Most Important Developments in HR for April 26th

Now in its sixth year, the Workforce 100 recognizes companies that excelled in human resources over the course of the previous year. To determine which companies make the list, Workforce editors work with researchers from the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the publication’s research division. The research team created a model to sift through publicly available data on HR performance to separate the best from the rest. To give employees more of a say in the rankings, recruiting and job-review website Glassdoor provided data on what workers are saying about the companies that made the list. From there, that information was combined with the public data available to create the 2019 Workforce 100 list. This year we noticed that many highly ranked companies have gradually climbed the list since the Workforce 100 began. Southwest started out unranked in 2014, eventually moved to the middle of the list, and made it to the No. 1 spot in 2019. Companies including T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Hilton have seen similar trajectories. Workforce

If Congress doesn’t act soon, tens of millions of Americans will only receive about three-quarters of their Social Security benefits when they retire. Social Security’s trust funds will be tapped out by 2035, according to an annual report released Monday by trustees of the government’s two largest entitlement programs, the other being Medicare. That’s one year later than last year’s report projected. The new projection doesn’t mean retirees will no longer get checks in 16 years. But the program will at that point only have enough revenue coming in to pay three-quarters of promised benefits through the end of 2093. Lawmakers have a broad continuum of policy options that would fix the situation, said Steve Mnuchin, but they have long punted on addressing Social Security problems, which would likely entail raising payroll taxes, curtailing benefits, or some combination of both. CNN

Two employee activists at Google, Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, say they have been retaliated against for helping to organize a walkout among thousands of Google workers in November, and are planning a “town hall” meeting on Friday for others to discuss alleged instances of retaliation. In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she co-founded at New York University. Claire Stapleton, a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. Wired

Creating a more culturally and gender-diverse workplace has been proven by McKinsey, Gallup, and numerous companies around the world to improve business success. Still, many struggle to overcome gaps in gender and ethnic diversity when it comes to hiring, leadership cultivation, and promotion. But building a strong, inclusive leadership team is more than just filling a quota and checking the right boxes. Diversity isn’t just about gender and ethnicity. It also involves creating the right blend of strengths and weaknesses, skill sets, and personalities. It means being inclusive of introverts and extroverts, technical types and creatives, communicators and analytics, various lifestyles, visionaries, realists, optimists, and pessimists. Training Magazine