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TOTAL REWARDS

Adopting adoption

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Adobe Stock

Two years ago, asset management firm TCW added a slate of family-building benefits to its roster, realizing its employees may need help having a child. The benefits include reimbursements for adoption, IVF, surrogacy, and egg-freezing costs, as well as paid time off to welcome a child.

“Our employee population is evolving. People now build families in different ways,” said Jessica Kung, executive VP and CHRO at TCW. “And those timelines can be maybe more later in life than they used to be.”

TCW isn’t the only company coming to such a realization, yet adoption benefits lag behind other offerings. Last year, 37% of companies offered paid leave for adoption, up from 27% in 2020, according to a report by the International Federation of Employee Benefit Plans. Financial reimbursement for adoption costs didn’t rise as sharply, growing to 20% last year from 17% in 2020. In contrast, the study found that 42% of companies offered fertility benefits, up from 30%.

Rita Soronen, president and CEO of the Dave Thompson Foundation for Adoption, said offering adoption perks would give employers an advantage.

Keep reading here.—TA

Presented By Sana

A change of course in courseload

Class is in session, and the teacher’s new pet is a major completionist. No, it’s not the kid in class who reminds the teacher they forgot to assign homework (thanks a lot, Jeremy)—it’s an AI-first learning platform.

Sana, which Josh Bersin calls “the first system I’ve seen that can truly be an end-to-end learning platform for companies,” is an AI-powered learning management system (LMS) built for today’s leadership challenges.

Only 36% of HR professionals believe current leadership programs are effective. That’s why Sana’s designed to go above and beyond. Sana offers:

automated admin workflows that save valuable time
interactive hybrid learning built directly into the platform
custom AI-powered dashboards that answer your specific questions

Traditional LMS completion rates hover around 5%, while Sana users experience over 90%. See why Sana is the superior choice for HR pros.

TECH

You better recognize

Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images

The ability of artificial intelligence to extract valuable insights and patterns inside large datasets that would be difficult or impossible for humans to perform is the true AI unlock for businesses—but it’s only an unlock if it’s sitting atop a foundation of useful and unbiased data.

Employee recognition software company Workhuman announced last week it launched a new update to its platform that incorporates AI to provide productivity and skills insights inside its recognition and culture platform.

HR leaders don’t need another AI tool, Workhuman execs contend. What they need is a data set that will actually tell them something useful about their people, culture, and business.

“For at least a decade, HR people [and] people people have been saying, ‘We need people analytics. We need to understand these insights.’ But they have been pigeonholed to…what does the business say that it values, and what is the board saying that it wants to understand about the workforce?” KeyAnna Schmiedl, chief human experience officer at WorkHuman, told HR Brew ahead of the launch. “Where HR has been asked to [focus] people analytics…has been on the raw quantitative data that just tells you how many people, at what time, putting in what type of hours. Is that what we care about anymore? Should it have ever been what we cared about?”

Keep reading here.—AD

DEI

Remember your rights

Division between rainbow-colored wooden figures and plain wooden figures

Soulmemoria/Getty Images

In recent months, one major company after another has rolled back its DEI commitments: Walmart, Meta, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, Target, Deloitte. The trend began even before the second Trump administration released executive orders taking aim at DEI, but the implied consequences of such orders has led other companies to wonder whether they should follow suit.

Speaking at GreenBiz 25, an event for sustainable business leaders, attorney Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum, and consultants Eloiza Domingo and Tynesia Boyea-Robinson, offered advice on what steps companies should take next.

What the EO says. Executive Order 14173 is perhaps the one that most companies will be concerned with. It prevents federal contractors from “engag[ing] in workforce balancing” based on gender, race, and other identity attributes, and requires agency heads to affirm that contract and grant recipients do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.”

But the EO has ramifications for companies that aren’t federal contractors, too.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—CV

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WORK PERKS

A desktop computer plugged into a green couch.

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Only 15% of professional women have a formal or informal mentor at their organization, compared to 24% of men. (HiBob)

Quote: “Federal workers are being forced back to the office. But I do not think many other companies will follow, and I’m not sure if the federal policy itself will even be fully enforced or persist.”—Stanford professor and remote work expert Nick Bloom on the potential for federal RTO policies leaking into the private sector (MarketWatch)

Read: Recently laid-off federal workers are contending with a particularly tough labor market. (Yahoo! Finance)

Become a PWFA pro: Accommodating pregnant + postpartum team members shouldn’t be complicated. In the PWFA Toolkit, AbsenceSoft breaks down everything you need to know about supporting your team (+ their new additions). Read on.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Is DE&I getting a rebrand?

Amelia Kinsinger

The language around DE&I is shifting—but it’s not just politics driving the change. Discover how companies are redefining inclusion and belonging for the future.

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