuances that the millennial generation is experiencing.”

Buck said she has hope that Gen Z and younger generations will be better about avoiding burnout and mitigating its symptoms when they arise.

“While they may not have all the answers, the fact that they’re surfacing these conversations, and a lot of these discussions are being led by millennials and really pushed by Gen Z, I see as a really promising step forward in this discussion,” she said.

Man resting his head on his work desk, stressed and tired

Millennials are the most likely generation to experience burnout

What’s going on with the ’80s and ’90s kids, and how can HR help?

Fridays in the office during the summer are quieter, Slack messages slow down as the day wanes, and early departures or dismissals are more common.

 “Summer Fridays” as a way to offer employees flexibility, and it’s a trend that’s on the rise. Some 59% of HR pros provided additional flexibility or time off this summer compared to the rest of the calendar year, and 28% provided more summer flexibility in 2024, according to a survey of 514 HR Brew readers.

The fewer employees an organization has the more likely it is to offer summer flexibility. Nearly half (41%) of small companies with fewer than 100 full-time employees partake in Summer Fridays. Meanwhile, only one-fourth (26%) of large companies, those with 500 or more full-time employees, offer this summer benefit.

Most HR pros see no signs of their return-to-office policies slowing during the warmer months. Nearly all people pros (92%) with a five-day, in-office requirement don’t offer any special flexibility perks.

Once an organization tests a flexible summer schedule, it likely sticks around. Some 75% of people leaders who offered Summer Fridays this year, for instance, also followed the same schedule last year.

Employees undoubtedly would welcome more flexibility this summer so they can follow the lead of other HR Brew readers who are enjoying this warm-weather benefit.

Summer Fridays have become a popular choice for HR to offer employees

More companies are offering flexibility this summer compared to last year, an HR Brew survey found.

If you’ve scrolled through TikTok, you’ve probably seen Natalie Marshall.

Marshall, also known by her social media personality, Corporate Natalie, frequently pokes fun at 

. She started her TikTok page in 2020 as a way to laugh through the pain of the pandemic-era world of work, Marshall told HR Brew, at a time when she was 23 and working as a Deloitte consultant.

“This concept of making fun of work from home was new, and people were latching on to that at that time, because it was like, ‘Wow, we’re allowed to talk about our employers in this way? We’re allowed to poke fun at this?’” Marshall said. “I think everyone just wanted to share a laugh at that time.”

Marshall left her job at Deloitte in late 2020 to dedicate more time to content creation. Five years later, she’s running three businesses, including her social media brand, a podcast called 

with fellow workplace content creator Ross Pomerantz, and Expand VA, a virtual assistant platform for content creators.

In a recent TikTok, Marshall and Pomerantz suggest how employees open their next meeting with HR. “I literally blacked out. If I can’t remember, it didn’t happen,” Pomerantz joked. “I’m not speaking without legal counsel present, and if this is about me making a pass at Joe from legal, I’m not speaking at all,” Marshall teased.

What workplace content means to employees. 

Since Marshall started posting videos making fun of corporate America, she said she’s seen the “corporate content space” grow into thousands of creators that bring value to the employee experience.

By sharing day-in-the-life videos where employees showcase what it’s like to work at a specific company or industry, Marshall said workplace content has the power to “open people’s eyes” to new perspectives and opportunities, while also helping employees feel like they’re not alone if going through a workplace hardship.

“It just opens the conversation and allows us to feel comfortable. It’s like when you see [a] content creator post about their mental health journey, and you feel so seen, and you feel like, ‘Oh, wow, I could talk to my friends about this,’” she said.

 Marshall’s content has evolved as the workplace has changed, with return-to-office conversations and Gen Z’s style of working being prime examples. She’s also branched outside of TikTok into attending HR conferences and speaking to people pros about her advice and expertise with a focus on generational dynamics.

“Why is there so much like instability between generations in the workplace? I wanted to speak to this cross-generational harmony, because I think Gen Z has a lot to offer the workplace,” she said. “They’re changing the dynamic of social media teams at so many companies. They’re able to get everyone benefits that a company might not have wanted before. They aren’t afraid to ask these questions.”

Marshall said employers need to become more transparent, and that’s why she continues to make fun of the 

 of transparency in the workplace in her videos, especially in the interview and onboarding process.

“With these change-ups that we’re seeing where people are getting notified last minute that they now are changing to fully in office. It’s like, ‘I took this job because I enjoyed the lifestyle…being remote, being with my dog, being with my young children,’” she said. “That’s something that I make videos poking fun at, but it really is to bring light to it that companies need to be transparent.”

As Marshall frequently highlights grievances that many employees have with their managers, including a funny bit about 

, she’s ironically now someone else’s boss with two full-time employees, a brand manager and content specialist. She said it gets hard being a manager in a small business, because you have to keep yourself accountable to learning and growing as a leader.

“When you’re the operator for your business, you’re like, ‘Oh gosh, should I take a course? What should I do?’” she said. “Really plopping down and learning how to manage effectively, and keeping myself accountable for that has been important, because I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know everything, and I want to walk the walk as much as I talk about it on socials.”

On top of growing as a manager, Marshall said she wants to continue honing her skills as a speaker and thought leader, and branch out of the “Corporate Natalie character” and into who Natalie Marshall is as a workplace expert—which has her spending more time on many HR pros’ favorite hangout space, LinkedIn.

“It excites me to see that platform growing, and really investing myself on that page, and positioning myself as more of a thought leader in the creator space, in the HR space, and finding my niche there,” she said. “On other platforms, it’s pretty clear I’m Corporate Natalie, but on LinkedIn, it’s really pulling back the curtain of, ‘Who is Natalie Marshall?’”

HR Brew Profile series featuring Natalie Marshall. (Credit: Natalie Marshall)