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 Hiii, Raise your hand if you immediately picked up the movie reference in my subject line????🙋♀️ Holes is more of a millennial movie, but today, we’re focusing on Gen X, aka the sandwich generation! They’re currently spending the equivalent of two workdays a week caregiving between parents and/or children, while employers respond with the corporate version of “damn, that’s crazy.” So this week, we’re talking invisible labor, and why telling people to just focus isn’t an actual strategy when a lot of employees are one phone call away from a family emergency. Put down your sandwich for a sec (sorry, had to do it) and let’s discuss! Sponsored by Spark Hire Applicant volume is up for a lot of orgs right now, BUT there's just one little problem. 🤏 Spark Hire's Lean Team Hiring Playbook shows exactly where your process is breaking down, stage by stage, so you can find and fix what's broken more quickly instead of wasting precious time guessing. 🔎 Download it and walk away with a hiring process audit, an asset scorecard, and an AI use-case map that will give you time back this week! 🗞️ Here's the Tea: Gen X employees say they are burned out from caregiving responsibilities The TL;DR: Nearly 1 in 4 Gen X employees are spending two full workdays a week on caregiving, and 44% say it's tanking their focus at work. Over half are burned out, but 3 in 10 say their employer is giving them basically nothing to help. My POV: Soooo we've known caregiving is crushing employees since…basically forever, and yet here we are, still acting shocked that people can't focus while managing their kid's pediatrician appointment and their mom's insurance paperwork in the same 15-minute break. Almost 40% of your Gen X workforce is in the sandwich generation squeeze right now, and that is showing up somewhere in your engagement scores and turnover data! Flexible schedules and leave policies have become the bare minimum for people holding your org together while also holding their entire family together. 🎙️Mic Drop Moment: “Everybody has HR for them, but who has HR for HR?”On the mic this week: Keisha Toussaint is the founder and CEO of BCC’d HR, an independent employee advocacy and people strategy practice built to shift power back toward employees, and particularly black and brown professionals navigating workplace challenges. After more than a decade in corporate HR, she removed what she calls the “corporate muzzle” to provide confidential guidance rooted in advocacy. Pin this:
My H*ly Sh*t Moment: Having the courage to ask whether or not a decision is right or wrong is tough in this job, because your own ethics can end up clashing with less-than-stellar company decisions sometimes! ▶️ Press Play 📊 Data Is My Love Language: Stat: Nearly half of workers say they’d let AI negotiate their pay My spiral: For a lot of folks, negotiating your own salary is uncomfortable as hell, so of course people want an easy button. But outsourcing the one convo that determines your financial trajectory for years says something bigger about how burned out and unequipped people feel to advocate for themselves! And the gender gap between men and women using AI to negotiate pay could be a preview of how AI could either close the pay gap or make it so much worse depending on who builds the tool and what data it's trained on. 🛠️ In Your Toolkit The old motivation playbook just isn’t hitting like it used to, and NO, another pizza party won’t fix it either! 🍕 For this month’s HR Therapy, I’m sitting down with Dr. Anthony Belluccia, Senior Product Scientist at The Predictive Index, to unpack what behavioral science says is happening. We’ll talk AI, why work is becoming less central to people’s identities, and how behavioral data can help managers navigate the convos they may have been avoiding. Come learn what motivates people today, and let’s have a lil fun! 🤓 ✨ Safe Space Summit📣 Jessica Winder is taking the stage at Safe Space Summit!!! 🧠 Session topic: Her session is alllll about what it means to sit in the loneliest seat at a company, how to do this job during these wild times and what's most pressing on HR's plate. She's got the stories and the tips you need to hear. 👀 2/4 speakers are announced... and more to come! Wanna attend Safe Space Summit? Apply here. .png?sig=93d12ff8558c143c953c4b8cc043ffbac6d7feb66552bb15022ae7ebdcbe89da&size=email-body&dpr=2) Sponsored by Udemy Business As you've already experienced, AI is moving faster than your workforce strategy, and figuring it out later isn't an option anymore. 👀 Coursera and Udemy are joining forces for FWD Virtual 2026 to provide the answer! You'll get first dibs on the strategies everyone else will be catching up on later! 🤓 🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF We might see a lot of Gen Xers handling kids and caretaking and call it resilient. In some ways, it probably is, but it’s also enitrely possible that they’re running on fumes because they don't feel safe enough to say they're struggling. So my question for you today is: What are you calling resilience that might actually be burnout? 🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW: Occasionally, meetings end without the elephant in the room ever getting airtime. Instead, it follows everyone back to their desks and may show up later as a resignation email or a passive-aggressive Slack message. So here's a small habit worth stealing: End your next meeting by asking: "What's one thing we didn't talk about that we probably should have?" 👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE  The classic “promotion” nobody asked for…being so good at your job that you get to do everybody else’s job too! 😬 Read what members had to say here. See ya on Friday! | ||||||||
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