This issue of HR News Roundup includes items about skill building, weight loss drugs, RTO, 2025 leadership trends and more news we found noteworthy. And because we all need a laugh now and then, don’t miss the fun items in “the lighter side.”
Transforming the Employee Experience by Taking a Skills-Based Approach
Lauren Lightbody, Training Magazine
Many organizations are turning to skills as the foundation for building their talent strategy. With skills at the center of your talent strategy, leaders plan around the organization’s skills and needs, candidates are evaluated on skills, and employees are enabled to grow and develop skills critical to the organization’s success. In doing so, companies gain access to a richer and more diverse candidate pool, improve employee engagement through internal job mobility and growth, and facilitate more agile team-based work that drives business outcomes.
GLP-1s: To Cover, or Not to Cover, These Weight Management Drugs?
Jen Colletta, HR Executive
… Employer uptake may be slow—Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that less than one-fifth of organizations with more than 200 employers covered GLP-1 drugs for weight management last year—but demand is high. KFF found that almost half of Americans are interested in an effective weight-loss medication, while a J.P. Morgan study estimates that 30 million Americans could have such drugs prescribed for weight loss in the next five years.
That interest could influence whether workers jump ship—or stay on board—for employers that cover GLP-1s for weight management: Cardiometabolic care tool 9amHealth found that more than two-thirds of the 1,300 Americans it surveyed would stay at a job they didn’t like because of its GLP-1 coverage. Twenty percent would be likely to take a new job if it offered such coverage.
RTO Comes With Legal Risks
Hailey Mensik, WorkLife
As the return to offices continues, more employers and HR professionals are paying attention to the potential legal risks posed by reluctant returning staff.
The reality is that RTO is a messy business, and employers leave themselves open to discrimination claims from employees, should they allow remote accommodations to certain employees who request it and not others, without a clear explanation, according to legal experts.
That goes doubly so if returning to offices wasn’t explicitly outlined in their original employment contracts.
Distraction Or Disruption? It Matters For Strategy
Tara J. Rethore, Chief Executive
How you show up as a leader matters. Whether distracting or disruptive, sweeping change—like that potentially precipitated by the recent Executive Orders—affects real people. Customers. Staff. Stakeholders. Partners. Board members. What impacts them also affects your business context. It doesn’t matter whether you support or oppose a particular change, or even whether or not you like it. It is very likely that your organization includes people holding both views. But how you show up as a leader matters.
The leadership trends that will shape 2025
Donna Wiggs, Big Think
Little in 2024 could be considered static. Is inflation speeding up or slowing down? Is support for remote work ending? How fast will AI transform the workplace? What will be the fallout of local, national, and global conflicts? How can employees and organizations become better equipped to successfully navigate what portends to be continued upheaval?
The questions, hopes, and concerns of 2024 give no indication of subsiding in 2025. In fact, they are most likely to intensify, with their impact manifesting from top-level decision-making to individual relationships.
How to Get Your Workforce to Actually Read the Employee Handbook
Allen Smith, SHRM
Quinn highlighted three best practices related to employee integration of new or revised handbook policies:
1, With ever-changing regulations and practices at work, employers need to better convey their expectations in a uniform and consistent manner. Handbooks are ideal for this, but only if they are kept up-to-date and reinforced over time.
2. The most effective and most defensible means of handbook application will be with ongoing communication, including training targeted at employee expectations.
3. Employers should document how they communicate and interact with employees regarding these issues.
- Could Boomerang Employees Be Your Next Great Source of Talent?
- How To Reduce Email Overload
- Why Are 93% of Workers Looking for a New Job?
- Workers Decry Lost Productivity from “Busy Work” and RTO
- Revealed: How Much Exercise You Need to ‘Offset’ a Day of Sitting
- The EEOC’s New Guidance on Wearable Tech: What Employers Need to Know
- 3 Ways HR Can Help Orgs Cultivate the Crucial Skill of Adaptability
- How to Cultivate Meaning When Life Feels Absurd
- 10 Things Incredibly Likable People Never, Ever Do (and Why You Love Them for It)
- 3 Ways to Improve Culture and Reduce Turnover at Your Nonprofit
- H5 Bird Flu: Current Situation
- How to Detect Phishing Scams
- 43 Embarrassing Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make
From the Lighter Side …
As an HR Manager, you’ve probably received a variety of recommendations for new hires, but it’s likely you have never gotten a recommendation letter like the one sent by the president of Pendleton Tool and Die Company about a former employee. It is beautifully read by the British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Another letter in the series was a response to a university rejection letter read by British actor Himesh Patel.
And finally, actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads a brilliant cover letter by a job-seeking copywriter named Robert Pirosh that he issued to various parties when he got to Hollywood. It landed him a job at MGM.
You can find more at the popular You Tube Channel Letters Live. Some are moving, some are hilarious – but be aware that some topics are not work appropriate.
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