CEOs are having their worst year in decades

It’s been a bad year for CEOs.

Chief executives have left their posts at an alarming rate as their performance — and their behavior — come under increased scrutiny by corporate boards.

What’s happening: Well over 1,000 CEOs have left their companies this year, according to a Challenger, Gray & Christmas report. That’s 33% more than last year and the highest total in the first seven months of the year since the staffing research company began tracking exits in 2002. READ MORE

Jamie Dimon warns of risks to US economy: 'We've been spending like drunken sailors'

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sounded the alarm over the state of the economy on Monday, warning that the "booming environment" cannot last forever. 

Speaking at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference in New York, Dimon warned of significant headwinds to the economy, including geopolitical tensions, government spending and monetary policy tightening by central banks across the world. READ MORE

Harnessing Grassroots Automation

Companies are increasingly embracing the idea of helping nontechnical staff members — those who have deep business-area expertise — learn to directly automate processes that give them headaches and eat up their time. For instance, human resources employees are uniquely qualified to identify the mundane and repetitive parts of their jobs, such as candidate-tracking tasks, and then, with some training, build automations that will relieve them of chores such as duplicative data entry and data cleaning. READ MORE

Meet the Typical Remote Worker, Who Makes Good Money, Runs Errands During the Day, and Will Take a Pay Cut to Avoid RTO

It's become clear that remote work is here to stay. Just ask the workers who would rather quit their jobs than return to the office.

"The quality of the work-life balance is unbeatable. It's truly unbeatable," Timothy Done, a millennial who left his job rather than return to an office nearly 600 miles away, previously told Insider of his pivot to a full-time remote role. READ MORE

What CEOs are missing by trying to get workers back to the office

There’s been a surge of labor action in the past year, with high-profile strikes and threatened strikes among Hollywood writers and actors, Starbucks baristas, truck drivers, auto workers and more. Workers are pushing back in other ways, too: Many are trading up for better jobs, while others (like some women with caregiving responsibilities and some older workers) are simply leaving the workforce. Clearly, there’s a widespread desire for more voice and better treatment on the job. READ MORE

Why aren’t employers delivering the EX employees want?

Given ongoing turnover troubles, many employers have turned to a longtime retention strategy: giving employees more money.

It’s not a new approach. For instance, pre-pandemic, Salesforce trotted out annual bonuses that averaged $39,959, while Meta’s annual bonuses averaged $33,225 pre-pandemic. However, their average retention sits at only 23 and 25 months, respectively, according to a Paysa blog post. READ MORE

Why the performance review is dying out—including at companies like Apple and Microsoft

Performance reviews are commonplace at big companies, and in theory enable managers to give detailed acknowledgment and constructive criticism. But in reality they do more harm than good because employees focus on impressing their manager rather than on performance per se. Microsoft made this problem worse with a stack ranking system, in which managers graded people on a bell curve, each grade going to a fixed number of employees.

As one employee remembered, “If you were on a team of ten people, you walked in the first day knowing that no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review. . . . It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” Another described sabotage, either open and direct or subtly withholding just enough information to keep colleagues from getting ahead in the rankings. Without trust, managers could not influence anyone. READ MORE

Rehiring ‘boomerang’ employees? What to consider first

The concept of “boomerang” employees—who leave and eventually return to their ex-employers—is certainly not brand new, but in the pandemic’s aftermath, the idea is getting more traction with both workers and employers. And, experts say, to take advantage of this growing trend, HR needs to be proactive and strategic.

Recent research from LinkedIn on the phenomenon found that, in 2021, boomeranging accounted for 4.3% of all job switches; in 2010, it was less than 2%. Also, workers are coming back more quickly: Now, the average time for U.S. boomerang hires is 17.3 months after employees leave; it was 21.8 months in 2010. READ MORE

AI skills most sought by employers

Employers are increasingly looking for workers who are skilled in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and new research from Upwork sheds light on what AI skills companies are searching and hiring for.

Upwork found that from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2023, companies’ top search term related to generative AI was ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot made by OpenAI. It was followed by BERT, an open-source language model, and Stable Diffusion which generates images based on a user’s text input. READ MORE

Unlimited PTO: A better deal for employers than workers?

The concept of unlimited PTO is not altogether new. But according to some reports, it is enjoying somewhat of a post-COVID resurgence.

Bank of America’s Mid-Sized Business Owner report, for example, found that nearly 40% of mid-sized businesses are meeting today’s recruiting and retention challenges by increasing vacation and paid time off—benefits that topped offerings like cost-of-living bonuses, enhanced healthcare benefits and improved retirement packages. When upping PTO and other related benefits, a significant amount (78%) of mid-sized businesses surveyed reported a boost in employee morale and retention rates. READ MORE