Employee burnout is rising and so are leave requests. What employers should do next

Burnout is no longer a buzzword—it’s a business reality. In 2024, more than half of employers reported an increase in leave requests, and over half of those saw increases exceeding 20%. While the reasons for this uptick vary—including illness, mental health, caregiving responsibilities and parental leave—the common denominator is that today’s workforce is stretched thin. In frontline service industries like hospitality, senior care and restaurants, where labor shortages are already impacting operations, the strain is even more visible. READ MORE

7 Lessons Employers Can Learn from The Current State of the Pharmacy Benefits Industry

When Mark Cuban declares an industry practice "insane" multiple times during a panel discussion, it's worth paying attention. At Brown & Brown's Benefits Evolved 2025 event, Cuban joined our founder and CEO, Jake Frenz, Avantika Waring, MD and Chief Medical Officer at 9am Health, and Jared Bowcutt, Senior Vice President at Brown & Brown for a no-holds-barred conversation about pharmacy benefits. What emerged wasn't just criticism of the status quo, but a roadmap for employers seeking better value, greater transparency, and improved outcomes.

Here are seven critical lessons every employer should consider as we move forward into this time of reckoning. READ MORE

Many employees with side hustles see them as insurance policies

Most workers with side hustles aren’t leaving their full-time jobs to become business owners — instead, they’re using their side gigs as insurance policies for financial stability, according to a July 29 report from Glassdoor.

Although the percentage of workers with multiple jobs has increased during the first half of 2025, the applications for new businesses has remained flat. Glassdoor calls these workers “employee+” professionals who are diversifying their income without leaving their primary job. READ MORE

Samsung rolls out 5‑day RTO tracking tool to curb 'coffee badging' for some US semiconductor staff

Samsung has joined the growing list of companies requiring full-time in-office attendance with a new five-day policy for some of its US-based employees.

The company implemented the full five-day RTO policy in early July for a group within its semiconductor business and is rolling out a tool internally to track employees' compliance, Business Insider has learned. READ MORE

How to Change the Performance of Your Performance Review Systems

Are performance review systems broken? According to one report, the answer is yes.

A 2025 Corporate Performance and Learning SurveyOpen in a new tab by Acorn, an HR technology company, found only 29% of surveyed workers trust how their organization evaluates performance. The survey included responses from 1,239 U.S.-based full-time workers, spanning executives, managers and individual contributors across HR, learning and development, and business teams. READ MORE

Banking CEO breaks from the pack on return to office. He goes in 4 days a week but leaves the rest up to the ‘adults’ he works with

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters is standing out in the global banking sector by maintaining a flexible, hybrid work policy and resisting the rigid office mandates now sweeping through much of Wall Street. As peers from companies like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs urge staff back to traditional office rhythms, Winters has doubled down on a philosophy of employee autonomy and trust, placing his bank in sharp contrast to its U.S. and U.K. peers. READ MORE

Why AI Is Making 1:1 Meetings Irrelevant

For decades, the one-on-one meeting has been a sacred ritual of managerial life. It’s the office equivalent of a treadmill session: repetitive, well-intentioned, and mostly endured out of guilt.

Conventional wisdom says every manager should have regular 1:1s with their direct reports to build trust, boost engagement, and drive performance. However, as work evolves—with a faster pace, flatter structures, hybrid and asynchronous communication, AI tools that manage tasks more efficiently than most humans ever will—it’s worth asking: Do we still need all these 1:1s? READ MORE

The rise of fractional executive leadership: What’s driving the interest?

The complexities that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the world of work—employees suddenly working from home, safety concerns, supply chain disruptions—prompted HR professionals to prioritize agility in their strategies like never before. Five years later, today’s complexities, experts say, are again driving a reimagining of long-held norms—including about leadership, giving rise to alternative models like fractional executive leadership.

A fractional leadership model enables veteran C-suite executives to contribute to an organization on a part-time basis. It’s a strategy employers often leverage to navigate a particular project or moment of change or complexity—while shortening the time and expense of an often months-long executive search and reducing the risks of long-term hiring. READ MORE

10 ways to tackle the growing problem of unauthorized AI at work

The rise of artificial intelligence has brought both opportunities and challenges to the workplace. However, a growing trend of employees using free or unauthorized AI tools poses significant risks, from security breaches to the loss of trade secrets. Recent reports indicate that some workers are engaging with AI in ways that are not authorized by the employer, highlighting the importance of establishing policies and protocols that will enable responsible and deliberate adoption and use of AI at work. READ MORE

US corporate bankruptcies hit 15-year H1 high: S&P

Finance leaders of the companies tracked by S&P have been increasingly turning to the courts for bankruptcy protection since 2022 when interest rates began to rise as the Federal Reserve sought to combat inflation. They’ve risen from 373 in 2022 to 634 in 2023, touching 688 last year. 

So far this year, the distress has been concentrated in industrial and so-called consumer discretionary companies which accounted for a combined 107 bankruptcies, followed by healthcare firms (27) and corporations in the consumer staples sector (19).  READ MORE

US manufacturing mired in weakness as tariffs bite

U.S. manufacturing remained sluggish in June, with new orders subdued and prices paid for inputs creeping higher, suggesting that the Trump administration's tariffs on imported goods continued to hamper businesses' ability to plan ahead.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said on Tuesday that its manufacturing PMI nudged up to 49.0 last month from a six-month low of 48.5 in May. It was the fourth straight month that the PMI was below the 50 mark, which indicates contraction in the sector that accounts for 10.2% of the economy. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PMI little changed at 48.8. READ MORE

Getting a Wharton MBA Was 'a Waste of Time,' According to a Global Bank CEO. Here's the Degree He Recommends Instead.

Bill Winters, the CEO of 160-year-old bank Standard Chartered, says that the MBA he earned from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business was a "waste of time" — but the humanities undergraduate degree he received from Colgate University was more worth it.

In an interview that aired earlier this week, Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua asked Winters, 63, what he would recommend for young people to study. Winters responded by saying that he studied international relations and history as an undergraduate, graduating in 1983. He recommended those fields, stating that majoring in those areas taught him "how to think."

But his MBA from Wharton in 1988 was unnecessary, he said. READ MORE