News & Events

Most of today’s workforce are too young to remember early 1960s teen heartthrob Neil Sedaka, but they likely know that his signature song “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” continues to ring true in any decade.

Sedaka’s sad song may be at the top of some Spotify playlists as big-name employers are “breaking up” with employees during a wave of mass layoffs centered around the tech industry in the U.S.

“Tech jobs feel like they're vanishing quicker than steam from a pot of boiling water lately,” reported USA Today.

On one side of the American economy, tech companies almost daily announce new layoffs, while in other sectors, such as shipbuilding, companies cannot hire workers fast enough.

The massive tech worker layoff, which started in 2022 and has extended into 2023, has led to more than 200,000 employees being let go and has many examining its effect on the U.S. job market.

“More than 66,000 workers in U.S.-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts so far in 2023, according to a Crunchbase News tally, and the year is just getting started,” reported Keerthi Vedantam for CrunchBase. “Last year, more than 140,000 jobs were slashed from public and private tech companies as they were forced to confront rising inflation and a tumultuous stock market.”

It’s never easy to make HR predictions for the coming year but the crystal ball is particularly cloudy in 2023 due to the chances of the U.S. economy entering into a recession between now and December.

The pandemic’s effect on the workplace is a bit like having driven off a cliff – no matter how much we want to turn around or go back to the way things were before, it simply isn’t possible, especially when it comes to company culture in a hybrid work environment.

“Some leaders are thinking about what new culture and a new way of working might look like, and how to perpetuate a culture in a primarily hybrid world,” says Bryan Hancock, the global leader of McKinsey’s talent work.

HR compliance checklists come in all shapes and sizes with the spectrum covering an alphabet soup of acronyms from COBRA to FMLA to ADA to FLSA.

The Society for Human Resource Management offers its members a whopping 39 compliance checklists that fall among 13 different categories.

“Ensuring your company is compliant with tax and labor laws helps create a safe and secure workplace for employees, provide fair compensation and ensure your company keeps up with its tax obligations.

Artificial Intelligence and the future of work is a hot topic, but when it comes to the future of leadership, automation and machines take a backseat to something much less esoteric: “human leadership.”

Gartner HR Research identified human leadership as the next evolution of leadership in a study released in June 2022.

Business leaders and managers aspiring to greatness have no shortage of avenues to learn and grow from books to blogs to TED Talks to podcasts.

Honestly, there is so much content to consume that half the battle is cutting through the clutter to decide where to focus your time.

When it comes to predicting the future, there is nothing like a worldwide pandemic, economic turbulence, and geopolitical turmoil to remind us that forecasting can be an activity with more pitfalls than curtain calls.

Yet business leaders understand that they must keep looking ahead because sailing their companies into uncharted waters blindly, without preparation or a sense of direction, is the surest way to end up wrecked on the rocks.

New Year’s Resolutions are easy to make … and very hard to keep.

In fact, a study a few years ago examined 800 million user-logged activities that showed most people are likely to give up on their New Year’s Resolution by January 19.

“The difficulty of the goal you set isn’t nearly as important as whether or not you develop the kind of habits that allow you to achieve that goal,” wrote Inc. contributing editor Jeff Haden. “Otherwise, you’re just wishing and hoping. Your intentions are great, but unless you develop new habits … your chances for success are basically nonexistent.”