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HR STRATEGY

Speaking up

Masked protester holds sign reading "No More Detentions No More Deportations"

Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Over 1,400 Salesforce employees signed a letter last week demanding that CEO Marc Benioff cease business operations with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sources told CNBC.

“We are deeply troubled by recent press reports describing Salesforce pitches of AI technology to [ICE] to help the agency ‘expeditiously’ hire 10,000 new agents and vet tip-line reports,” the letter said, according to CNBC. The letter was drafted after Benioff “joked” to international employees at a Salesforce leadership event in Las Vegas that “ICE agents were in the building monitoring them,” WIRED reported.

Benioff’s remark “landed in the context where immigration enforcement is not an abstract idea. There are some employees really living with it…as a risk, fear, or family impact, and that makes the ‘humor’ function sort of as a power signal, not a punch line,” Christine Haskell, managing director at advisory firm Dative.works and former senior director of data culture and literacy at Salesforce, told HR Brew.

“The CEO’s words set an emotional weather climate, and when the weather is threat adjacent, even in a joke, it tells employees that leadership is willing to treat that lightly,” Haskell said.

For more on what HR needs to know about Salesforce employees’ response to Benioff’s comment, keep reading here.—MC

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DEI

Built to fail

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

Emily Parsons

If anyone could have predicted that the post-2020 focus on DEI would fade away, it was DEI practitioners.

DEI practitioners like Lily Zheng, fairness strategist and consultant. When Zheng started DEI consulting in the late 2010s, their work focused on helping companies move beyond one-off, 60-minute learning and development sessions and toward long-term DEI strategies. In their book, Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for Al, Zheng examines how companies can continue to invest in DEI, despite recent pushback.

Zheng sat down with HR Brew to talk more about their book and how DEI work has shifted over the last decade.

TECH

New in town

Yutthana Gaetgeaw/Getty Images

HR tech company Workleap is embarking on its next phase of growth with the appointment of Peter Dougherty as its chief revenue officer.

The Montreal-based company—behind Workleap platform, an AI-powered HR solution, and ShareGate, a data migration and governance solution—is bringing Dougherty on to its team to help facilitate global growth by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success.

Dougherty comes to Workleap with over 15 years of experience working at SaaS organizations, including global payments orchestration platform Spreedly and point-of-sale (POS) and e-commerce platform Lightspeed Commerce.

“What’s our value? What are the problems we solve? How are we helping our customers innovate and do more, especially in the era of ‘do more with less?’” Dougherty said about his overall strategy. “That’s the center point. That’s the middle of the onion of how you build great alignment across the organization.”

For more on what’s on the horizon for Workleap, keep reading on Revenue Brew.—LI

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WORK PERKS

A desktop computer plugged into a green couch.

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: New Jersey hired more workers with H-1B visas than any other state last year. For every 10,000 new hires, 30.5 had a H-1B visa. (Peoria Journal Star)

Quote: “I believe that millions of white-collar workers are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months due to AI…AI is now able to do the work of a very, very smart human in minutes or even seconds. This is going to displace marketers, coders, designers, lawyers, accountants, call center workers—you name it.”—Andrew Yang, former Democratic presidential candidate, on the impact AI will have on the workforce (Fortune)

Read: Some tech companies are forcing their workers to use AI tools and evaluating AI fluency as part of the hiring process. (the Wall Street Journal)

L&D’s Everest: AI fluency is one of the toughest challenges L&D teams face. Thankfully, Sana Learn is here to help. Their platform provides personalized learning experiences at scale. See for yourself.*

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Written by Mikaela Cohen and Layla Ilchi

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